140 John B. Calhoun 



storage (i.e., increase in A'); (b) increase in discriminatory power in the 

 sense of screening out portions of those stimuli of the d of others requisite 

 for ehciting responses (i.e., decreasing d'); or (c) impeded synaptic trans- 

 mission (i.e., decreasing v'). 



5. Behavioral Origin of Response-Evoking Capacity, S 



a. The target diameter genotype as determined by varibility of behavioral 

 traits. I now wish to present the logic of why variabiHty of behavioral 

 traits becomes inevitable. In fact, as aminals become more social, varia- 

 bility in physical traits must become of less importance in determining 

 the kind and intensities of interaction. So let us start with the case where 

 all indi\'iduals possess identical heredity and therefore identical physical 

 characteristics. Even for so simple an organism as the house mouse, marked 

 differences in capacities for social involvement develop despite the fact 

 that the members of the group come from a stock made genetically homo- 

 zygous by nearly a hundred generations of brother-to-sister inbreeding 

 (Calhoun, 1956). 



The initial formulation of social interaction dealt with a deterministic 

 model in which all individuals w^ere identical. It showed that half the time 

 an individual was in the responsive state it would meet another responsive 

 individual and half the time it would meet another in the refractory state. 

 Thus, even under ideal conditions, an individual would be frustrated as 

 frequently as it would be satisfied from social interaction. But satisfaction 

 will not hkely precisely alternate with frustration. Furthermore, if we 

 consider some arbitrary relatively short span of time when the group first 

 forms, determined by the average individual having, for example, a total 

 pool of interactions equivalent to 2-5 times the number of individuals in 

 the group, then something like the following will have transpired : 



Each individual's behavior toward another may be characterized by its 

 form or pattern and by its timing with regard to whether the other in- 

 dividual involved in the interaction is also in the responsive state (the a 

 state) or whether it is in the opposite or nonresponsive state (the p state) . 

 Initially the form of the behavior of all individuals in the responsive state 

 will be identical. Identical form denotes possession of the entire assembly 

 of traits, d, by every individual. With each individual contacting its as- 

 sociates in a random sequence over time, it is inevitable that some, who 

 are in the responsive a state, will purely by chance more frequently en- 

 counter others who happen to be in the nonresponsive p state. Each such 

 encounter will throw the responsive individual into an a^^ frustrating type 

 refractory period. Thus, the appropriate behavior of this individual will 

 not only not be rewarded, it w^ill actually be punished. After this individual 



