Baggage Check: Broken Windows

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Dr. Andrea Bonior dives into the world of psychology.

ALMOST TWO MILLION PEOPLE — and who knows how many handwarmers — converged on the National Mall yesterday for the inauguration of Barack Obama.

Such a mass of humanity, especially with proximity to the incoming President of the United States, is bound to bring about its fair share of problems. Social psychologists know that when people are together in large crowds, they can sometimes become overly disinhibited. A combination of deindividuation (feeling less aware of your personal morals and responsibilities when swept up in a crowd) and emotional contagion (which speaks for itself!) is often to blame.

In fact, highly emotionally charged times where many strangers are gathered together can occasionally spell disaster, as stampedes at sporting events, looting, and riots can exemplify. This time, however, as of late Tuesday evening, not a single arrest had been reported. Not a single arrest? That seems rather hard to believe. Perhaps people were too frozen to move, let alone misbehave.

Unfortunately, not every negative aspect of crowd behavior was evaded yesterday.

The amount of trash left on the National Mall was absolutely staggering. This speaks to a different facet of human behavior, often referred to as the Broken Window theory. The idea is that when one window in a building is broken, vandals are more likely to do more damage, and then the crime eventually begins to snowball (squatting, other vandalism, property crimes and violence), all because of one single broken window.

Sadly, one glance at panoramic pictures of a post-inaugural Mall appears to support the notion that this theory holds true for litter as well.