Dirty air leads to increased crime
Environmental pollution has a negative impact not only on health but also on their moral character.
To such conclusion the group of scientists from Columbia, Harvard and Michigan universities (USA). The results of their study are published in the journal Psychological Science.
The researchers analyzed data on air quality and crime rates in American cities 9360. Data were collected for nine years.
It turned out that in cities with poor air quality often occur murder, robbery, physical abuse and so on.
A clear link between dirty air and crime is evident even when the researchers took into account many factors that can affect the results of the population, its racial composition, poverty and unemployment, and so on.
News
Every sixth death in the world associated with environmental pollution
To ensure that air quality and the tendency of the population to the violation of moral norms really exists a causal relationship, the researchers conducted a series of psychological experiments. Not to force the participants of the experiment actually to breathe dirty air, they were asked to use your imagination.
So, during one of the experiments 256 people showed pictures of different places and parts of the images, the atmosphere was polluted and the other pictures is clearly the air was clean. Participants were asked to imagine that they live in these places, walk around the neighborhood and breathe this air. In parallel with them held a cash game on honesty. The result was that people who think about what it means to live in conditions of ecological disaster — cheated during a game more often than those who imagined myself walking on clean ground.