Why do so many people litter when it is an antisocial behavior ?

Answer 1

I wouldn't call littering anti-social behavior - in fact I'll go so far as to call it completely natural, very normal, and very human.

The first answer is, littering is easy. In a world where every moment of time is prized because we never have enough of it, spending even 12 seconds to take something to the trash is 12 seconds you didn't spend doing something else.

The second answer is really much more intuitive - and is closer to the real issue. Basically - people litter because they don't see the consequences of littering.

Despite our civilizational advancements of the past 10,000 years, our brains are still stuck in the dark ages - that is, our ability to conceptualize and abstract ideas is still only as advanced as it was 10,000 years ago, before we began building civilization, when our greatest concern was not something large and unknown, but rather the things right in front of us, very concrete and very well defined.

The things we worry about today - environmentalism, war, famine, human rights, these things are all very abstract - they require a leap of imagination to comprehend. The problem is, our brains haven't caught up to that sort of need to abstract. When you worry about a faceless starving child in Africa, that person is only an IDEA to you. Yes, they may be real, but you don't really consider them real - they're not standing in front of you.

This shortcoming in our ability to abstract is responsible for a whole host of our culture's problems - and littering is one of them. We don't see the immediate consequences of our actions most of the time, so we assume there aren't any. We litter, and the world doesn't end, so we assume it's ok. We throw our cereal boxes, cell phones, computers, chip bags, milk bottles in the trash, and the world doesn't end - so we think it's ok, that there are no consequences for how utterly wasteful we are.

Unfortunately, that illusion is quickly coming to an end, and I think in the next 50 years or so we'll find ourselves finally understanding in concrete terms, how our actions result in planetary consequences.

Answer 2

littering is easy.

Also while littering is considered, by some, to be an antisocial behaviour, when so many people do it so reguarly, can you really consider it to be all that anit-social?

Plus carrying your garbage with you to a garbage receptical is so very "uncool" and starting from about age 7, in North American society, we are hyper-focused on what is "cool" (or, perhaps, more accuratly, not being labeled "uncool") that we would do or say almost anything in our effort to be considered "cool". This "cool-consciencousness" starts to die off in our society around the late-teen years, some even earlier, while most of us never loose this fixation completly, some never start losing it at all.

Answer 3

Why do people litter when they know global warming is going on right now as we type?

Answer 4

Becasue they are too lazy to take it to the trash.

Answer 5

Usually these people are stupid and don't know any better