Halloween a matter of mistrust – or trust

WASHINGTON – If you leave a bowl of treats outside your door tonight and invite trick-or-treaters to help themselves, are you courting disaster?

Not in their experience, said virtually all of the 31 adults who told a reporter, in an informal poll, that they have tried that approach. The result suggests that lots of kids – perhaps especially those with adults at their backs – can be trusted with Halloween temptation.

“I’ve left candy out for years,” said Christie Jamison, 48, a restaurant cook who often works late. “I know my neighbors, and my neighbors know me.”

Lots of other adults, however, find the idea of offering unmonitored Halloween goodies almost bizarre.

“Are you kidding? I live in Washington, D.C. They’d take the whole bowl – and it’d probably be the parents,” said Teresa Conway, 48, a consultant at APCO Worldwide, a government and public relations firm.

Jamison and Conway both may be right because people usually size up their neighborhoods accurately, said Joel Best, a sociologist at the University of Delaware in Newark. So, pessimists may rightly mistrust their neighbors while those who leave out treats may rightly trust theirs.

Then again, people who mistrust trick-or-treaters may simply be putting a human face on their own anxiety about Halloween. That wouldn’t be surprising, said Jennifer Lukomski, a professor of child psychology at Rochester Institute of Technology.

“People who don’t normally let their child out unsupervised in the backyard are asked once a year to let that same child ring the doorbells of strangers and ask for candy,” said Lukomski. “They have a lot of fear and anxiety about that.”