Study Shows Messiness Makes You Messier
Study: Sloppiness breeds more mess
Adding graffiti encouraged people to litter, experiment shows. Minor stealing, trespassing also increased, Dutch researchers found.
Associated Press
Friday, November 21, 2008
Washington —- Does a messy neighborhood make a difference on how people act? It sure does!
Graffiti on the walls, trash in the street, bicycles chained to a fence, all resulted in a decline in how people behaved in a series of experiments.
…
Here’s an example.
The researchers found a tidy alley in a shopping area where people parked their bicycles. There was a no-littering sign on the wall.
The researchers attached flyers for a nonexistent store to the bikes’ handlebars and observed behavior.
Under normal circumstances, 33 percent of riders littered the alley with the flyer.
But after researchers defaced the alley wall with graffiti, the share of riders who littered with the flyers jumped to 69 percent.
They did a half-dozen similar experiments, all with similar results.
[Read the rest of the article in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution Here]
[Read it in The Economist Here]
So what does this mean for organizers – Well it can be interpreted to mean that once a surface has been cluttered by even one thing, a person is more likely to add more clutter. It’s already a mess right? So one more thing won’t really matter.
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