My 84-year-old grandma, who can hardly walk, couldn’t find a disabled parking spot the other day when she went to eat at a local restaurant. She had to park at the back of the lot and needed the help of both my mom and her walker to make it to the entrance of the restaurant. When she finally got inside, a group of able-bodied teenage girls walked out to their car — conveniently located in the disabled parking spot my grandma couldn’t have.
This is what happens when we replace the dictates of common courtesy with rules.
These teenage girls had a handicapped sticker on their car, so they were not actually breaking any rules. To them and so many people in our society, disabled parking spots have become nothing more than a rule to be followed. Consequently, when able-bodied people happen to have a handicapped sticker — by whatever means they obtained it — they will park in a disabled parking spot with no guilt because they think they are doing nothing wrong.
Whenever we make a rule to enforce common courtesy, we run the risk of making that rule or law too successful. In other words, people might start thinking of the new rule as just that — a rule — instead of a means to enforce something more fundamental, such as courtesy or morality. Consequently, when the rule doesn’t match up exactly with courtesy, people will act in ways they normally would not had there never been a rule in the first place — just like the disabled parking spot example.
The converse of rules that are too successful and backfire is best illustrated by six day care centers in Haifa, Israel, that decided to start fining parents who came in late to pick up their children. Before its new rule, the parents would pick up their children on time as a common courtesy for the day cares. After the day cares instituted the tardiness rule, however, the number of tardy parents doubled. The parents began looking at picking their children up on time as a rule, and they acted accordingly.
If the outcome is the same for rules that are too successful and rules that aren’t successful enough in that they subvert common courtesy, is the answer to this problem of courtesy to end most rules? It is an interesting question about human nature to see if we actually could be motivated to act courteously without external force.
Imagine if there was no law punishing people for parking in disabled parking spots. The only enforcement would be the internal drive we have to act courteously — the same enforcement that motivates people to do great things, such as helping the elderly cross the street, opening a door for a stranger or helping someone pick up papers they’ve dropped. Would there be more or less abuse with able-bodied people parking in disabled parking spots?
I don’t claim to have the answer to this question, but it is worth thinking about. However, in the case of my grandma and those teenage girls, if the girls had been thinking of disabled parking spots as a courtesy instead of a rule of which they could more or less take advantage — seemingly without consequence — I highly doubt they would have ever parked in that spot.