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Hitchhiking
Someone recently brought up how no one hitchhikes in America anymore. With the increase in crime since World War II people have become less trusting and therefore less willing to hitchhike. My narrative on crime has always been that crime in America has been dropping steadily since its peak in the early 1990s. So why are people still afraid of hitchhiking? Why do we think our society is more dangerous than it is?

us violent crime rates since 1960

Violent crime is back down to 1975 levels and homicide rates are down where they were in the early 1960s. From the 1960s to the 1990s crime rose steadily in America. My guess is that people who were raised in the 1950s and 1960s were more apt to hitchhike because they were taught that they could trust others by their parents. However, as they became adults the situation changed dramatically. The rise in crime in the 60s, 70s, and 80s decimated that trust people had in strangers. This generation taught its children that the world was a more dangerous place than its parents taught them. Subsequent generations have gone along with this even as the crime rate has dropped.

My conclusion is that the explosion in violent crime from the mid-60s to the early 90s damaged people's trust in society severely. The effect of subsequent reductions in crime has not and will not have an increase in trust that is equivalent to the decrease in trust associated with the increase in crime. This, I think, is pretty standard in psychology. People remember the negative much more than they remember the positive. Nancy Etcoff's TED talk on "the surprising science of happiness delves into this.:
It in part reflects the anatomy of the human emotion system. Which is that we have both a positive and a negative system. And our negative system is extremely sensitive. It is our sentinel. It is there to protect us against danger. So for example, we're born loving the taste of something sweet, and reacting adversely to the taste of something bitter. Yet we are much more sensitive to the bitter than the sweet. We can detect the bitter at one part per two million. We can detect the sweet at one part per 200. We also find the people are more averse to losing than they are happy to gain. People are very loss-averse. I also have up here the marriage formula. This is by a psychologist named John Gottman, in Seattle, who does work with couples, in couples therapy. And he finds that the formula for a happy marriage is five positive remarks, or interactions, for every one negative. (Laughter) And that's how powerful the one negative is. Especially expressions of contempt or disgust, well you really need a lot of positives to upset that.
Read the book "The Science of Fear" by Daniel Gardner. You'd probably enjoy it.

Posted at 7/17/2010 3:02:00 AM by Vinny


Hmm,
but the question is - Why has crime steadily been decreasing? Have
levels of criminal intent actually been dropping for the past 20 years?
Or is it the case that there is a relationship between reduced trust and
the corresponding number of victims?

If you are reducing your exposure to risk (i.e., getting into a
stranger's car), it would make sense for fewer incidents of crime to
occur. Perhaps the overall lack of trust that we have developed is
actually beneficial to us?

Posted at 7/19/2010 8:32:00 PM by Chris


I'm
late to the party on this one, but I think it's an interesting
question. I definitely think that as a society, we're more fearful than
Americans from a few decades ago. But I think another part of it
probably has to do with economics- so many more people own cars these
days that hitchhiking is largely unnecessary, and people may assume that
someone who is hitchhiking is "down and out" and more likely to be
dangerous. When I lived in Nicaragua, people hitchhiked all the time,
and it's considered very normal and perfectly safe. But since so few
people there own cars, it makes sense that hitchhiking is widespread.

Posted at 8/2/2010 2:07:00 PM by eileen


 
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