Behaviours

I really like theories and more if they can prove. This is about the uncivil behavior of individuals. It originated in an experiment conducted in 1969, Philip Zimbardo, a psychologist at Stanford University.

He left a car in the grimy streets of the Bronx in New York with registration plates pulled up and the doors open. His goal was to see what was happening.

And something happened. After 10 minutes, began to steal their components. After three days there was nothing of value. Then they started to destroy it.

The experiment had a second part: left another car, under similar conditions in a wealthy neighborhood of Palo Alto, California. Nothing happened. For one week, the car remained intact. Then Zimbardo went a step further, and pounded some parts of the body with a hammer. He must be a sign that the good citizens of Palo Alto expected, because after a few hours the car was so wrecked as the Bronx.
This experiment is what led to the broken window theory, developed by James Wilson and George Kelling: If a building is a broken window, and not settled soon, the other windows immediately end up being destroyed by vandals. Why? Because it's fun to break windows, of course. But above all, because the broken window sends a message: there's no one to look after this.
Our councils are familiar with this theory. When a graffiti on a wall, if not cleared soon, the whole wall and in nearby houses, appears full of graffiti. Hence the importance of always keeping the city clean, the streets in order, the gardens in good condition ... Police also know, and therefore considers it important to tackle not only the great crimes, but also small transgressions.
The message is clear: once you begin to disobey the rules to keep order in a community, both the order and the community begin to deteriorate, often with surprising speed. Uncivil behaviors are contagious.

And this applies not only to public, but to many other facets of social life.

In these cases, neither the police nor City Hall cleaning services can do nothing, as in the case of the abandoned car of graffiti or dirt in the streets. The solution lies with the citizens themselves, without crushing the abandoned car and helping to keep the city clean. And recovering civic and moral behavior in the family, the company in the sports club in the city, in the media and so on.