Re-opening, and Common Decency

Have you noticed the number of things that we take for granted, which are not heavily enforced?
For example, we normally expect that people will not throw trash in public places, on the street, in playgrounds, in rest areas, public toilets ... ?  But people do throw trash.  Some of this behavior is deliberate.  It may be an expression of defiance, or it may be a result of being brought up in poverty in tiny homes, where it is imperative that you get trash out of your space as fast as possible.  Or having tiny babies around, always underfoot, so that Trash becomes a sort of personal enemy.  Or that, walking through a neat neighborhood, you feel so angry at the oppressive tidiness that you want to crap it up a bit.

Anyhow, people will be streaming out like bats out of hell---at least in some localities---but our Governor has instructed that only one public restroom per parking lot is to be opened.  What are the chances that, by about midday, the users crowding these public parks and rest areas will make these restrooms too crapped-up to use?
Many of us are entirely unfamiliar with the habit of certain parents of beating their children (or their wives, or their pets).  Yet, it takes place.  The security forces will interfere only if there is a complaint.  There are fellows riding noisy vehicles around, just for the fun of it.  People set off fire crackers.  Others drive around with their car stereos going full blast.

What drives some people to be public nuisances?  Our first, knee-jerk response is to blame the upbringing of these people.  But that just slightly changes the question to ask: what makes some parents bring their kids up to be anti-social, while others think that it is simple common decency to, for example, pick up after yourself.  Why do people in, say, Finland, keep their cities spotlessly clean, while Americans trash their cities with all their energy?

One of the sources of public feeling against immigrants is the suspicion that it is immigrants, and people of color who are the sources of litter.  Is this perception justified?  I have certainly noticed little black kids throwing their hamburger wrappers on the street.  But I have also noticed people of other ethnicities doing the same, or worse; I have seen big white guys toss box springs and mattresses off pickups onto the highway shoulders.  When adults indulge in this sort of behavior, I would suspect that there is some family policy, some recurring rhetoric running through the family discourse, that justifies anti-social behavior.

Is it at certain times that this sort of thing happens?  Good times?  Bad times?  Democrat times?  Republican times?  During hard times?  Prosperous times?  I'm sure there are many theories about this phenomenon, but I'm also sure that many of these theories are likely to be wrong, because they must depend so much on the habits of the people in the environment of the authors.

In particular, when times are bad for everyone, as they probably are now, irresponsible public behavior hugely escalates everyone's dissatisfaction with their lives and their constraints.

One interesting thing I found was that, early in the Social Distancing times, people were defiant about not wearing masks.  I live in a particularly distancing-schmdistancing sort of area.  The staff at the grocery store did not wear masks, except for the clerks in the pharmacy.  A little later, customers did begin to wear masks, even if as a token gesture.  Then the official instructions from the Governor said: from today, masks must be worn in public.  People immediately began to wear masks, and grocery store employees began to tape spacing distances in checkout lines; but the checkout clerks still did not wear masks.

Generally speaking, I think I'm satisfied with the response to the distancing instructions from people and businesses in our area.  They clearly do not believe that the virus is a threat to their safety, but for whatever reason, they make at least a show of covering their faces some of the time, keeping their distances, and of course, schools and restaurants are closed, as are gyms and barber shops, etc.  Certain businesses are due to open up soon, and I'm wondering whether the number of cases of infection will immediately shoot up.  At the moment, the number of cases is still around 100, with just 2 deaths so far.  If the response to a sudden rise in the number of cases or deaths results in an immediate increase in careful behavior (distancing, face covering), I will be satisfied.  This is a community of doubting thomases, and Trump has succeeded in convincing many of my neighbors that they have been extraordinarily gullible for too long.

One lesson we can learn from all this is that, when Democrats overstate their case for any course of action---even a reasonable course of action, such as recycling, or protecting the environment, or lowering emissions---there is a backlash.  "Hey, with all these jokers buying hybrid cars, how come the weather is still warming up?"  This is the sort of drivel you might expect Trump to spout.  Many laymen have no idea of the enormous inertia of physical systems, and still more, of biological systems.

A gadget for picking up things

To come back to littering: I used to make it a habit of picking up litter when I took my walks in the afternoon.  (So did my wife.)  But now, we're fearful about picking up something from the litter.  Usually, it is bacteria that you contact from litter, and generally, our bodies can defeat a bacterium or two; they're simply destroyed by our stomach acids, or our antibodies.  This virus, unfortunately, being new, we have no resident antibodies to deal with it, which is the problem.  Anyway, there could be viruses on litter on the street.

Well, I don't have any enormous wisdom to offer about the problem of irresponsible public behavior.  Social psychologists may have suggestions, but I would suspect that few of these will have experimental support, outside of maybe a small experiment in a limited area.  What I would do---without any proof of efficacy---would be to set a good example.  If I want to pick up trash in my neighborhood, however, I will have to walk around with a pail or a small trash can, and one of those picker-upper things ---we got one on some occasion, but they're a lot of fun to use---and pick up the trash with that.

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Well, what do you know.

I went back to Google, and looked for theories about littering.  Why do people litter?  The answer to this question is obviously of intrinsic interest, but also, obviously, of interest for anyone who wants to reduce littering for any reason, in any locality.  To be quite candid, I was looking for the individual causes of littering: what attributes of the individual or his circumstances, or his history, would tend to result in littering behavior?

Well, it appears that this sort of theorizing is no longer considered valuable.  Only theories of group behavior, which can be experimentally verified, are considered worthy of study!  Therefore, regardless of the motives of particular littering individuals, only the actions of everybody in the course of, say, a day, in a particular block, is going to be studied.

What would happen if the block happened to be almost perfectly litter-free?  Well, it appears that if a single piece of litter were to be added, it would likely be picked up by someone.  In other words, there is evidence to believe that isolated pieces of litter will be removed, often by people quite unconnected with the problem.  This situation continues, until a certain limit is passed; once the location becomes fairly littered, the littering increases.  It appears that the presence of litter gives litterers permission to continue to add new litter.  Places that are heavily littered, such as picnic areas, or alleys behind a building, or places where smoking takes place and is heavily littered with cigarette butts, will be littered further.

This is in line with my own experience.

There are other pearls of wisdom to be obtained from articles such as this.  They are research papers on social behavioral psychology, and for reasons that have to do with the independence of the discipline of social psychology, they do not lean on concepts of individual psychology at all.  The concepts have to do with goal frames, behavioral norms, and so on.  It is all very dispassionate and mechanical.  And uninteresting!

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