Hey there, Shankar here.

Over the next few weeks we're going to bring you a series of stories exploring how race,

immigration and religion intersect with politics, policing and the media.

We begin today with an episode from last fall that explored the broken windows theory of

policing and how that theory became widely popular in ways its creators never intended.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vidantam.

In the early 1980s, a couple of researchers wrote an article in The Atlantic that would

have far-reaching consequences.

The article introduced a new idea about crime and policing.

It was called Broken Windows.

The idea was simple.

A broken window is a sign of a neglected community and a neglected community is a place where

crime can thrive.

The researchers said if police could fix the small problems, the big ones would disappear.

So the broken windows theory was this magical solution that basically everybody could like.

It quickly became seen as a panacea for crime.

Today we explore how ideas sometimes get away from those who invented them and then are

taken to places that were never intended.

It's a beautiful story and it's a myth.

Our story begins in 1969.

The psychologist Philip Zimbardo ran an interesting experiment.

He abandoned two cars on the street, one in a mostly poor crime-ridden section of the

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