Superstitious Moral Claptrap

Nothing frustrates me more than to hear the words "they need to help themselves".  To the extent that this is a way of arguing that government interventions don't work, that needs to be said instead, and with specificity as to what programs don't work.  An ideological, categorical opposition to all government intervention is paranoid and delusional.

The fact is that people are doing the best they can, or know how to do.  And this includes the people engaging in behaviors that are causing problems: the crime, the neglectfulness, etc.  In my work with poor, undereducated parents, I see that they all love their kids, and want the best for them.  They just sometimes didn't know how.  They lack a certain skill-set to do things like providing a cognitively enriched environment, speaking with certain affect and tones that better reinforce familial bonds, or following through with structure and placing appropriate and consistent  demands.

But there are clear reasons for their skill deficits.  It isn't some immoral choice they are making.  Often it is because that was the way they were raised, or that certain traumas increase stress - anything from relationship issues to working demeaning low-wage jobs.  The causality is incredibly complex, and specific to every family.

There are a vast array of policy interventions - from micro-level options such as parent training, which to be effective would be intensive and costly, to macro-level decisions about neighborhood design, wage, tax, property policy.  In the middle might be specific community-level interventions such as recreation centers, transporations, parent and job training, etc.  Effective macro-interventions would have enormous long-term benefits, as things like functional families or safer streets make micro-interventions unnecessary.  However, in the present there are people in real need, and specific deficits are driving very real issues.

I imagine the answer then, is simply both, adjusted according to necessity.  What we don't need is claptrap about "personal responsibility", which is neither deterministic, parsimonious with fact, or causally coherent.  You might as well say that hurricanes need to be more responsible and stay offshore.

On Punishment

The Punishment of Loki, by Luis Huard, 1900

Mark Kleiman quotes his colleague Ed Witney:

“Voters should think twice before delivering great political power into the hands of men who show a strong urge to punish. Those who neglect this principle will not remain free or safe for long."

Punishment definitely affects behavior - technically, by scientific definition it means that the behavior has reduced or stopped. But what we're really talking about is the application of aversive consequences after a behavior, and this definitely works. 

That said, it's far more complex, obviously. I'm reminded of a classroom of teenagers I once worked with at a continuation (at-risk) school. I asked them to raise their hands if they had been spanked as children - almost every single hand went up. These kids were horrendously behaved, and yet came from homes in which corporeal punishment was the norm. There is also evidence that this type of punishment teaches physical aggression through modeling. Punishment tends to be more effective short term, as the individual learns avoidance strategies. It also requires consistency - if punishment is delivered inconsistently, it weakens dramatically. 

Far better, is positive reinforcement: applying enjoyable consequences immediately following appropriate behaviors. This not only strengthens the behavior you want, but allows for targeting and shaping new behaviors that are more functional and will bring the individual into contact with natural contingencies. For example, punishing a child for not doing his homework doesn't specify what skill you want to increase. Better to reward specific study skills such as organization, following a schedule, attentiveness, self-regulation, etc. 

All of this gets quite complex, as there are specific factors unique to every context. But as a rule, positive reinforcement is far more productive. You can do both however: inappropriate behaviors can be punished while appropriate behaviors are rewarded. But too often the latter are forgotten (it's natural to notice poor behavior more than good). 

In my work with families the most difficult barrier to behavior change in children is often a culture of punitive discipline. There is a dynamic of anger, resentment and hostility. When delivered consistently and with love, this isn't too much of a problem. But more often than not the loving, compassionate side loses out to a constant refrain of disappointed criticism. My work is to support the parents in learning to deliver more positive reinforcement by focusing on the behaviors they want from their children. 

This of course applies not only to children but to everyone: spouses, friends, co-workers. Focus on the positive and reward want you want with smiles, compliments, etc. For the behaviors you don't want, give clear, immediate and strong feedback, but don't dwell on it. How we all respond to others has a huge impact on their behavior. 

I'm less comfortable extrapolating this to national politics and policy. But with specific context taken into account, the same principles will apply. Speeches I doubt have much behavioral impact. But policies and programs certainly do. Organizational behavioral management is a field in which policy-oriented topics are studied. 

To note: everything I have said is based in behavioral science, and as such assumes a deterministic view of human behavior, in which our behavior is learned based on our genetic predispositions interacting with the environment. Free will is irrelevant, and as such so is blame. What matters is the system over time.

On Being Better

Life is hard, especially when dealing with people who drive us crazy.  But I think when properly applied, a bit of methodology can go a long ways towards being more compassionate, confident, and effective in our daily interactions.

We tend to be a bit sloppy when faced with dysfunctional behavior, in terms of how we view the cognition behind it. Where I teach, 16 and 17 year old kids routinely act like 3 or 4 year-olds (no – I’m not exaggerating). A common – completely understandable – response from staff is disbelief, shock and offense at such immaturity. “What are you, some kind of dummy?!!”. (Not usually in such disrespectful language, but we have our moments).

Because when we have a chance to take a step back, there is no real reason for shock or disbelief. The explanation is perfectly clear, when taking into account the particular student’s life experiences, and ultimately their failure to have properly learned appropriate self-control, self-discipline, emotional management, etc. Whatever their story is, the fact of the matter is that they have not been able to develop adequately.
Something I have found fascinating in working with such teens is that, once a degree of rapport has been established, how often it is that they are able to express their own insight into their behavior. Unformed, lacking in narrative, etc., sure, but they know at some level their inadequacies. Some of the best work I feel I have done, the most progress I have made with students, has been achieved through helping them to better understand themselves by trying to create an environment in which they feel safe enough to be vulnerable. This is not done by diminishing them and provoking their superficial pride and ego through humiliation (flying off the handle is actually embarrassing, in that you are not in control of yourself, and end up with regrets).

One student of mine, who I, for pedagogically tactical reasons, chose to essentially counsel all period instead of doing my normal rounds, wanted so adamantly for other people not to treat her like she was “crazy”. This, she asked for, while recounting the time she got in trouble for yelling at the cops to leave her the “f#ck alone”. “But *****”, I told her, “you ARE crazy. You have serious anger problems. But you know what, that’s OK. We’re all a bit crazy at times. And most of us haven’t been through half of what you have. “More than anything, she wanted validation. She knew she was a mess, but she didn’t want to be only a mess. Ever since that day, she still barely does her work. But some kind of calm seems to have come over her, and she no longer seems like the quietly brewing tempest she once was. If only she can continue to find others in her life who validate her, she’ll have a chance of making it.

There’s a deep logic to human behavior. So many of us take our developmental maturity for granted, and subsequently find it difficult to understand the behavior of those who fail to behave appropriately. In what might be described as egotistic arrogance, we imagine their level of cognitive awareness to be equal to ours, and thus the behavior to be not an outgrowth of natural development, but of conscious disregard. And when we treat them thusly, I think it entirely logical for them to take extreme offense. Because yes, if they knew better, they would be “dummies”. But they obviously didn’t really know better (in a sort of universal, developmental sense). We can see this illustrated quite clearly in the classic case of the cold, unloving parent or guardian: a child makes an honest mistake, and the caregiver over-reacts, i.e. assumes more developmental capacity than is appropriate. We naturally understand this to be a miscarriage of justice.

While adults are not children, and the infractions maybe more severe, the same dynamic is at work. We ought to recognize our intuition about the child’s treatment and imagine it in the emotional composition of the perpetrator. If he is not treated with dignity, there will be no object to which he will be able to appeal for justice, other than that which resides within his own, internal understanding of fairness. A subjectivity which of course, considering transpiring events, and certainly in the “heat” of the moment, as higher brain functions are limited, ought not be something in which to place our faith. So as we still have a leveraging role to play in our relationship, mutual respect is an invaluable commodity.

Behavioral Politics

A family is struggling to pay rent.  The father has a drinking problem and is abusive to his wife.  His hours have been cut back at work, and she makes minimum wage working as a cashier at a convenience store.The two teenage children are having difficulties in school, and acting out.  The son has been hanging around with a crowd of thugs, and has been arrested for vandalism.  The daughter is pregnant and planning to drop out of school to care for her baby, whose father denies responsibility.  The family lacks health insurance, and relies on food stamps to afford groceries.

Unfortunately, stories like this are not uncommon in America.  There are however, two very different responses from liberalism and conservatism, our prevailing political party ideologies.  These responses can be broken into two elements: the behavioral narrative, and social action. 

In the liberal response, the behavioral narrative is that the family is victim of social dysfunction that has limited their capacity to turn their lives around.  Without outside help, their dysfunction will only be compounded, their problems leading to even greater net harm to themselves and society.  Though opportunity may exist, the family is so behaviorally challenged that it is almost impossible for them to avail themselves of it.  They literally cannot see the correct normative path that would lead to success, mired as they are in a variety of cognitive challenges.

In the conservative behavioral narrative, the family has indeed lost its way, but is responsible for its own recovery.  It assumes that it is within the family's power to reverse its course without outside help, and that any ongoing failure to do so is a choice that the family has consciously made.  Many opportunities that exist in society and culture, and all that is necessary is for the family to embrace that opportunity and follow existing social norms that lead to success.  They do in fact possess the adequate cognition to make the correct choices, and thus their failure to do so represents a lack of personal responsibility.

Both liberals and conservatives take a position on social action that follows directly from their behavioral narrative.

The liberal social action response is predicated on a sense of inclusive social culpability for the plight of the family: by its structure, society has participated in the systematic creation of the family's  problems.  Implicit is a larger assumption that current social and economic norms are unjust, and inevitably lead to such "underclass" families.  Because of the behavioral narrative of limited cognition, liberals see government intervention as
the only way to guarantee equal opportunity.

The conservative social action response is predicated on an exclusive culpability for the plight of the family: the family is solely responsible for their own plight, except for the extent to which it has been lead astray from a particular set of right-minded norms and values exclusively by a liberal culture which promotes values counter to traditions such as church, patriarchy, and obedience to time-honored norms.  Conservatives tend to be quite charitable towards the down-trodden, but only if they can be sure that certain cultural and religious tests have been met by the recipients of their largess.  They are highly skeptical  and resentful of broad governmental programs which they cannot be confident are not administering aid to those not worthy of it, or in other words have not made the requisite religious transformation.  By approving only of private (religious) charity, they can be sure their donations are spent with exclusivity. Furthermore, the claim is often made that government aid is not only wasted on the unworthy, but actively promotes a culture of dependency and irresponsibility.

If you'll notice, there seems to be some odd incoherence between the conservative behavioral narrative, which eschews gracious social determinism in favor of get-tough contra-causal free will, and their social action response, which mixes tough-love with protestations against just the sort of social determinism it denies exists.   My guess is that this paradox is rooted in a deep schism between the biblical commandment to be humble, charitable, compassionate and giving, and the desire to see behavior as black and white, where cognition is freely available to all, especially in the sort of free-market utopia they like to envision America as, where meritocracy really does reign, and people's value is truly self-determined.  How can it be, one might ask, that this struggling family can be both personally responsible - personally accountable - for their own situation, yet be simultaneously at the mercy of an unrighteous path, their existence bent not only by the evils of secular liberalism, but then caught in a web of nanny-state learned dependency.

The science of behavior has existed for well over a century now, and social learning theory is a simple fact.  While the debate over free will still burns, with most scientists and philosophers who study it finding it ultimately rather nonsensical, the idea that a poor, dysfunctional family can be examined outside the context of social learning, with a cognition capable of understanding and dealing objectively with its circumstance, is nothing if not preposterous.  Yet such is the state of discourse and political ideology in contemporary America. 

In many ways, with respect to human development and behavior, certainly with respect to our scientific understanding of why people do the things they do, and why society continues to struggle with problems such as poverty and dysfunction, conservatism is in a state of deep denial.  As with most forms of denial, taking it head on is often not the most effective tactic.  More knowledge can actually often only entrench it further.  Yet it is my belief that denial of behavioral and social determinism is at the root of our contemporary political drama.

Winning

In a recent discussion with a conservative, the following statement was made:

"The most important decisions in life don't require a high iq to make. Go to school. Don't do drugs. Show up for work on time every day. Don't reproduce before you're able to care for a child, Etc. Not following these simple rules turn people into losers."

This really seems to cut to the core of disagreement between liberal and conservative attitudes towards social inequality. Putting aside general circumstantial situations, why do some people seem to make such poor choices, and others make such better choices?

You've probably noticed that I have a running suspicion that conservatives are more inclined to believe that people have more free will than liberals. However, this is disputed. Yet I think this statement fits my claim.

So, the basic concept is that these important decisions are not difficult, don't require a high IQ, and thus the right course should be chosen more than it is. In other words, people who make the wrong choices are "losers", doing so by choice.

My critique of this is as a determinist. I believe that while people make choices, their ability to choose is enforced by prior learning and development. Basically, people are going to make the choice that they feel most compelled to make. Because this compulsion is real, no matter what options are in theory available to them, in reality there is only one option - the one they are most compelled to take.

For instance, two dieters are faced with the choice of eating a piece of chocolate cake, and only one is able to resist it. They both have the same number of choices, yet depending on their internal make-up - prior learning and development (and the interplay between these and genetics) - they will experience different levels of compulsion. While the right decision makes rational sense - if you are on a diet, you shouldn't have the cake! - humans are much more complex. And again, this complexity is rooted in our development. Chances are if you ask the successful dieter to tell you how he did it, he won't be able to explain it - he just did it. Likewise, the dieter who failed likely wouldn't be able to tell you why she failed - she just couldn't do it. Both wanted to resist.

There are definitely "losers" and "winners". There are people who work really hard and do everything they can to get ahead, while others take easier routes. And just like the dieters, how do we know how some people manage to succeed, while others don't?

There's actually a considerable degree of research on this! It is impossible to draw a 1:1 line of causality between any one factor, as humans are infinitely complex. But there are general factors that can be isolated to provide pretty good predictors of successful behavior. For instance, you take two groups of 100 people, and you can find behavioral correlations that will show clear patterns. Social researchers, psychologists and economists have found numerous connections between life circumstances, personality traits and behavioral characteristics that predict one's chances of being successful in life.

I don't think that conservatism seems to embrace much, if any of this research. There seems to be an odd cognitive dissonance, where even if the research or evidence shows predictive relationships between development and behavior, it is somehow waved away with the idea that people can always choose to "follow the rules".

Some conservatives who embrace the research, who might simply object to the idea of government programs intervening to help people, on the grounds that it doesn't work, or contributes to unsuccessful behavior, don't seem to have any thoughts on how we might help people who lack proper development. Problems exist that have existed, that exist now, and will likely continue to exist should we do nothing. Is there not a moral requirement that we, those of us who understand the problem, no doubt having had the gift of being taught how to be successful, act to help them, out of a sense of fairness? What would this plan look like, from a conservative standpoint? For every kid out there growing up with terrible disadvantages, what plan do conservatives have for him, who will be more likely to grow up to fail, and likely sire more failure-prone children?

Is the assumption that there is nothing that we can do? Because I can actually make a pretty good case that the availability of social programs does at least some good, in that it can provide just the sort of relief that many people need. I've witnessed it first-hand over and over, and there are statistics to back me up. It of course is not perfect. Many people are beyond help, and I'll admit that some may even be given improper incentives - although I think that case has yet to even have begun to be constructed.

So to the extent that this is an evidenced-based debate, and we are accepting the large amount of data and research out there on the subject of individual success, it seems we are left with questions of behavioral analysis and public policy. I'm open to new types of programs and approaches, but conservatives don't seem to have anything to offer, other than old arguments attempting to defend their right to basically do nothing and leave things at that.

Taming Tigers

Mathew Kahn wonders whether Tiger Mom Amy Chua might have indeed made some parents less strict:

"Will any parents who were revolted by Professor Chua’s story respond by engaging in less “tough love”?  Such defiance is always interesting."

I’ve been thinking about defiance a bit lately. As a teacher of generally defiant students, I essentially go with the “catch more flies with honey” doctrine. It seems to work pretty well for me. However I probably put up with things from my students that would make many blush. Yet I recently had an interesting discussion with a colleague who takes the opposite approach – they get few chances and then “they’re outta there”. We discussed who in the end may be getting more out of their students.

Of course, what complicates the process of teaching – or parenting, for that matter, is personality and temperament. I think my colleague and myself are basically doing what comes naturally to us, and were either of us to try and behave as the other, we would probably fail. Or, it would at least feel very unnatural. On the other end of things, our particular “styles” likely produce different results with different children. I know for a fact that many of her former students behave quite well for me. And likely many of my students could use her more dictatorial approach.


I’ve thought about trying to find a way to quantify and assess the efficacy of our distinct approaches, but there are numerous difficulties. I might at some future data find a way to design an effective model, one that captures what is going on.

Reform through Dignity

Law and Grace, Franz Timmermann

Well God damn it, Keith Humphreys just made up for a terrible post with an excellent one.  He describes a piece for Newsweek he co-authored with Mark Kleiman, about a promising new sobriety program in South Dakota.  My favorite part of the piece:

For a criminal justice program, 24/7 Sobriety is remarkably respectful of offenders. I sat in one morning at a breath test station and watched dozens of people convicted of DUI come in, blow their breath test and then move along, each taking no more than a minute or two. The staff members were friendly, greeting each person by name and wishing each a good day. The building looked like a credit union. Because there were no uniformed officers, cell bars or guns visible, offenders with aversion to law enforcement would not have any instinctive ambivalence about coming in. The offenders also had some camaraderie among themselves, expressing pleasantries as they saw other offenders they knew in the testing station.

This is an excellent point. Society has to get over the notion that there are “bad people”. There are bad behaviors, and there are people who have a really hard time not doing them. But it is a moral imperative that we honor the dignity of every man, woman and child. Not only is this a moral issue, but as you point out, a utilitarian one as well. People do not respond well to humiliation. Most negative behaviors arise from dysfunctional feelings of low self-worth. They know right from wrong, but they choose the negative behavior because they lack the inner strength to choose otherwise. Doing the “right” thing seems unimportant because they don’t feel valued enough to show they have integrity – why bother?.

So what every “deviant” needs desperately is a sense that they are valued and that their behavior matters. In my classroom, my philosophy is that every kid is a “good” kid. There is nothing they can do to show me otherwise. There are rules, and consequences. But this is made clear, and then – most importantly – they are shown that they will be loved no matter what. As soon as a kid is on my side, the defiant behavior stops. They want to please me. They want to show me that they can do the right thing. I'm no miracle worker, and there are plenty of students who are just dealing with too many issues.  But regardless, this becomes one of the few places in their lives where they feel like they actually matter.  And that is a start.