I'm sorry if this is veering off-topic, but for what goal or purpose were the vaults social experiments? What could possibly come of it all?
From the Wiki page on the enclave (http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Enclave)
The Vaults were funded by the U.S. government and, accordingly, the government had control over them. Ostensibly, they were intended to allow a selection of privileged United States citizens to survive the Great War. Secretly, however, a large part of the Vault Project had a far more sinister goal. The U.S. government's real plan to survive a nuclear war was simply to find another planet to live on after blowing up this one. A spacecraft designed to ferry the human race to another planet was either under construction or ready to go before the War. The plan was for the government to flee to the oil rig, and then leave in a spaceship for another planet the Enclave (?) or other personnel responsible for safeguarding the bloom field space center had either been ordered off of, taken to safe locations, or simply abandoned the space center. [2].
Any voyage to space would have been very difficult and fraught with unforeseeable complications. Thus, to test the aptitude of the average American person to travel to another planet, many of the Vaults were designed to have some sort of critical flaw. Vault 12, in Bakersfield (better known as the Necropolis), had a faulty Vault door that wouldn't close all the way, allowing dangerous radiation to leak in, leading to the creation of California's ghoul population. Vault 15, which is a few miles east of Vault 13, was built normally (the rockslide that buried its control center was accidental), but it was populated with a diverse mix of races and people to see what sort of tensions arise when varied backgrounds are packed into a small environment. Vault 13, the home of the Vault Dweller in Fallout, was intended to stay shut for a full 200 years to test the effects of long term isolation (the troubles with the water chip forced the Overseer to improvise, potentially ruining the experiment as much of the Vault's population left to found Arroyo). The types and purposes of the experiments go on. Vault 8 (which is the Vault that Vault City was built around) was a control group, a Vault intended to exist normally to serve as a reference point for the other Vaults.
In order to monitor the populations being experimented upon, the Enclave's oil rig possessed a great deal of equipment that allowed them to observe and control the Vaults. For example, the Enclave sent the all clear signal to Vault 8 shortly after the War, prompting them to leave their Vault and build their city. These monitoring tools also let the Enclave see that the population of Vault 13 was largely intact. Thus, they traveled in force to Vault 13 and sent a command to the Vault's computers to open the Vault door. After taking care of some mild resistance, the Enclave troops rounded up the residents of Vault 13 and shipped them off to the oil rig in Vertibirds to take part in the Chemical Corps' FEV experiments.
Eventually, due to either a change of plans by the Enclave's leadership or the spacecraft being destroyed, the Enclave abandoned their initial goal of settling on another planet, and decided to resettle the one they already had, although the Vault monitoring and research continued (as the Vault Behavioral Project Dr. Henry mentions).