Even under the controlled circumstances of the 1945 Minnesota starvation experiment, the participants were aware of a distressing change in their behavior. A majority of the volunteers were members of the Church of the Brethren, and many had hoped that the period of deprivation would enhance their spiritual lives. But they found just the opposite to be true. “Most of them felt that the semi-starvation had coarsened rather than refined them,” it was reported, “and they marveled at how thin their moral and social veneers seemed to be.”
