The “bro­ken win­dows” the­ory of crime, dat­ing back to an arti­cle in The Atlantic from 1982 and more recently pop­u­larised by Mal­colm Glad­well in The Tip­ping Point and Rudy Giu­liani (mayor, NYC), sug­gests that signs of petty crime, like lit­ter­ing and bro­ken win­dows, trig­ger fur­ther crim­i­nal behaviour.

Now, recent research is start­ing to sug­gest that the the­ory is cor­rect.

Keiser thinks that it’s unlikely that peo­ple inferred a reduced police pres­ence by the pres­ence of lit­ter or graf­fiti — cer­tainly, lit­ter is gen­er­ally tol­er­ated by the police [in the area where the research was under­taken]. Instead, he thinks that one trans­gres­sion was actu­ally fos­ter­ing another. This isn’t a sim­ple case of imi­ta­tion — lit­ter­ing doesn’t just beget lit­ter­ing. Keiser’s idea is that see­ing the break­down of one social norm makes it eas­ier to ignore oth­ers, by weak­en­ing our gen­eral resolve to act appro­pri­ately and strength­en­ing our temp­ta­tions to act in our own self-interest.

Via Link Banana, there’s also an inter­est­ing write-up on the same research in The Econ­o­mist.