Can We Design An Environment That Facilitates Honesty?
I’m writing this from the Environmental Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Chicago. Here, we study how the physical environment affects affective and cognitive processes, as well as complex human behaviors. Our overarching goal is to quantify the relationships between the physical environment and these psychological phenomena. In this piece, I’ll write about one of the main streams of research I have been working on that has implications for the design of salubrious and cooperative environments (Kotabe, Kardan, & Berman, 2016).
Can we design an environment that causes people to behave more honestly?
First, we are working on a project to quantify the perception of ‘disorder’ in an environment, and furthermore, its effect on a complex human behavior—rule-breaking. Rule-breaking is particularly of interest here because there is an extraordinarily influential social science theory called “broken windows theory” (Wilson & Kelling, 1982) which posits that disorderly environments give rise to disorderly (rule-breaking) behaviors.
This was demonstrated in a series of field experiments reported in the journal Science (Keizer, Lindenberg, & Steg, 2008). Explanations for this theory all have one thing in common—they assume that these effects occur because people in disorderly environments are engaging in some complex social reasoning about, for example, the presence of police, the behavioral norms in the neighborhood, or the prevalence of poverty (social disorder).
References
Keizer, K., Lindenberg, S., & Steg, L. (2008). The spreading of disorder. Science, 322, 1681–1685.
Kotabe, H.P., Kardan, O., & Berman, M.G. (2016, October 13). The Order of Disorder: Deconstructing Visual Disorder and Its Effect of Rule-Breaking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Advance online publication.
Wilson, J. Q., & Kelling, G. L. (1982). Broken windows. Atlantic Monthly, 249, 29–38.
About the Author
Hiroki P. Kotabe
Hiroki is a postdoctoral scholar in the Environmental Neuroscience Laboratory (enl.uchicago.edu) at the University of Chicago. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and is interested in how the physical and social environments affect a person's emotion, cognition, and behavior. More info and his publications can be found at his personal site: home.uchicago.edu/~hkotabe
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