In other cases, participants were instructed to tell their partner four truths and one lie about themselves. Those who received information about their fictitious partner (again, preprogrammed responses) thought their partner would be better able to detect their lies. Participants in other experiments, given a monetary incentive to lie but warned that their partner would flag suspected dishonesty, were less likely to lie when they received information about their partner. The less anonymous participants felt, the less likely they were to lie.
Probing the assumption of social symmetry and its implications for anonymity in a real-life setting, Shah and LaForest sent mailers to residents of some New York City Housing Authority housing developments, providing prosaic personal information about neighborhood coordination officers, who patrolled the developments as part of a community policing program. In surveys taken two months after the mailers were sent, residents of developments that received the information thought it was more likely their NCO would know if they committed a crime than did residents of developments that didn’t receive the mailers.
The researchers further find that in the three-month period after the mailers were sent, crime dropped in and around the developments that received them, relative to those that didn’t. The effect was modest—a 6 percent drop in the immediate vicinity of the development and a 7 percent drop within a slightly larger radius—but reliable. And this reduction was in line with the typical results of hotspot policing initiatives that entail amplifying police presence in particular areas of concern.
Shah points out that the effect of the treatment faded quickly, and cautions that the mailers in themselves are not necessarily a crime-prevention strategy. “I wouldn’t look at our field experiment as testing a ready-to-go intervention,” he says. “I really think of it as giving some insight into a specific component that’s already there in lots of community policing initiatives but has never really been evaluated on its own, which is just, what is the effect of knowing more about your neighborhood officers?”
“These results suggest an interesting wrinkle in the psychology of anonymity and social interactions,” Shah and LaForest write of the cumulative findings of their experiments. Shah doesn’t speculate on how the findings might apply in other contexts, but he points out that social media allows people to gather information about others in a way that blurs the line between acquaintance and stranger. When you check a new colleague’s LinkedIn profile before meeting for the first time, you may be trying to get to know the person a little better. But, the research suggests, you may come away feeling, and acting, as though your colleague knows you a little better too.