Tag: Broken windows

Windex and Compliance

Katie Liljenquist

People are more fair and more generous when they are in clean-smelling environments, according to a soon-to-be published study: The Smell of Virtue.

The experiment had participants engage in several tasks, the only difference being that some worked in unscented rooms, while others worked in rooms freshly spritzed with citrus-scented Windex.

The first experiment was a test of whether clean scents would enhance reciprocity. Participants received $12 of real money. They had to decide how much of it to either keep or return to their partners who had trusted them to divide it fairly. Subjects in clean-scented rooms returned a significantly higher share of the money. The average amount of cash given back by the participants in the unscented room was $2.81. But the participants in the Windex room gave back an average of $5.33.

The second experiment evaluated whether scents would encourage charitable behavior. Test participants indicated their interest in volunteering with a campus organization for a Habitat for Humanity service project and their interest in donating funds to the cause. Participants surveyed in a Windex room were significantly more interested in volunteering (4.21 on a 7-point scale) than those in a normal room (3.29). In the Windex room, 22% participants said they’d like to donate money, compared to only 6% of those in a unscented room.

Follow-up questions confirmed that participants didn’t notice the scent in the room.

The results are consistent with the “broken windows” theory of crime that argues disrepair in the environment promotes lawless behavior.

Katie Liljenquist, assistant professor of organizational leadership at BYU’s Marriott School of Management, is the lead author on the piece in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, with co-authors are Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and Adam Galinsky of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

References:

Thanks to Mary Abraham of Above and Beyond KM for pointing out this study.

Bribery’s Broken Windows

Alexandra Wrage of TRACE international wrote Bribery’s Broken Windows (.pdf) for the Q1 edition of Ethisphere. She tackles the credibility issue with allowing facilitating payments to low level officials, but saying “no” to senior ranking official. She advocates that the companies should prohibit payments at all levels.

She looks to the New York subway system’s Clean Car Program which is in turn based on the Broken Windows theory of James Wilson and George Kelling.

Once one window in a building is broken, the rest will be broken soon after. The broken  window, left unrepaired, is a sign to the world that no one cares. If no one cares, there is no risk in breaking the rest of the windows. People are better behaved and less prone to escalating criminal activity when they see that their petty acts are addressed promptly and decisively.

Doesn’t it seem likely that this would hold true of petty bribery, too? If officials face “zero tolerance” for the smallest inappropriate demands, if both companies and enforcement agencies declare even the five and ten dollar demands an intolerable abuse of official power, won’t it be more difficult for a culture of corruption to flourish? Otherwise, low-level govern-ment officials will look at the broken windows and assume that no one cares.