The order of disorder: Deconstructing visual disorder and its effect on rule-breaking

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