[slowking2]

The link you posted says that the original rat park researcher's own graduate student was unable to replicate the original experiment when he tried reducing the confounds. That seems like the most favorable possible situation for a replication to me. It also says that one confound was that morphine consumption wasn't measured in the same way between conditions in the original experiment. That seems pretty bad to me. Linked article also mentions that other researchers have had trouble replicating the results fully.

Rat park doesn't consistently apply to rats, so why should its results be considered particularly informative about humans?

Has someone done a much better study on rats since then? Significantly larger N, always taking measurements the same way across conditions, genetics carefully controlled or at least measured? I'm not an animal behavior researcher, so I'm sure there could be other things important to handle.

Rats are certainly more similar to humans that flies are, but that doesn't mean any particular study is informative about humans.

[pazimzadeh]

Just saying, since neither humans nor rodents typically live in cages, maybe rodent experiments would be more predictive of human behavior if they weren't forced into living in small cages.

[shadowgovt]

looks around his cubicle

I must be in the control group. ;)