Impulsive Rich Kid, Impulsive Poor Kid, an article about using CBT to fight impulsivity that leads to criminal behaviour, especially among young males from poor backgrounds.
How much crime takes place simply because the criminal makes an impulsive, very bad decision? One employee at a juvenile detention center in Illinois estimates the overwhelming percentage of crime takes place because of an impulse versus conscious decision to embark on criminal activity:
“20 percent of our residents are criminals, they just need to be locked up. But the other 80 percent, I always tell them – if I could give them back just ten minutes of their lives, most of them wouldn’t be here.”
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The teenager in a poor area [who is] is not behaving any less automatically than the teenager in the affluent area. Instead the problem arises from the variability in contexts—and the fact that some contexts call for retaliation.”
To illustrate their theory, they offer an example: If a rich kid gets mugged in a low-crime neighborhood, the adaptive response is to comply—hand over his wallet, go tell the authorities. If a poor kid gets mugged in a high-crime neighborhood, it is sometimes adaptive to refuse—stand up for himself, retaliate, run. If he complies, he might get a reputation as someone who is easy to bully, increasing the probability he will be victimized in the future. The two kids, conditioned by their environment, learn very different automatic responses to similar stimuli: someone else asserting authority over them.
The authors of “Thinking, Fast and Slow” extend the example further by asking you to imagine these same two kids in the classroom. If a teacher tells the rich kid to sit down and be quiet, his automatic response to authority on the street—comply, sit down and be quiet—is the same as the adaptive response for this situation. If a teacher tells the poor kid to sit down and be quiet, his automatic response to authority on the street—refuse, retaliate—is maladapted to this situation. The poor kid knows the contexts are different, but still on a certain level feels like his reputation is at stake when he’s confronted at school, and acts-out, automatically.
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The researchers examined clinical studies of programs that keep this in mind and focus on teaching kids to regulate their automaticity. These interventions were designed to help young people, “recognize when they are in a high-stakes situation where their automatic responses might be maladaptive,” and slow down and consider them. One of the interventions studied was the Becoming a Man (BAM) program, conducted in public schools with disadvantaged young males, grades 6-12, on the south and west sides of Chicago.
“What makes the interventions we study particularly interesting is that they do not attempt to delineate specific behaviors as “good,” but rather focus on teaching youths when and how to be less automatic and more contingent in their behavior.”
Researchers randomly assigned students to have the opportunity to participate in BAM, as a course conducted once a week throughout the 2009-2010 school year.
The course is actually a program of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). CBT helps people identify harmful psychological and behavioral patterns, and then disrupt them and foster healthier ones. It’s used by a wide range of people for a wide range of issues, including to treat depression, anger management, and anxiety disorders. The particular style of CBT used in BAM focuses on three fundamental skills:
Recognize when their automatic responses might get them into trouble,
Slow down in those situations and behave less automatically,
Objectively assess situations and think about what response is called-for.
One thing participants are taught in BAM is that “a shift to an aversive emotion” is an important cue for when they are prone to act automatically. Anger, for example, was a common cue among participants in the study group. They were also taught tricks to help them slow down to consider their situation before acting: including deep breathing and other relaxation techniques. Lastly, they were guided through self-reflection and assessment of their own behavior: examining their “automatic” missteps, thinking about how they might have acted differently.
The researchers found that, during the program year, program participants had a 44% lower arrest rate for violent crimes than the control group. They repeated the intervention in 2013-2014 with a new group, and found that program participants had a 31% lower arrest rate for violent crimes than the control group.
if I could give them back just ten minutes of their lives, most of them wouldn’t be here.
He’s wrong about that. He would need to give them back 10 minutes of their lives, and then keep on giving them back different 10 minutes on a very regular basis.
The remainder of the post actually argues that persistent, stable “reflexes” are the cause of bad decisions and those certainly are not going to be fixed by a one-time gift of 10 minutes.
if I could give them back just ten minutes of their lives, most of them wouldn’t be here.
He’s wrong about that. He would need to give them back 10 minutes of their lives, and then keep on giving them back different 10 minutes on a very regular basis.
I disagree. Let’s take drivers who got into a serious accident : if you “gave them just back ten minutes” so that they avoided getting into that accident, most of them wouldn’t have had another accident later on. It’s not as if the world neatly divided into safe drivers, who never have accidents, and unsafe drivers, who have several.
Sure, those kids that got in trouble are more likely to have problematic personalities, habits, etc. which would make it more likely to get in trouble again—but that doesn’t mean more likely than not. Most drivers don’t get have (serious) accidents, most kids don’t get in (serious) trouble, and if you restrict yourself to the subset of those who already had it once, I agree a second problem is more likely, but not certain.
Yeah, but we are not talking about average kids. We’re talking about kids who found themselves in juvenile detention and that’s a huge selection bias right there. You can treat them as a sample (which got caught) from the larger underlying population which does the same things but didn’t get caught (yet). It’s not an entirely unbiased sample, but I think it’s good enough for our handwaving.
but not certain.
Well, of course. I don’t think anyone suggested any certainties here.
To use the paper’s results, it looks like they’re getting roughly 10 in 100 in the experiment condition and 18 in 100 for the control. Those kids were selected because they were considered high risk. If among the 82 of 100 kids who didn’t get arrested there are >18 who are just as likely to be arrested as the 18 who were, then emile’s conclusion is correct across the year. The majority won’t be arrested next year. Across an entire lifetime however.… They’d probably become more normal as time passed, but how quickly would this occur? I’d think Lumifer is right that they probably would end up back in jail. I wouldn’t describe this as a very regular problem though.
Would you think that in future, when such technologies will probably become widespread, driver training should include at least one grisly crash, simulated and showed in 3-D? Or at least a mild crash?
The model is that persistent reflexes interact with the environment to give black swans; singular events with extremely high legal consequence. To effectively avoid all of them preemptively requires training the stable reflexes, but it could be that “editing out” only a few 10 minute periods retroactively would still be enough (those few periods when reflexes and environment interact extremely negatively.) So I think the “very regular basis” claim isn’t substantiated.
That said, we cant actually retroactively edit anyways.
The model is that persistent reflexes interact with the environment to give black swans; singular events with extremely high legal consequence.
I don’t think that’s the model (or if it is, I think it’s wrong). I see the model as persistent reflexes interacting with the environment and giving rise to common, repeatable, predictable events with serious legal consequences.
Unrelated to the real content of the article, but my first reaction after reading the title was: “obviously, the impulsive Rich Kid can afford a better lawyer”.
Impulsive Rich Kid, Impulsive Poor Kid, an article about using CBT to fight impulsivity that leads to criminal behaviour, especially among young males from poor backgrounds.
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He’s wrong about that. He would need to give them back 10 minutes of their lives, and then keep on giving them back different 10 minutes on a very regular basis.
The remainder of the post actually argues that persistent, stable “reflexes” are the cause of bad decisions and those certainly are not going to be fixed by a one-time gift of 10 minutes.
I disagree. Let’s take drivers who got into a serious accident : if you “gave them just back ten minutes” so that they avoided getting into that accident, most of them wouldn’t have had another accident later on. It’s not as if the world neatly divided into safe drivers, who never have accidents, and unsafe drivers, who have several.
Sure, those kids that got in trouble are more likely to have problematic personalities, habits, etc. which would make it more likely to get in trouble again—but that doesn’t mean more likely than not. Most drivers don’t get have (serious) accidents, most kids don’t get in (serious) trouble, and if you restrict yourself to the subset of those who already had it once, I agree a second problem is more likely, but not certain.
How do you know?
Yeah, but we are not talking about average kids. We’re talking about kids who found themselves in juvenile detention and that’s a huge selection bias right there. You can treat them as a sample (which got caught) from the larger underlying population which does the same things but didn’t get caught (yet). It’s not an entirely unbiased sample, but I think it’s good enough for our handwaving.
Well, of course. I don’t think anyone suggested any certainties here.
To use the paper’s results, it looks like they’re getting roughly 10 in 100 in the experiment condition and 18 in 100 for the control. Those kids were selected because they were considered high risk. If among the 82 of 100 kids who didn’t get arrested there are >18 who are just as likely to be arrested as the 18 who were, then emile’s conclusion is correct across the year. The majority won’t be arrested next year. Across an entire lifetime however.… They’d probably become more normal as time passed, but how quickly would this occur? I’d think Lumifer is right that they probably would end up back in jail. I wouldn’t describe this as a very regular problem though.
Would you think that in future, when such technologies will probably become widespread, driver training should include at least one grisly crash, simulated and showed in 3-D? Or at least a mild crash?
The model is that persistent reflexes interact with the environment to give black swans; singular events with extremely high legal consequence. To effectively avoid all of them preemptively requires training the stable reflexes, but it could be that “editing out” only a few 10 minute periods retroactively would still be enough (those few periods when reflexes and environment interact extremely negatively.) So I think the “very regular basis” claim isn’t substantiated.
That said, we cant actually retroactively edit anyways.
I don’t think that’s the model (or if it is, I think it’s wrong). I see the model as persistent reflexes interacting with the environment and giving rise to common, repeatable, predictable events with serious legal consequences.
Unrelated to the real content of the article, but my first reaction after reading the title was: “obviously, the impulsive Rich Kid can afford a better lawyer”.