[cypher]

I'm afraid I have to say this sounds totally unethical to me, I don't think it's about keeping emotions out of it so much as respecting that each & every hamster is an individual with the right to the best life it can possibly have & by doing any experiment like this you are basically reducing them to "lab rats".
I think even if it were possible to see it as ethical it would be a very difficult experiment to do anyway as there are so many variables that have to be coupled with cage size it would take many hams & probably many years to gather any data that would be truly valid or useful.
I think most if not all of your analysis would ultimately be subjective which kind of blows the scientific idea right out of the water & I'm not sure what such a study would achieve other than to satisfy your own curiosity really.
I can't see a way of doing this that wouldn't be stressful to any hams involved or truly scientific tbh.