6 Dec 2025 · 5:24
Rat park: What Really Drives Addiction?
Rat Park
What if addiction is shaped by more than the substance itself — and the world someone lives in?
In this episode of Circuit Breaker: Rewiring Your Decisions, we explore the Rat Park experiments led by psychologist Bruce Alexander, which questioned how environment and social connection might influence addictive behaviour. We look at how the research challenged familiar assumptions about addiction and raised broader questions about the role of isolation, connection, and the conditions in which we live.
But if our surroundings can shape our behaviour, what does that mean for how we understand addiction? Discover how Rat Park invites us to look beyond individual choices and consider the wider environment — and why the conversation about addiction may be more complex than we think.