Disorder perception is the adaptive interpretation of social cues, not just a sensitivity to randomness

Frontiers in Psychology

Daniel T. O'Brien¹ 

关键词: broken windows theory;    community perception;    urban neighborhoods;    physical disorder;    social disorder;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00124

学科分类：心理学（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

This past June Kotabe (2014) presented the World is Random (WIR) model for disorder perception. He argued that it can explain phenomena across domains and multiple levels of analysis, most importantly the dynamics articulated by the popular sociological theory of “broken windows” (BWT). There are two critical problems with this claim. First, Kotabe makes a false dichotomy between “psychological” mechanisms and “social” behavior, obscuring any social function that disorder perception might have. Second, the author gave only a cursory summary of BWT and the behavioral patterns it predicts, meaning WIR has been evaluated not against the actual theory fit to an anecdotal sampling of findings associated with it. Notably, these two issues are each dealt with by an existing psychological theory called community perception that the author does not address. This perspective states that the perception and interpretation of disorder in neighborhoods is part of an evolved adaptation for evaluating the social character of collectively inhabited spaces (O'Brien and Wilson, 2011).

【 授权许可】

CC BY