Already in 1969 the psychologist Philip Zimbardo showed the destructive side that people can develop once the sites surrounding them don't look clean, tidy and controlled anymore. In an experiment that year, Zimbardo parked an old car on the sidewalk opposite the New York State University, took off the license plates and opened the engine hood. Afterwords he observed from distance how looters and hooligans completely destroyed the car in only 26 hours. Repeating that same experiment in the university city of Palo Alto, nothing at all happened at the beginning. But as Zimbardo took a sledgehammer and started the process of destroying the car by himself, the latent vandalism in the local society got awakened and thus the car totally destroyed in a short time.
Zimbardo supposed that the willingness for destructive behavior of a local society increases with evidence of breakup and collapse around them, not only in his case of an abandoned car, but also in general where they occur, be it garbage littering, graffiti, broken windows or the like. Out of this research, the theory of Broken Windows got born.
For a long time though, the Broken-Windows-Theory wasn't proved by further experiments and assumed to be only a very general idea without any indications of what is supposed to mean "evidence of breakup and collapse" and how quick the behavior of the local people changes accordingly. However by now, the theory has been further invested, got more sophisticated and indicates, in short, that harmless violations of law, like acts of vandalism, graffiti or littering of garbage prepare the ground for much more serious violations, since they produce a feeling of a situation out of control and that nobody is brought to justice for it.
In 2005, the three Netherlands researchers tried to add more prove by conducting social experiments that almost speak for themselves. Some of them are of special interest regarding the problem of garbage in general and of littering in particular.
For example to find out if the harmless violation of littering leads to a higher readiness of actually committing a crime, the three researchers tried to seduce people to stealing. Kees Keizer, one of the researchers, therefore put an envelope only half way into a postal box with a well visible 5 euro bill in the vision panel, so that the money was apparent for everybody using that postal box. In one experimental setting he painted some graffiti on the postal boy, in a second one some garbage was littered around the box and in the third experimental setting everything was left clean and in order. The results were unambiguous. In the case of the clean setting, only 13 percent of the passers-by stole the money, but in the two other cases with graffiti or littering present, more than double the people stole the money. Keizers O-tone: „ What I saw, made me questioning human kind. Even old grandmas, seeing the dirty postal box, became thieves. But back home, they must have been disappointed: the supposed five euro bill was a simple copy."
Another experiment took place in a small side street which is used by cyclists to park their bikes. Kee Keizers painted the walls of this place in a neutral gray and after put up a prohibition sign for graffiti on the spot where the bikes used to be parked. The next day he hung some publicity flyers of a non-existing sports magazine on the handle bar of the parked bikes stating: „ Have a nice Christmas". When the owners of the bikes returned, since there was no garbage can around, they had the choice either to pocket the flyer or to simply throw it on the ground, which 33 percent of them did. (leaving it on the handle bar would have hindered their riding). A couple weeks later, in a night mission, he came back and sprayed only a few wiggly lines and some letters on the gray wall. The only pretension that Keizers had for these motives were that they look trivial enough not to be taken for a piece of art. The next day Keizers again hung flyers on all the handle bars of the parked bikes. Now there were suddenly 69 percent of the bike owners that threw the flyers on the ground. Thus only a couple of graffiti sufficed to let the people forget about good manners. Not only the impact of the effect was surprising - the number of people that threw the flyer away almost doubled - but also that the violation of one norm (graffiti are forbidden) favored the violation of another norm (don't throw garbage on the ground). Apparently the first norm-violation worked like an infection that could attack other norms.
After the three researchers published their results in 2008 and therewith demonstrated the correctness of the Broken-Windows-Theory, they received hundreds of reactions. Not all of them positive. Nevertheless in Amsterdam there is meanwhile a law in force that every new (illegal) graffiti has to be immediately removed.
However we shouldn't believe that a shabby slum quarter may anew flourish, just by picking up garbage, repairing windows and painting walls. When everything is already completely run down, norm violations have already spread into areas, which are not publicly visible and just reconstructing the physical order won't help much anymore improving the general situation.
Nonetheless „Fight it from the start" is certainly an effective device and if cleaning up garbage doesn't help, it certainly doesn't hurt either.
(based on a article by Reto U. Schneider published in NZZ Folio 07/09, Das Experiment – Wehret den Anfängen.)
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