Kotabe Hiroki P, Kardan Omid, Berman Marc G
Department of Psychology, University of Chicago.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2016 Dec;145(12):1713-1727. doi: 10.1037/xge0000240. Epub 2016 Oct 13.
Disorderly environments are linked to disorderly behaviors. Broken windows theory (Wilson & Kelling, 1982), an influential theory of crime and rule-breaking, assumes that scene-level social disorder cues (e.g., litter, graffiti) cause people to reason that they can get away with breaking rules. But what if part of the story is not about such complex social reasoning? Recent research suggests that basic visual disorder cues may be sufficient to encourage complex rule-breaking behavior. To test this hypothesis, we first conducted a set of experiments (Experiments 1-3) in which we identified basic visual disorder cues that generalize across visual stimuli with a variety of semantic content. Our results revealed that spatial features (e.g., nonstraight edges, asymmetry) are more important than color features (e.g., hue, saturation, value) for visual disorder. Exploiting this knowledge, we then reconstructed stimuli contrasted in terms of visual disorder, but absent of scene-level social disorder cues, to test whether visual disorder alone encourages cheating in a second set of experiments (Experiments 4 and 5). In these experiments, manipulating visual disorder increased the likelihood of cheating by up to 35% and the average magnitude of cheating by up to 87%. This work suggests that theories of rule-breaking that assume that complex social reasoning (e.g., about norms, policing, poverty) is necessary, should be reconsidered (e.g., Kelling & Coles, 1997; Sampson & Raudenbush, 2004). Furthermore, these experiments show that simple perceptual properties of the environment can affect complex behavior and sheds light on the extent to which our actions are within our control. (PsycINFO Database Record
杂乱的环境与无序行为有关。破窗理论（威尔逊和凯林，1982年）是一种有影响力的关于犯罪和违规行为的理论，该理论认为场景层面的社会无序线索（如垃圾、涂鸦）会使人们推断他们违反规则也不会受到惩罚。但如果部分情况并非关于这种复杂的社会推理呢？最近的研究表明，基本的视觉无序线索可能足以促发复杂的违规行为。为了验证这一假设，我们首先进行了一组实验（实验1 - 3），在这些实验中，我们识别出了一些基本的视觉无序线索，这些线索能跨越具有各种语义内容的视觉刺激而具有普遍性。我们的结果显示，对于视觉无序而言，空间特征（如非直线边缘、不对称）比颜色特征（如色调、饱和度、明度）更重要。利用这一知识，我们随后重构了在视觉无序方面存在差异但没有场景层面社会无序线索的刺激物，以在第二组实验（实验4和5）中测试是否仅视觉无序就会助长作弊行为。在这些实验中，操纵视觉无序使作弊的可能性增加了35%，作弊的平均幅度增加了87%。这项研究表明，那些认为复杂的社会推理（如关于规范、治安、贫困）是必要的违规行为理论应该被重新审视（如凯林和科尔斯，1997年；桑普森和劳登布什，2004年）。此外，这些实验表明环境的简单感知属性会影响复杂行为，并揭示了我们的行为在多大程度上是可控的。（《心理学文摘数据库记录》
