Order?  Chaos?

To read the Web, you’d think graffiti was a harmless and even beneficial vibrant expression of urban culture, something to be celebrated and preserved, but ask any property manager and the response would be unanimous: they hate it.  So do local police.  As the City of Santa Ana, California puts it:

What is tagging?

Tagging is not an art form or about expressing oneself.  It is vandalism and the destruction of private and public property.  Tagging is any unauthorized marking, etching, scratching, drawing, painting or defacing of any surface of public, private, real or personal property.

Know anybody like this?

Tagging causes blight in our community resulting in a genuine threat to the quality of life, incalculable economic losses to businesses, and can lead to the general deterioration of the area in which you live or work.  The eradication of graffiti is a huge drain on the City’s resources in both cost and manpower. 

Well, does graffiti tagging cause blight?  Are those of us intimidated by flamboyant pervasive graffiti just fogies stuck in mental prisons of our own making?  Or can the visual texture of an environment change out and others’ behavior? 

It can if they’re tough guys

Now, via a study reported in The Economist, we have sociological evidence, and it’s  both interesting and important:

A place that is covered in graffiti and festooned with rubbish makes people feel uneasy.

Do graffiti and rubbish go together?  That’s a question, too, isn’t it?

Correlated?

The idea that observing disorder can have a psychological effect on people has been around for a while. In the late 1980s George Kelling, a former probation officer who now works at Rutgers University, initiated what became a vigorous campaign to remove graffiti from New York City’s subway system, which was followed by a reduction in petty crime.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc?  Did the sequence imply causality?

Expression and feelings linked?

This idea also underpinned the “zero tolerance” which Rudy Giuliani subsequently brought to the city’s streets when he became mayor.

Grim at the best of times

Many cities and communities around the world now try to get on top of anti-social behaviour as a way of deterring crime. But the idea remains a controversial one, not least because it is often difficult to account for other factors that could influence crime reduction, such as changes in poverty levels, housing conditions and sentencing policy—even, some people have argued, the removal of lead from petrol. An experimental test of the “broken windows theory”, as Dr Kelling and his colleague James Wilson later called the idea, is therefore long overdue. And that is what Dr Keizer and his colleagues have provided.

Will it do any good?  Or just be repression?

Dr Kelling’s theory takes its name from the observation that a few broken windows in an empty building quickly lead to more smashed panes, more vandalism and eventually to break-ins. The tendency for people to behave in a particular way can be strengthened or weakened depending on what they observe others to be doing.

Long ago I formulated a more general version of this as the law of the observant herd:

Think this might influence someone’s behavior?

The influence can be indirect:

This does not necessarily mean that people will copy bad behaviour exactly, reaching for a spray can when they see graffiti. Rather, says Dr Kees Keizer and his colleagues at the University of Groningen, it can foster the “violation” of other norms of behaviour. It was this effect that his experiments, which have just been published in Science, set out to test.

[Dr. Keizer] deliberately created such settings as a part of a series of experiments designed to discover if signs of vandalism, litter and low-level lawbreaking could change the way people behave.

They found that they could, by a lot: doubling the number [of people] who are prepared to litter and steal.

The mechanism by which they created their urban mini-laboratory is quite interesting.

How safe and law-abiding are you feeling right now?

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.

Order.  In the former, the walls of the alley were freshly painted

Disorder.  In the latter, they were tagged with graffiti (but not elaborately, to avoid the perception that it might be art).

As the Santa Ana city council neatly defined it:

In most cases, the difference between graffiti being art or a crime is PERMISSION

I contemplate obtaining permission

Without permission, it’s defacement.  Back to Groningen:

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.

There were no rubbish bins in the alley, so a cyclist had three choices.

You leave your bike.  You return.  An annoying flyer is stuck on your handlebars.  What do you do with this trash?

Does the background influence the bicycle?

He could:

!.  Take the flyer with him

2.  Hang it on another bicycle (which the researchers counted as littering) or

3.  Throw it to the ground.

When the alley contained graffiti, 69% of the riders littered compared with 33% when the walls were clean.

That, dear readers, is a correlation.  Change one variable and double the rate. 

To remove one possible bias—that litter encourages more litter—the researchers inconspicuously picked up each castaway flyer. Nor, they say, could the effect be explained by litterers assuming that because the spraying of graffiti had not been prevented, it was also unlikely that they would be caught. Littering, Dr Keizer observes, is generally tolerated by the police in Groningen.

Rules you don’t enforce are useless – which is why you have to scrub out graffiti immediately, lest it propagate.

Feel comfortable riding the subway?  New York, 1980

Might there have been something distinctive about bicycles and alleys? 

The other experiments were carried out in a similar way. In one, a temporary fence was used to close off a short cut to a car park, except for a narrow gap. Two signs were erected:

1.  One telling people there was no throughway

2.  The other saying that bicycles must not be left locked to the fence.

This is brilliantly simple.  The conditions showed two instructions, one directed at our test subject, the other providing an observant-herd data sample as to whether rules are actually enforced.  The experimenters provided the simplest of visual evidence. 

Order.  Four bicycles parked nearby, but not locked to the fence.

Disorder.  The four bikes locked to the fence, in violation of the sign.

In the “order” condition, 27% of people were prepared to trespass by stepping through the gap, whereas in the disorder condition, 82% took the short cut.

Tripling the non-compliance rate.

[Just out of curiosity, dear reader: if you come to a four-way stop with absolutely nobody around, do you stop?  And what does your answer say about your views on rules, authority, and enforcement?  Discuss among yourselves.  – Ed.]

What do you do if nobody’s watching?

And why do you do it?

Nor were the effects limited to visual observation of petty criminal behaviour. It is against the law to let off fireworks in the Netherlands for several weeks before New Year’s Eve. So two weeks before the festival the researchers randomly let off firecrackers near a bicycle shed at a main railway station and watched what happened using their flyer technique.

With no fireworks, 48% of people took the flyers with them when they collected their bikes.
With fireworks, this fell to 20%.

The moral is that our observant herd has Augustinian features: man is born sinner, and only the rule of law keeps him in his place.

The most dramatic result, though, was the one that showed a doubling in the number of people who were prepared to steal in a condition of disorder.  

In this case an envelope with a €5 ($6) note inside (and the note clearly visible through the address window) was left sticking out of a post box.

Would you be more likely to pinch mail from this box?

In a condition of order, 13% of those passing took the envelope (instead of leaving it or pushing it into the box).

But if the post box was covered in graffiti, 27% did.

Even if the post box had no graffiti on it, but the area around it was littered with paper, orange peel, cigarette butts and empty cans, 25% still took the envelope.

The researchers’ conclusion is that one example of disorder, like graffiti or littering, can indeed encourage another, like stealing.  

Dr Kelling was right. The message for policymakers and police officers is that clearing up graffiti or littering promptly could help fight the spread of crime.

Broken windows lead to broken rules.

Rule-breaking next?

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