What Darkness Does to the Mind Regardless of anonymity, we become more likely to deceive.

[xchrom]

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/06/what-darkness-does-to-the-mind/276578/



In the summer of 2008, I moved from Pittsburgh to Chapel Hill to start my new position as a faculty member at the business school at the University of North Carolina. Although I was sad to leave Carnegie Mellon and my colleagues there, I was excited to meet new ones and to move into our new home. A few months earlier, my husband Greg and I had bought a lovely house surrounded by quiet, leafy streets just a few blocks away from the center of town.

Within a few days of moving in, Greg and I received a letter from Chapel Hill's City Hall welcoming us and informing us that new street lighting would be added in the neighborhood in the follow­ing weeks since that part of town had recently experienced a surge in crime. In addition to raising my fears (and not making me feel any safer), the letter also piqued my curiosity, since it highlighted an intriguing assumption: that lighting would reduce crime.

In a sense, this assumption was consistent with what Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote: "As gaslight is the best noctur­nal police, so the universe protects itself by pitiless publicity." According to conventional wisdom, darkness conceals identity and also decreases inhibitions; as a result, it may be linked to crime. The idea that darkness promotes unethical behavior dates back to the myth of the "Ring of Gyges," which was recounted by Plato in The Republic (360 BC). In the myth, a shepherd in Lydia named Gyges finds a ring that makes him invisible. He travels to the king's court, seduces the queen, conspires with her to kill the king, and takes control of Lydia. Thus, invisibility corrupted the wearer of the ring. The story leads Plato to ask the following ques­tion: is there anyone alive who could resist taking advantage of the invisibility ring's powers, or is it only others' monitoring that prevents us from committing immoral acts?

From this perspective, by providing anonymity, darkness may facilitate dishonest behavior. When transgressors believe others will not be able to identify them, are they more likely to behave dishonestly? Scholarly work conducted in the 1960s and 1970s found that criminal assaults most frequently occur during hours of darkness and that improving street lighting in urban areas is commonly followed by reductions in crime of between 33 percent and 70 percent -- impressive gains. Although interesting, the sci­entist in me notes that this evidence is inconclusive, as the rela­tionship between darkness and crime suggested by this data could be explained by other factors. I wondered whether there is a direct relationship between darkness and crime rates. Even more inter­estingly, does darkness increase dishonesty?

[Laelth]

1. k&r for exposure. n/t

-Laelth

[KoKo]

2. Interesting Article ....