the Culture of Crowd: How Seoul's Crowded Environment Misrepresents the Character of Koreans

When my brother and I were young, we bought a pair of Mus musculus domesticus, otherwise known as pet mice.

Our endearing and furry little rodent friends were given a very large mouse house in which to play and make more little mice.

To our excitement, they did both. In fact, they continued to do both, until we had to partition off the wee furry "bairns" from their big furry kin.

Each afternoon we returned home from school and checked on our pets.

On one such afternoon, we were confronted by a scene that could only be described as "Nightmare on Mice Street."

Before our eyes were the dismembered remains of the most recent litter of baby mice. Our horror was amplified as we realized that the babies had been eaten by their mother.

What had driven the mother to eat her own children? Why had she not been able to happily share her space with her own offspring? What sort of detachment drove her to commit such an atrocity?

Calling the pet shop owner (Google had not yet been invented), we were told that mother mice, kept in an artificial environment, were more highly sensitive to stress than mice in the wild.

The owner, perhaps out of kindness, told us that the mother had more likely allowed her babies to starve and then disposed of them.

I later learned that this advice had scientific merit. Mice do not hate their babies. But mice required space in which to explore, hide, build nests, store food and separate and socialize with other mice.

When kept in even large confined spaces, where people walked back and forth, these instincts were inhibited and consequently mice were much more likely to display abnormal, stress-induced behavior.

In short, what we had witnessed was not mice culture.

Of course, people are not mice, but social behavior in animals can provide clues to help us understand social behavior in humans.

The question that consequently arose from this childhood trauma was what part of our behavior is determined by our fundamental character and what part is our response to our environment, particularly if that environment feels crowded or confined?

I think we must all have, at one time, been in a densely packed crowd, an interminably stationary queue or an overly loaded elevator and felt the creeping surge of suffocation rising within us.

It may happen in a traffic jam, where one feels pinned in and unable to move, or at a party where there seems insufficient air to meet the needs of all the lungs in the room.

If the suffocating feeling...