Kees Keizer from the University of Groningen tests the Broken Windows Theory
Originally advanced by George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson in a 1982 Atlantic article, the “broken windows theory” — which claims “that a decrease in visible signs of public disorder would lead to a reduction in crime rates” — continues to be a source of debate. Though it “helped make community policing commonplace, sparked proposals for dramatic changes in criminal procedure doctrine,” and contributed greatly to the advancement of Rudolph Giuliani’s career, only recently has it been subjected to rigorous testing.
In what might just be the first exhaustive attempt to study broken windows effects over a relatively large territory, Bernard E. Harcourt and Jens Ludwig found that, on the whole, the theory did not hold up.
“Taken together, the evidence from New York City and from the five-city social experiment provides no support for a simple first-order disorder-crime relationship as hypothesized by Wilson and Kelling, nor that broken windows policing is the optimal use of scarce law enforcement resources.” (”Broken Windows: New Evidence from New York City and a Five-City Social Experiment”)
However, when studies are conducted over specific, limited sites, rather than extensive territories, the opposite conclusion seems to be reached. In one recent study, Kees Keizer and colleagues from the University of Groningen constructed a setting where pseudo-subliminal cues — of disorder and negligence — could be isolated as the sole differing factor contributing to pedestrian behavior.
“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. When the alley contained graffiti, 69% of the riders littered compared with 33% when the walls were clean.“
In a second variation of the test, Keizer et al.
“showed that the mere presence of graffiti can even turn people into thieves. He wedged an envelope into the slot of a mailbox, with a 5 Euro note showing in the transparent window. If the mailbox and the ground around it were clean, just 13% of passers-by stole the envelope. If the mailbox was covered in graffiti, or if the ground around it was covered in litter, the proportion of thieves doubled to 27% and 25% respectively.”
While there is no reason to believe that one’s immediate environment does not directly influence behavior, and on an unconscious level at that, the gap between the relatively conclusive findings of Keizer et al.’s experiment and Harcourt and Ludwig’s, which was more territorially and philosophically ambitious in purview, should not be underestimated.
It is one thing to be environmentally ‘encouraged’ to steal, in an isolated setting, and quite another for the net crime rate, over a whole territory, to be profoundly effected, or determined, by strictly aesthetic, environmental factors. Poverty levels, gentrification, housing conditions, policing methods, and even the displacement of crime from one region to another, are all powerful forces that contribute to crime in a way that the ‘community policing’ movement may ultimately serve to obscure.
(Likewise, the expanding set of practices that are considered ‘anti-social behaviour’, a social category that is largely an off-shoot of CPTED and the community policing movement, is arguably discriminatory in nature, and may produce more negative than positive effects in actual practice.)
That being said, in a recent, thought-provoking post, Jason Kottke wonders whether the “broken windows theory” applies to web environments as well as to real ones.
“But what about a site’s physical appearance? Does the aesthetic appearance of a blog affect what’s written by the site’s commenters? My sense is that the establishment of social norms through moderation, both by site owners and by the community itself, has much more of an impact on the behavior of commenters than the visual design of a site but aesthetics does factor in somewhat. Perhaps the poor application of a default MT or Wordpress template signals a lack of care or attention on the part of the blog’s owner, leading readers to think they can get away with something. Poorly designed advertising or too many ads littered about a site could result in readers feeling disrespected and less likely to participate civilly or respond to moderation. Messageboard software is routinely ugly; does that contribute to the often uncivil tone found on web forums?”
The analogy can of course only go so far. For one, compared to the real world, there aren’t all that many actions available to a web visitor. (In a certain sense, commenting is the only form of behavior open to testing.)
Road map for the Chilbo community in Second Life
Perhaps a more appropriate test of the broken windows theory in online settings would have to take place in a richer, more interactive, socially mediated world like Second Life, where the concept of ‘environment’ more naturally holds. And sure enough, something resembling the broken windows theory can be seen at work in SL. In fact, the concepts behind much of the design of SL itself have more to do with civilizing effects than with simulated real-world functions. Roland Legrand of Mixed Realities recently made just this observation:
Why are there roads in virtual worlds such as Second Life, where one can perfectly teleport from one place to another? Is it just because people want to imitate what they already know in real life - which also could explain why virtual houses often have roofs, kitchens and bathrooms?
But very recently I found out something new about virtual roads: they have a civilizing influence.“
Indeed, much like the real world proper, the mainland in SL
suffers from ad farms (Linden Lab tries to root this problem out now), griefers, ugly and empty malls, barriers, red lines which make it impossible to navigate rivers or to stroll around, land parcels owned by avatars who never show up etc. But at the same time, mainland is a place where one meets people, where one has to collaborate with people just because they happen to live next to you. This is the rightly famous element of serendipity.
Tuque and the other avatars who develop Chilbo do exactly that: they try to connect to people, to live and collaborate with them. It is an experiment in city development.
Through Chilbo runs the Route 10 Road. Walking along that road one meets people, and constructing the road and making it longer means that one has to talk to others, convince them to remove barriers and red lines and open up for serendipitous encounters.
It seems Linden Lab recognizes the profoundly civilizing influence of Route 10, because all of a sudden, the residents of Chilbo saw that the road was paved by Linden Lab!
In this respect, SL ultimately thwarts attempts at comparison. For, on the one hand, it is no different than, and is very much an extension of, the real world, inasmuch as environmental conditions directly shape behavior (like anywhere else); but on the other hand, the virtual world is itself structured for primarily, rather than secondarily, aesthetic-conventional reasons. Roads are not designed first for transport and secondarily for aesthetic; their primary purpose is to reproduce the effects of roads without reproducing their function. So, in a deeper sense than we can discuss here, SL is already, constitutively styled on a broken windows-esque theory, the full elaboration of which we’ll just have to save for a future post.
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