Broken Window Theory

We define ourselves by our choices of action. And our choice leads us to our behaviour towards others. Since, humans are a social animal and we live in somewhat developed society, our actions, and our behaviour take us long towards our future hold in the society. These things are interconnected and affect each other largely. Someone’s behaviour towards us can give us a lot of insight into social mechanics, how it works and all. Mostly, we have control over most of our choices, we make and thus in retrospect, our life depends upon the choices we make throughout our life and thus, we have the chains in our hand to tame the beast. We have to decide on one or the other in almost every other moment in our life. We need to take decisions

This is where; we have the responsibility over our decisions or actions. Though, the ‘Broken Window Theory’ makes a contradictory prediction here. According to this theory, all the bigger problems in society can be reduced down to some pretty small but neglected issues and thus by solving those small problems we can naturally eliminate most of the bigger problems in the society. One of the consequences of the theory can be regarded as that, our intent or our heart’s desire to do something may not be that much important in the bigger picture, the social context, the immediate situation, we might find ourselves in, is way much more important. This can tip the favour towards the victim or the person doing the act. If we see in that light, we really have not much to do in deciding over actions, as it would be heavily dependent upon the immediate context of our behaviour rather than the our intent to actually do something. Gladwell in his work”The Power of Context” has shown a lot of evidences from psychological studies to prove this theory in action. The study of the prisoners in a simulated environment and their progressed behaviour works in tandem with this theory. People, who showed healthy minds in psychological studies beforehand, started showing repulsive behaviour in just a few days, and the change was so quick that the experimenters had to stop the experiment way before the pre assigned time because of the mental health of the volunteer prisoners. This study was a concrete proof of how our actions may largely depend on our situation in spite of our intent or