The highrise, and particularly in its deployment as a housing solution for low income groups, came to be the focus of intensive research which sought to diagnose the pathologies of highrise living. Delores Hayden has observed that this sub-field of social science was in the first instance populated primarily by behavioural ecologists, who were 'most limited in their political interests and their methodological approaches'[9]. Working within the secure rigidity of factorial ecology these scholars returned to the question of social pathology that vexed urban commentators on the early industrial city. Manifest pathologies such as crime, ill-health, aggression, as well as the more elusive unsettlements of alienation, interpersonal avoidance and isolation, competitiveness, poor 'task performance', social overload, stress, senses of helplessness and diminished choice were attributed in the more simplistic analyses to the sheer number and proximity of people in the modern city or, in the more sophisticated studies, to the intensification of uncontrollable, unplanned encounters with large numbers of unfamiliar people. In short, crowding either directly or indirectly contributed to behaviours that quite vividly recall the sorts of pathologies that other earlier urban commentators had diagnosed. Behaviouralists referred to these as 'deindividuated behaviors', which included such things as vandalism and antisocial acts[10].

The connections between this highrise science and co-incident studies conducted in laboratories (on rats) or in the highly controlled (and accessible) 'field' laboratories of student dormitories, has yet to be properly traced. Those controlled studies of crowding did nonetheless provide evidence that could be extrapolated to real world, urban circumstances  such as the multi-family highrise dwelling. The highrise environ offered an exemplary site for contemplating the social implications of  crowding in what one research team referred to as 'chronic high-density living'[11]. Such behavioural ecology perspectives immensely simplified the ways in which we might begin to explain things like crime or ill-health by presuming an environmental determinism. It was also assumed that if specific urban environment could produce certain social pathologies then treatment of those diagnosed pathologies only required attributes of that environment to be adjusted. Although scholars within the tradition did at times reflect on the limits of their approach, it is true to say that they imagined themselves as doctors to the urban populace. As one scholar noted, the behavioural ecologist 'may be in the unique position of being able to help direct the social evolution of homo sapiens into home
urbanis'[12].