Re: Broken Windows

You have touched one of the hardest questions in sociological research.

It continues with that idea and shows that when one social norm is violated, many people think that it is ok to violate other social norms. (In other words, most people have no internal moral compass worth mentioning.) As these experiments show, this quickly extends to theft and serious crimes.

But it's a bit of an egg and chicken too. It's easy to show the correlation but it's not to advance the right causation. Does one generalised norm violation weaken a culture of compliance / legality; or is it because of a lack of that culture that norms start getting broken, from the petty to the greater??

All this makes me wonder about how we can establish and maintain a functioning and prosperous society. Obviously standards must be set and maintained, yet the majority of people seem to be too dumb to understand a simple rule like "do no harm", and too weak to implement it.

Yes, but the point is, if you don't have a culture with strong norms, to create the right incentive structure. A proper incentive structure is usually more effective than either harsh laws or omnipresent police *alone* to prevent law-breaking and general norm-breaking.

A person who really understood such a rule and implemented it would not litter in an alley already covered with litter, because even though the additional harm would be small it would still be additional.

"You only pee downstream." It's all in the incentives.

That said, it is comforting to know that in these studies a large number of people did not alter their behavior when they believed that others were ignoring social norms, and that there were significant differences in the numbers who ignored pointless rules and those who ignored rules to the detriment of others.

Yes, because depending on the character of the norm, people can usually reasonably predict (à la Kant) what will happen if everyone breaks it; and while many might decide it's worth breaking, there are, because of this calculation, limits to how far people will go.

Still, it makes me wonder what we can do to encourage good behavior and discourage bad behavior, without lapsing into restrictionist policies which are just as harmful (or moreso) than the behaviors we seek to prevent.

And that is part of the problem. It's very easy to realise that even short of laws passed, enforcement strengthened or penalties increased, the proper incentive structure can modify behaviours positively. The hard thing is to do it without resorting to those measures whose balance is easily broken towards the unreasonably authoritarian ground. Partly, because by the time you realise you need to do something, a culture of respect is already at the breaking point, so you cannot trust in "society" as you should be able to.

If only we could find a way to increase the number of intelligent people who are committed to doing right by others, while reducing the number of idiots and those who care nothing for others. Then we might reduce the discrepancy between what is required by law and what is required by liberty.

Sometimes it seems to me that letting people fail will in the end select positively, not just among people, but also within people. Most people are not at the extremes, and that majority near the median can and will, upon being allowed to fail, decide what course to take afterwards.

Of course, the problems we have with that are manifold too: we don't like to see people fail and feel guilty about it even when they have manifestly brought it upon themselves, so that phrase "help them by not helping them" is seldom applied; then, even if we're willing to let people fail, people usually bring others along to their own failures, so the number of casualties or victims is likely to be considerably higher than it should ever have to be; then we have the problem that if the culture itself was already too strongly inclined against respect, many more people will probably not be able to change; also we will have to face the tendency of people to lay the blame elsewhere, whatever that elsewhere might be in the particular case, as it fits them, in order to take all responsibility away and not face the consequences of previous acts or decisions... and that's of course, just the beginning...