HPPR hosts & contributors Wed October 31, 2012 Behind A
Halloween Mask, Even 'Good' Kids Can Turn Into Candy Thieves
Originally published on Wed October 31, 2012 2:07 pm Vampires
and monsters will be out in force tonight, but some of the
darkest creatures out there might be your little angels inside
those Halloween costumes. It's been more than a quarter-century
since psychologists discovered that the cloak of anonymity of
Halloween costumes gives children license to steal — not just
candy, but real money. In a naturalistic experiment published in
1976 into the behavior of 1,352 children in the Seattle area on
Halloween, researchers found that virtually all children were
willing to join in the stealing — given the right circumstances.
The kids varied in age from 4 and 5 to pre-teens. In an
interview this week with The Salt, Scott Fraser, one of the
researchers, says the study challenged an idea that was
universally believed at the time and is still widely held today:
People who do bad things are bad people; a