This article on FOXNews talks about a study done about messiness leading to worse behavior. At first when I read the title I was almost sure that they did the same thing that the article for television and obesity did in that they applied causation to correlation. It looked like they did that because messiness may lead to worse behavior, but bad behavior could also lead to messiness, implying that there is only correlation which does not mean there is causation. However, when I actually read through the article, the study actually did connect messiness leading to worse behavior, and they followed through by not only doing one experiment over and over again, but six different experiments.
In the first experiment, the researchers found bicycles parked in a clean alley of a shopping area where there was a no littering sign placed nearby. On the bicycles, they attached fake fliers and found that only thirty three percent of the bicyclers threw the fliers on the ground. The experimenters then vandalized the walls of the alley, drawing graffiti all over it and performed the same experiment. They found that sixty nine percent of the bicyclers threw their fliers on the ground after the walls were graffitied. They tried this experiment several times and came out with the same results.
In the second experiment, there was a fence that partially blocked the main entry into a parking lot. One sign said “no admittance” and the second sign prohibited bikes from being locked onto the fence. When the fence was clear, only twenty seven percent of the people heading towards their cars in the parking lot ignored the sign and squeezed through the gap that was not blocked by the fence. However, when the researchers locked several bikes to the fence, that number rose to eighty two percent.
The study goes on to do four more experiments, each one in a different area, ruling out the possibility that only a certain social class is effected by messiness. I agree with their methodology in each of the experiments. They re-did the experiments over and over again, eliminating biases and also the ranges of messiness were varied in some of the experiments which confirmed that the worse behavior was in fact connected to the surrounding messiness. They could not have had a questionnaire or survey for this type of study because many people would not admit to behaving worse in messier conditions since it is not socially acceptable to not follow the rules.
http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2008Nov20/0,4670,SCIMessingUp,00.html
