One major thing people forget about is that Calhoun's experiments were flawed from the beginning for the simple fact that he provided no enrichment activities or objects for the animals involved.
Mice, and especially rats are surprisingly intelligent, and playful and need things to do and keep themselves entertained with. This is something Calhoun did not factor into his experiments. He provided no toys, no new items to interact with, no wheels for the animals to run on, nothing. So, naturally with nothing to do besides eat, sleep, and fuck, and with increasingly cramped, and dreary quarters shared with antagonistic, and hyper-sexual creatures, it's no wonder the animals went batshit insane.
Just imagine how well you'd take it if you were trapped in what basically amounted to a large solitary confinement prison cell that you had to share with an ever-increasing population of incredibly violent, horny and bored strangers. Of course everything went to hell.
This is why his experiments don't hold up when you try to compare them to human life. Aside from the obvious fact that humans aren't mice, nor rats, humans have incredibly vast, and ever-increasing ways of entertaining themselves. These distractions might be a problem nowadays, but not having them would be even worse. Humans are blessedly creative and intelligent, and so long as they have ways to express those virtues, and maintain ways to keep themselves entertained, I don't think we would see an end result exactly the same as the ones in Calhoun's experiments. Make no mistake though, as gifted as us humans are, even we'd be rendered hopelessly insane if we had to share the same living conditions as the mice, and rats did.
Lastly, though I can't seem to find the source for it now, Calhoun's experiments were done again, this time with enrichment activities and items for the animals, and things went much, much better. The colonies still eventually died out, but they were nowhere near as hellish and chaotic as they had been prior.
