A researcher watched hundreds of videos to try to understand what happens in parking lots — which reveals a lot about the way we think about obligation, decency and others.
One Saturday morning, very early, the psychologist Hannah B. Waldfogela behavioral scientist and researcher at Columbia University, in the USA, arrived at a parking lot and came across a kind of crime scene.
“A cart was stuck in the curbanother lay on its side in a parking lot, a third glided along with the windlike some sort of metallic hayball through the park,” he wrote.
The question was simple: why do people they don’t pack the strollers from the supermarket?
It may seem trivial, but is a question that most of us have asked ourselves. In Waldfogel’s hands, however, the supermarket cart becomes a mirror — which reflects our relationship with responsibilitythe hierarchy and the invisible rules that keep life in society functioning.
To answer the question, Waldfogel did something few social scientists had done before: turned to YouTubesays .
Its data source of choice was the channel, a group of “vigilantes” of car parks that confronts those who leave their carts where they happen to be.
The channel has already published hundreds of meetings of this type in the USA, Canada and even Australia, totaling more than 90 million views. Waldfogel saw 564 of these interactions, recording every excuse, insult and moment of guilt.
It was behavioral science at its most raw. “People around me called this ‘worrying’ and a ‘waste of time’. I called it an investigation,” he wrote.
From the images, patterns began to emerge. Some avoided the question — “Do you work here? Is it the cart police?“Others reacted aggressively.”I’ll cut your face” shouted one man. Another warned: “This is how people end up dead”.
More than half of customers apologized. Some cited physical limitations: “I’m 72 years old. I can’t walk that far.” Others called for a certain feeling of acquired right — “After 40 years working in food retailtar, I’ve already earned that right.”
There were also those who argued that leaving carts lying around guarantees someone’s job: “They pay someone to come and collect them”.
And then there were the sensible onespeople who, when confronted, ended up do what was right.
A man mumbled: “There are more things happening in the world to worry about it”, but took the cart back anyway. Another did a small act of redemption: “I just got caught by the Cart Narcs! I apologize.”
In the end, Hannah Waldfogel ended up concluding that fixing the stroller “means that other people matter.” It’s not so much about the stroller itself.
The psychology of parking
One published in 2008 in the magazine Science showed how fragile they areIn reality, our social norms. Researchers found that when an alley was covered in graffiti, people were twice as likely to throw leaflets on the floor.
The same pattern was observed in car parks. When the carts were loose, 58% of people threw leaflets to the ground left on windshields, compared to 30% when the strollers were carefully stowed.
This domino effect is the behavioral version of entropy. When one rule is visibly broken, the rest fall much more easily.
In a published in 2019 in Scientific Americanan anthropologist Kristal D’Costa divided behavior around carts into five archetypes:
- Those who always give back (Returners), who pack the cart out of a sense of obligation or empathy.
- Those who never return (Never Returners), who believe that “it’s someone else’s work”.
- Those who return for convenience (Convenience Returners), who only do so if the storage location is close to the car.
- Those who return due to social pressure (Pressure Returners), who behave well when they feel they are being watched and fear being judged.
- Those who return it because of their children (Child-Driven Returners), which turn the task into a game for children, often taking them to ride the stroller to the storage area or letting them push it to the queue.
Decades of research in behavioral economics and social psychology show how unwritten rules, so-called norms, shape what we do.
In particular, researchers distinguish between injunctive norms and descriptive norms. To the injunctive normss concern moral judgment—what we think others approve or disapprove of. They are the inner voice that tells us: “People will think worse of me if I leave the stroller here.”
As descriptive normsin turn, have to do with what people actually do. These are the clues we collect from the environment. If the park is tidy, we tend to behave tidy; if carts are everywhere, chaos starts to seem acceptable.
These two standards do not always coincide — and it is in this disagreement that explains much of the anarchy in car parks.
Waldfogel also noticed this. “When we see carts spread across the parking lot, the descriptive norm tells us that leaving them like that is acceptable. But when you see other people packing their strollers, it can feel wrong not to do the same.”
This mix of rules and signsof judgments and imitation, helps to explain why the same person can, in one day, return the cart religiously and, the next, abandon it wherever possible. Norms only remain in place as long as a sufficient number of people respect them.
Why small gestures count
There is meaning in the humble shopping cart left haphazardly in the hypermarket park. A lost cart becomes a test of the social contract — what we owe each other when no one is taking notes.
Some stores, such as the Aldi chain, use incentives: you need to enter a coin to free the cart and retrieve it when it is returned. The system works, but it also has limits.
“If you search ” on Google, you will find countless blogs explain how to bypass the currency system“, noted Waldfogel. The idea is simple: incentives alone cannot overcome indifference.
The status also comes into playthe. As Waldfogel noted, “seeing a task as something of low status makes it more acceptable to neglect itIn other words, the more we think we are above a task, the less we feel we have to comply with the rules that keep society running.
Psychologists call it tension between selfish goals and norms collective. We want to be decent, but we also don’t want to waste time or do things that are even slightly uncomfortable. And when the park already seems to be in disarray, the standard of decency becomes optional.
Packing a stroller doesn’t save the worldbut it is a sign that the world still matters to us. “Do your part, pack your cart. Not because the cart itself is important, but because tidying it up means other people are”, concludes Waldfogel.
