About once a week, I see two guys in yellow jackets paid by the city of Zürich painting over graffiti on a metal bridge across the Sihl river. Each time, they paint the metal girders which form the handrails the same dark blue, covering up tagging that has been left on it. And each time they turn up, there’s fresh graffiti all along the bridge to cover up again.
With only slightly less frequency, I see people out with paint rollers and grey paint, re-coating the shafts of lamp posts near the main station as far up as they can reach. Most weeks, there’s graffiti to cover up there too.
Could their extremely regular work be motivated by the so-called ‘broken windows’ theory – that people respond to a perception of low-level lawlessness or disorder such as graffiti and littering by disobeying social rules?
This week’s Economist points to a new study on the subject from the University of Groningen, Netherlands, with an interesting methodology:
His group’s first study was conducted in an alley that is frequently used to park bicycles. As in all of their experiments, the researchers created two conditions: one of order and the other of disorder. In the former, the walls of the alley were freshly painted; in the latter, they were tagged with graffiti (but not elaborately, to avoid the perception that it might be art). In both states a large sign prohibiting graffiti was put up, so that it would not be missed by anyone who came to collect a bicycle. All the bikes then had a flyer promoting a non-existent sports shop attached to their handlebars. This needed to be removed before a bicycle could be ridden.
When owners returned, their behaviour was secretly observed. There were no rubbish bins in the alley, so a cyclist had three choices. He could take the flyer with him, hang it on another bicycle (which the researchers counted as littering) or throw it to the floor.
And the results?
When the alley contained graffiti, 69% of the riders littered compared with 33% when the walls were clean.
The researchers also did a test involving the honesty/dishonesty of people finding unattended money under conditions of order or disorder (created by letting off firecrackers in the vacinity). The results were similarly stark.
On one level all of this seems perfectly obvious. The connection between a perception of social disorder and changing behaviour is well proven. What’s interesting is the social cues people take to judge disorder, and that people transpose one form of ‘disorder’ (graffiti) to their behaviour in another (littering).
My questions (to the world):
- What are the most important signs of perceived order or disorder?
- Does behaviour change in direct proportion to perceived disorder, or is there a ‘tipping point’ effect?
Sadly I can’t check whether the paper answers these questions, as it’s locked up here behind Science magazine’s pay-wall. I have a feeling that quite a bit of research has been done into this in New York following Rudy Guiliani’s various zero-tolerance policies on such things, but I don’t know of anything specific.