Are Academics Messy? Testing the Broken Windows Theory with a Field Experiment in the Work Environment
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Joao Ramos
Abstract
We test the broken windows theory using a field experiment in a shared area of an academic workplace (the department common room). More specifically, we explore academics’ and postgraduate students’ behavior under an order condition (a clean environment) and a disorder condition (a messy environment). We find strong evidence that signs of disorderly behavior trigger littering: In 59% of the cases, subjects litter in the disorder treatment as compared to 18% in the order condition. These results remain robust in a multivariate analysis even when controlling for a large set of factors not directly examined by previous studies. Overall, when academic staff and postgraduate students observe that others have violated the social norm of keeping the common room clean, all else being equal, the probability of littering increases by around 40%.
©2012 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Article
- Are Academics Messy? Testing the Broken Windows Theory with a Field Experiment in the Work Environment
- The Role of Prosecutor's Incentives in Creating Congestion in Criminal Courts
- Political Beliefs and Tort Awards: Evidence of Rationally Political Jurors from Two Data Sets
- Mitigating Judgment Proofness: Information Acquisition vs. Extended Liability
- Decoupled Liability and Efficiency: An Impossibility Theorem
- Natural Resource Production under Divided Ownership: Evidence from Coalbed Methane
- The Hyperbolic Punishment Function
- Patent Litigation and the Role of Enforcement Insurance
- Contractual Democracy
