Good people go bad. One broken window left unrepaired-the rest of the windows will soon be broken.
Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford psychologist, arranged to have an automobile without license plates parked with its hood up on a street in the Bronx and a comparable automobile on a street in Palo Alto, California.
The car in the Bronx was attacked by vandals within ten minutes of its abandonment.
The car in Palo Alto sat untouched for more than a week.
Then Zimbardo smashed part of it with a sledgehammer.
Soon, passersby were joining in.
Within a few hours, the car had been turned upside down and utterly destroyed.
Untended property becomes fair game for people out for fun or plunder and even for people who ordinarily would not dream of doing such things and who probably consider themselves law-abiding.
Because of the nature of community life in the Bronx—its anonymity, the frequency with which cars are abandoned and things are stolen or broken, the past experience of no one caring—vandalism begins much more quickly than it does in staid Palo Alto, where people have come to believe that private possessions are cared for, and that mischievous behavior is costly.
But vandalism can occur anywhere once communal barriers—the sense of mutual regard and the obligations of civility—are lowered by actions that seem to signal that no one cares.
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