Researchers chucked litter on the streets of New York and Bern to see if anyone would intervene

By Alex Fradera To maintain pleasant public spaces requires that we all implicitly agree to certain civil behaviours, like pocketing our chocolate wrappers rather than leaving them strewn on the pavement, or turning the stereo down after eleven. But when these implicit agreements are too frequently ignored they can lose their force entirely, jeopardising the social order. To keep things together, one or more of us need to hold any miscreants to account… but who wants that hassle? A new paper in the journal Rationality and Society explores real-life littering norm enforcers, taking us from the streets of Switzerland to the New York underground. The sociologists Joël Berger and Debra Hevenstone convened at various crowded city transit stops, and waited for a transit service (a tram in Bern, Switzerland or a New York subway train) to deposit a load of commuters. Then one researcher would perform an act of littering in front of the commuters, tossing an empty bottle near, but not into, a rubbish bin, while the other researcher observed how people responded. Berger and Hevenstone were particularly interested in whether there would be any instances of social sanctioning – that is, a commuter directly confronting the offending researcher – an act also sometimes labelled “costly punishment”, because the individual has to inconvenience themselves to enforce the social rules. Social sanctioning has been studied frequently in laboratory conditions but only rarely in “the ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: environmental Forensic Social Source Type: blogs