[oh-4-fucks-sake]

One step further: they needed a larger cube. Seems like the study reasoned that providing unlimited food/water ruled out "resource scarcity" as a cause for decline. Space is very much a resource.

It's no different than the naïve reasoning around government-run housing projects: "You have food, water, and a tiny space to live crammed among 1000s of other people--what more could you need"? Didn't this spawn aberrant, violent, unhealthy behavior too? Wasn't (at least in theory) part of the solution to stop doing ultra-ultra-high-density housing? (Given, it's not like the government executed on re-housing all the project-tenants into lower-density housing--they often simply dumped them back into the streets.)

TL;DR: It's mostly obvious why ultra-high-density projects (and prisons, and concentration camps, and slums) set people up for failure; 256 tiny nests in a 4.5ft cube sounds a whole like a housing project.