The Dharma Initiative, developed in 1970 by University of Michigan doctoral candidates Gerald and Karen DeGroot and financed through The Hanso Foundation, was intended to study the nuances of human behavior in their sociological and ecological contexts through a communal social sciences research compound. The project's areas of study included meteorology, psychology, parapsychology, zoology, and electromagnetism, as well as something involving utopian societies (the film is damaged at this point so the full phrase is unknown). American psychologist and Walden Two author B.F. Skinner is mentioned as an influence on the DeGroots' work.