The science of fighting crime with Nick Cowen
32:57 Share

Ted .

audio collective.

This episode is brought to you by progressive insurance, fiscally responsible, financial genius, monetary musicians. These are the things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance too progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive dot, come to see if you can save progressive casualty insurance company and affiliate position.

Tier savings will very not available in all states or situation. Proving trust is more important than ever, especially when IT comes to your security program. Fanta help centralized program requirements and automate evidence collection for frameworks like soc to I saw twenty seven O O one, hipper and more.

So you save time and money and build customer trust. And with fanta, you get continuous visibility into the state of your controls, join more than eight thousand global companies like at last, hen flow health and cora, who trust venta to manage risk, improve security in real time. Now that's a new way to G R C.

Learn more advantage dot com flash ted audio. That's vantage t. Com flash ted audio. Support for the show comes from linked in where my B2Be mar keters out the re.

If you are A B to be marketer, you know how noisy the ads base can be. Which means if your message isn't targeted to a specific audience and the right audience you're looking for, IT can just easily disappear into the noise. But with linked in ads, you can precisely reach the prows who are more likely to find your ad relevant.

Lindon has targeting capabilities so that you can reach the forest looking for by job title, industry company and more filters so you can send out with linked in ads and start converting your B2B aud ience int o hig h qua lity lea ds. Today, linked in ads will let you build the right relationships, drivers and reach your customers in an environment where a lot of your customers are hanging out. Because you will have direct access to a network with decision makers, a billion members, a hundred and thirty million decision makers, intended million sea level executives, you can start converting your B2B aud ience int o hig h qua lity lea ds.

Today, we will even give you a one hundred dollar credit on your next campaign. Go to linton dcom slash ted audio to claim your credit. That's linton docs slash ted audio. Terms and conditions apply linked in the place to be, to be.

Have you ever wondered why we call french fries french fries, or why something is the greatest thing, sce sliced bread? There are answers to those questions. Everything everywhere, daily is a podcast for curious people who want to learn more about the world around them.

Every day you'll learn something, do about things you never knew, you didn't know. Subjects include history, science, geography, mathematics and culture. If you're a curious person and want to learn more about the world you live in, just subscribe to everything everywhere, daily, wherever you cast your pod.

In the U. K, we reduced drink driving fatalities from nineteen nineteen eighty to twenty twenty by around eighty five percent.

Hey, everyone is adam grant. Welcome back to rethinking like podcast on the science of what makes us tick with the ted audio collective. I'm an organization of psychologist, and i'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

I guess today is nick Colin. He's a criminologist at the university of lincoln in the U. K. And I recently read a riveting article that he wrote about putting an end to drunk try. Nick made me rethink some of my core assumptions about how to fight crime.

They're saying that fewer people are drinking and driving. They then feel, oh, that's actually kind of devient. It's kind of abNormal in this community. And that's when you see the cultural change. So my kind of taken this article is that culture, at least for some things, can be surprisingly manual.

Let me start by just asking you, how did you become a criminologist?

I, I did my P. H. D. In politics, or what you guys in the us.

Would call political science IT. Turns out that in the U. K. Especially, we produce too many political scientists. But lucky for me IT turns out we don't produce quite enough academic chrome logy IT turns out that they were recruiting in criminology.

And i'd published a little bit on in in criminal gy already from my perspective VS as a political scientist, basically on what kinds of criminal justice policies work to reduce crime. And then in the interview, the panel were you, they liked me, but they're a little bit skeptical. And they said, like, so you know, you've been studying politics up until now.

What makes you qualified to talk about the crime? And I said, well, you know, i've been studying political behavior. And political behavior often involves a lot of fairly sharp ages, ambition, motivation, disagree ability, willingness to burn people, if necessary.

These are all characteristics that one finds in criminal behavior as well. And so they they agreed, and they they thought they could not give me a trial on probation. And i've been in in this role as a criminologist for five years now.

I thought there might be a little bit more of a personal origin story like you were a batman fan as a kid.

I suppose everyone's always interested in kind of crime fiction. I grew up in oxford and we have a great long running series as this this check inspector morse. Basically there's there's a murder every week in oxford, which is not very accurate because aren't that many murders in in oxford year typically? But you know they kind like show the lovely architecture the real ox for cheer.

And there are some darkness always hidden in that landscape. News about crime is the thing that tends to dominate any media almost as soon as IT becomes popular. So I understand that when the printing press was invented, the first thing that was used that was useful was obviously to translate the bible into the vacuum that kind of what families sly happened.

The very next thing that happens is a bunch of newsletters about horrific crimes taking place, especially kind of intra familiar violence happening throughout germany. That becomes the next thing that the the new medium is useful. And of course, the medium that we're on right now, podcasting that's kind of elevated and kept a float by enormous range of very popular true crime podcasts. So yeah.

well, this this is gonna be even Better. This is gonna be a true crime data podcast. I remember I love detective novels as a kid. I read a tone of Hardy boys and Nancy drew, and then sort of graduated to adult mysteries.

And IT always bothered me that he's detectives like the sherly homes, is spend other time trying to sell crimes and none of IT trying to prevent. And that's what I love most about your work, is I think IT actually tells us how we can stop IT as opposed to solve IT. That's what I want to talk about today. Let's begin with your grandfather, because I think the paradox of your grandfather, to me, he was pointing. So tell me, tell me a little bit about how he spent his days versus his nights.

My grandfather was someone I, I, I looked up to a great deal and still still look up to. He kind of transitioned, like my family, from a working class family into a class family by kind of studying hard and becoming A A doctor. He worked in an army medicine.

He was deployed to africa. And then later on, he treats people who would force in the korean war. And he became a general practice, what I think in the U.

S. You'd call a primary care physician. And he was, for many decades, a kind of dedicated member of his community.

And he would often take time, you out of, out of schedule doors to make sure that people in his local community who had an illness, we're doing okay, that I hadn't got worse. He was anxious and conscious ous. Basically that's of my kind of character trait as well.

At the same time, my grandfather would drink and drive on on occasion um and he would do this typically when engaged in other kind of these elevated social activities that he was always interested in. So things like the theater, the Opera, he was also a keen golfer and these events in his day would would always involve drinking. And yet the main mode of transport form most of his life was driving.

And so he would frequently end on these kind of evenings and nights. Is home drinking a bit too much and making his way home, uh, a driving? I know a few times he told me about this story when no driving home h after one of these events, he knew he was over the limit, was driving slowly, but perhaps not quite so steadily as as as Normal, and a police officer noticed, pulled him over and breath ized him.

And this is probably of his most frightening events of his life, because he told me about at several times, macular sly, according to him, he came up negative, thinking back. I sometimes imagine if the police officer was looking at this guy who looked very anxious and afraid, seeing this police, and clearly, perhaps not a danger or beauty shouldn't really be on the road. Maybe the police officer decided to his own court that IT was going to be negative and thought that the warning that he had been pulled over would be enough.

So we don't know for sure. I suspect subsequently, my grandfather probably drank somewhat less after having that experience. Notably, he did not eliminate his drink driving. So I would have been A A marginal reduction rather than a total reduction. But he was aware that he was being watched.

There's a lot of research in psychology on the illusion of invulnerability and how IT tends to be more pronounced in professions like medicine. I've read some studies of of doctors where they say things like, well, i'm a doctor, so i'm protected. I'm sorry.

What exactly does that mean in a couple of of studies? The dave often, and I did, we found that physicians were less likely to wash their hands before and after patient contact. That nurses were IT was because they kind of walked around thinking, well, either I had a superior immune system to begin with, or i've developed one over the course of my time working in a hospital. And IT just is mind boggling to me that people so smart can be so dumb.

I think my my grandfather is true that as a doctor, you know, someone who gone through medical school and has excelled in his own area, yes, he probably did have some confidence that he dealt with life and death. And perhaps his experience in the military as well may have given that sense of confidence to have a little bit too much to drink and think he could still be in full control on the road.

So let's let's talk about how to then change the behavior of people like your grandfather. The first thing that I was really struck by when I learned about your work, I didn't realize how much progress we've made in the west on preventing drunk driving deaths. How to me a little bit about the this statistics there?

In the U. K, we reduced drink driving fatalities from nineteen nineteen eighty to twenty twenty by around eighty five percent. So in one thousand thousand and eighty, there were one thousand four hundred and fifty fatalities attributed to drunk driving.

In twenty twenty, there were only two hundred and twenty. The impact in the U. S.

Is a little bit less so. We went from in one thousand and eight, twenty eight thousand drunk driving deaths. And in twenty twenty there were eleven thousand, six hundred and fifty four. So that somewhere between a half A N A two third reduction so still impressive but perhaps not in the order of magical ude, which is like closer .

to what we're talking about in the U K. Why have john driving deaths gone down in second? Um why are you having so much more success in the U. K. Than we've had in the us.

When we're thinking about the reduction in death? There's obviously a lot of other stuff that's going on besides behavioral change. So we've changed the way that cars work. H these days, uh, even a minor collision usually causes a lot of camping.

And the reason for that is we'd rather the total a car and save the passengers and the and the drivers than to have a car that can survive minor collisions. At the same time, things like trauma surgery and emergency medicine in general has improved a great deal. That means that we can convert more injuries, do you to drink, driving into things where people recover and they therefore they don't appear in the file statistics.

On the other hand, when we look at those statistics, we find that total incidents, certainly the U. K. Have dropped a great deal as well. So all kind of collisions, dents that are associated with drink driving, they've all gone down as as as well. So although i'm sure they're some shift in the categories, IT still appears to be behavioral change that, that is happening.

That's encouraging. Yes.

it's encouraging. It's encouraging. I think this enormous amount variation, how much drink driving is happening in a given region in the united states, the united states is a lot more spread out.

Probably the distance between a bar and a home is gonna a lot larger, is a much more of a driving culture in the U. S. Compared to the U.

K. I think that in cities, the situations improved a great deal with the kind of emergence of ride sharing apps and other alternatives. But there are still probably enormous number of rural areas that are probably very sporadic ally policed. I I thought .

you were going to blame american culture more, that we've just done a poor job stigmatizing drunk driving here then you have in the U. K.

One of the the key ideas in this article that I wrote is that culture is, in some ways, downstream of policy. There's this idea is like, okay, so culture is this kind of really difficult thing to shift has been around for thousands of years or hundreds of years or a century. But IT turns out that for certain norms, a bit of deterrence and just actually having police say, oh, that thing you're doing don't want you doing that anymore.

We don't want you drink driving and we don't want you drink driving this level. And if you're prepared to go out and force IT, then that firstly, people will be less likely to drink and drive in this in in this case and then subsequently, because they're seeing that fewer people are drinking and driving, they'll then feel, oh, that's actually kind of devient. It's kind of abNormal in this community and that's when you see the cultural change. So my kind of taken this article is that culture, at least for some things, can be surprisingly, malia and policing can play a role in changing culture.

So of things that really fascinated me about your perspective, nick, is that IT dumb tails with. With betsy levy palos research, which we talked about on the show a few months ago, she's found that when IT comes to promoting reconciliation in post genocide rWanda and also stopping bullying in schools, that if you want to prevent bad behavior, changing people's perceptions of social norms is a driver. IT hadn't occurred to me, though, this would apply to serious criminal activity like drunk driving. So tell me what, what's the best evidence that that convinced you that changing perceived norms and creating a sense of sigma is an active .

ingredient here? Yeah so I think my my evidence comes from A A fantastic economist called the Patricia funk, who is written a number of papers on the role of social norms and crime. We know the criminal justice system, especially policing, can play a role in reducing crime.

We know that a poverty can play a role, especially for some types of acquistions tive crime and are other forms of kind of stress and deprivation in in areas where people like that live, they're going to be more likely to be to be victimized. And yet, when you put all those factors together, you can only explain a small amount of the variance that one see. So variations between countries, within countries and even from neigh's hood neighbor od enormous differences that are kind of going on there that are hard to explain.

One has some models suggests that what's what's going on is that there's a difference between criminal justice costs of committing a crime and the moral and the moral costs are the kind of internal feelings of kind of shame and deviance and a general bad feeling that are associated with committing crime. And basically, if you're already in a high crime area, perhaps you might be a victim yourself on occasion, then you're more likely to think that committing a crime is appropriate. If I kind of achieves your your ends or IT may be a way of of expressing yourself for a perhaps demonstrating that you're someone who who shouldn't be trifled with you might be an element of self defense and pride is kind of going on there.

One interesting thing is that IT implies that IT might be quite hard to maintain what you might think of as A A medium crime. Ecl barium in a particular neighborhood, basically either you've got low crime and it's like a self enforcing kind of virtually cycle all you've got fairly high crime. And the presence of a high amount of crime in turn induces subsequent higher crime as as well.

So I kind of like settles that are relatively high crime equilibrium. Another piece of evidence that the phone offers is sanctions without penalties. SHE uses the example of sanctions for fAiling to vote in countries where is is illegal not to vote. And he finds that levying like the sanction, which might be nothing or IT might be a small fine, radically changes people's attitudes to towards voting so people think, okay a bit of vote and even if the cost of voting like the actual practical ties of getting IT together and going out and voting is actually more than say um the cost of the fine, people will still think, oh, well, that was a fine so I was wrong. Therefore.

i'm going to go out and vote how do you square that with the ezy work on a fine as a Price where if you find parents for picking up their kids late from from school, they basically start to think, oh, this is cheep daycare and now I have, after school baby city that i've paid for .

yeah I I think heard that via Michael sandel. He made that an important part of his argument about not putting a Price on everything. I think quite a large number of people don't view a fine as a fee, like the labelling is important for a lot of people.

So the other kind of evidence that you highlight, which I I think is compelling, is the evidence that we need to be really careful about the anti drunk driving messages that we send out. Because sometimes by saying, like drunk driving is bad and you shouldn't do IT, you inadvertently signal that that behavior is widespread. And so we we need a highlight that is not I really liked the the quasi experiment that that you mentioned in montana.

We're just sharing that like four out of five Young adults in montana don't drink and drive. Just disseminating that statistic was enough to change people's perceptions. Hey, this behavior is is not as common as I thought I was. Maybe I should do IT.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I was. I was impressed by the theater. Al basis a for that study. IT seemed very subtle and very much in line with what we know about.

So social norms, there's a kind of thin line between having a message that drink driving is bad, and alternatively, accidentally signaling that drink driving is bad ass. That's the kind of thing you want. Well, yeah.

that's very well point.

So I think I think this is of the weirdness of thinking about, uh, crime as being, uh, criminal justice as as making people think that something is inappropriate, rather than making them think that it's wrong explicit. What you kind of want people to feel is that IT would be wrong in their little media, that people are gonna think that you are kind of you I don't like in order to influence behavior. It's like you kind of want to make people think the behavior is equi, not wrong or harmful.

But one of the things I found intriguing about this perspective is IT captured something that's always bothered me about the way that people talk about culture and in organizations. There's a famous line miss attributed to Peter druck er he never actually said IT um which is culture eat strategy for breakfast.

And it's supposed to remind leaders and managers and policymakers that you shouldn't just pay attention to the way that you're solving problems and setting goals and to sort of trying to execute your vision. You should also have pay attention to the values and the orm you create. And i've always been bothered by that because what your strategy influences is your culture.

If your strategy is corner cutting, you're gona build an unethical culture. If your strategy is long term prioritization of solving people's problems, then you're going to build a more caring culture and a culture that IT is less likely to be sort of narrowly focused on immediate self interest. And so I really like the way that you have.

You've highlighted how actually policy formulation in the context of crime can influence people's perceptions of culture. It's surprising to me that drunk driving would not have been stigmatized a couple decades ago. IT seems to me yourself, after him, I would have assumed that both people know how much drinking alcohol in paris judgment, and also the consequences are so severe.

You could kill someone, you, you could lose your own life. Why take the risk? I guess the question is then what happens to stigmatize strong driving? And then how does that interfere with somebody y's likelihood of of sort of changing their choice in the moment?

Uh, I kind of have this idea um that i've been working on called the occasional suspect as an alternative to the usual suspect. And police authorities typically deal with usual suspects frequently, daily basis, sometimes if they are kind of like community police officers. And the thing about usual suspects is they are not very tempted by a pull of social norms, so they're not too worried if something is stigmatize.

The vast majority of people actually, probably, if anything, are kind of particularly congressman of social Normal, but is more so than the legal norms around them. And so I I think kind of what what happens is people realize that drinking and driving is risky, but if they see other people taking that risk, then they're going to think like, well, IT appears to be considered an acceptable risk and and people aren't necessarily running the calculations about how how risky is. So if other people are doing IT, then they thinking, well, other people seem to think is a risk worth taking.

I think the prospects of sanctions and the prospects of people looking down on you if you decide to drink and drive probably happens, you know, the week before or the in the hours before you arranged to go out for a drink. And basic, it's probably when people how they're going to get home afterwards. I I think if if people are not think you can not planning ahead, then there's a very good chance that someone is even this current environment still going to get behind the wheel.

I think where the the incentives in the deterrence happens is in the decisions that lead up to that moment where people find themselves in a position of like, okay, am I going to get a cap home and then in the morning get a cap out and then drive the car home at some expense, loss of money, lots of resources or am I just gonna risk IT? And that's a situation where ideally you don't want people putting themselves into, you want them thinking ahead like hours before. So that doesn't even become a question. They're already decided that .

they leave in the car home for this night. So your thesis is that through advertising campaigns and through also just observing the behavior of their peers, that people came to see a drunk driving is more shameful. And then as a result of that, they're more likely to take a cab or an uber left or public transportation than they are to take their car.

They're more likely to assign a designated driver if they go with a group. And so that planning up front because they they don't want to violate a social norm of doing something that's both dangerous and sort of unacceptable, is enough to to lead to Better planning. Is that right?

exactly. I think that's the main mechanism for the way most people are making those decisions. But my argument is that to kind of jump start that kind of social norm change, you need to actually have police activity. So the mere fact that you've got communications telling people that is wrong and is a crime and you you could get in trouble without actually having people get into trouble doesn't have quite the the same impact.

My intuitive understanding of deterrents, you create frequent or severe punishment and that leads people to say, well, I don't want to get caught and I don't want to go to jail, so i'm not going to do this crime. And what you're saying is actually not quite that what happens is the average person isn't that worry necessarily about getting caught and punished, but rather, they see the punishment as evidence that this behavior is no longer acceptable and therefore, they don't want to do IT. And so it's not that that laws lead people to sort of make these utility maxi zing decisions of, I got to, to avoid the negative outcome, but rather that they they lead people to change their sense of what social norms they want to follow.

The other thing about this is if we understand that most people would be absolutely shocked to actually be confronted by a police officer and be in trouble. Or even worse to come before a judge. So they're not used to that kind of thing.

That means that a merely getting sanction just a little bit. So you know potentially just A A talking to by the judge in the UK, we have some disposals that are called a conditional discharges or absolute discharges where they say we're not doing anything, but you've admitted the offence and it's on your record. So no actual penalty. For a lot of people, that can be extremely strong evidence that the community does not like their behavior, and that will be deterrent enough. And so that means that is generally a good idea to focus on certainty of detection rather than the severity y of the sanction.

IT reminds me of a distinction, the gym march made between what he called the logic of consequence and the logic appropriators, logic of consequences, how do I get the outcome I want? And logic of appropriate.

This is, what should a person like me do in a situation like this? I hear your take on preventing drunk driving as suggesting that people make their drunk driving decisions, or at least most people make them according to the logic of appropriators, not a logic of consequence. And if we change our laws and we change our post, then we change people's views of property ness. In in turn, we shift their choices. They're absolutely .

that people are based thinking about what's appropriate. They might be saying it's about moral sy, but really the moral framework is going to be highly influenced by what they deem to be appropriate in their social context.

I based my views of right and wrong primarily on harm. And so if a choice is obviously harmful, then I think IT was pretty clear that, that's going to be a moral issue. Now is there a trade off, nick, between prevention of crime and injustice of punishment? Because IT IT seems to me that one of the things you're suggesting is that if if we were to take that kind of of harsh punishment into the U K.

Or into the us, there's a very good chance that a racing minority is are going to be disproportionate punished, uh, in the context of traffic stops, for example. And then do we just exacerbate our mass incarceration problem in the us? If you're suggesting we need harsher punishments to stigmatize behaviors, we want to stop, and we need increased police presence for some of these, doesn't that increase the risk also then that some people will be this proportionately and unfairly punished?

Comparing the united kingdom, the united states can be quite, quite useful here because, of course, no police force is perfect. But as IT happens, things can be a lot cooler when doing a traffic stop in the united kingdom, because police officers aren't armed by default in the U. K.

And that's because the civilian population is almost totally disarmed and reduce the nature of of the political situation. That kind of polarization in the united states is hard to see how reduction in kind of gun violence or kind of gun ownership is going to going to come soon. My results that have proven useful for the united kingdom ought to be addressed with care in the united states.

On the other hand, thinking from the racial justice dimension, my argument is not that we need kind of draconian, proportionate punishment, quite the opposite. Rather, what we want instead is punishments to be little and often you can probably cub a great deal of the worst punishment by kind of corrupting people is an earlier stage. So the great thing about a brazilian ing people is that it's before they've actually done in any harm.

They've merely politically risk harm. And that means you don't under a situation where you have to punish someone that much. Literally a short driving ban is a very strong punishment for someone who hasn't actually seriously harmed anyone yet. And if IT stops them from actually killing someone by accident later down the line, then you've corrected someone's behavior and you've actually saved on the possibility of having to send someone to prison for commission a much more serious offence.

Does your AI model really know code? It's specific in tax, its structure, its logic IBM granted code models do. There are purpose built for code and trained on one hundred and sixteen different programing languages to help you generate, translate and explain code quickly.

Because the more your A M model knows about code, the more I can help you do. Get started now at IBM docs slash granted IBM. Let's create something about the .

way we're working just isn't working when you're caught up in complex pay requirements or distracted by scheduling staff in multiple time zones or thinking about the complexity of working in montreal. While based in montreal, you're not doing the work you're meant to do. But with day force, you get H R. Pay, time, talent and analytics all in one global people platform so you can do the work you're meant to do, visit day four, stock com slash, do the work to learn more.

So, okay, ready for a lighting around.

Okay, I have done this before.

I see how that goes. What is the worst advice you've ever?

goten? Don't worry about publishing, just finish the PHD .

is terrible advice. How about the best advice right in the morning .

before someone has the chance to ruin your day?

The other favorite crime show, or a podger.

and this is like a shouts out all sociologists and criminologists, is if you haven't watched the wire, you have to watch the wire. It's actually like a kind of little sneak peak into all the elements that make up like the origins of serious crime from like the first season, where it's like looking at the role of the drug trade to kind of like spiral aling out into the rest of the city and understanding the economic and social aspects of IT.

What is an unpopular opinion you're willing to defend?

I think IT could be worth going off to casual drug users with fines in order to basically deter and and to dry up the supply of consumers of drugs.

What kinds of drugs are we talking about .

here in the U. K. Cocaine is a massive problem. If we're serious about stopping the drug trade, you actually have to target the consumers, in this case, the occasional suspect, rather than the usual suspect, the drug dealers who have already Priced in the cost of of, of going to prison.

Wow, what's the prediction you have for the future of crime?

I suspect we're going to see a lot fewer road based deaths once more and more of private transport becomes automated. And that thanks to A.

I things to look forward to. And what's the question you have for me?

How useful do you find an economic theory for explaining behavior within organizations?

Not very useful. With apologies to economic. That's fascinating.

Because as a non economist, I find economics extremely helpful. Maybe it's because the kind of actors i'm dealing with sometimes a bit too rational. Once they figure out how the prejudice system works and exactly what the cost and benefits of engaging with IT are might become quite injured to to many of the costs, they start pricing IT. And because they haven't got quite the same put of social norms means that they behave a little bit more like people in, in, in, in economic models.

Well, that's to think again moment for me. I make her two heavily on of the departures from rationality that that humans are capable of. But if we're talking about criminal masterminds who respond more strongly than the average person to the costs and benefits and incentives, then I think there's a lot of value that I was thinking more about, sophisticated micro economic theories, the basics of thinking about individual responses on a supply and demand curve or thinking about how people respond to incentives yeah, very useful.

Just not particularly interesting to me when take away from this conversation for me is I used to think about incentives as changing the behavior of people who are following the logic of consequence and social norms as shaping the behavior of people who are Operating honey, logic of appropriate inness. And one of the things that you've taught me is actually, there's a spillover from one to the other that incentives can influence people's perceptions of what's appropriate. And therefore, we shouldn't overlooked in you argue that this might even be true for murder, that the reason that killings have gone down so much in the course of nearly a millennium is in part that is no longer acceptable to kill someone after a family viewed or a drunken fight over honor. How strongly do you believe this?

Well, I am open to alternative explanations, but i'd say that's the explanation to beat right now. I think from what we understand, the natural world in which, you know, we evolve, so in which our kind of cognitive ve capacity developed was so AR as we understand that a lot more violent than the sort of world that we are living in now. So we're kind of like a tuned to engage in defensive, sometimes offensive violence, like by our nature.

Nevertheless, across across a great deal of the human world, we now see that homicide, in particular, is is very rare. Even up into the eighteen century, you still find that jewelry among certain classes was like just the right thing to do. IT wasn't just something that happened. IT was something is like, oh, if you're not willing to do IT, if you're not willing to get your dwelling is wrong with you, you're not defending .

your on a given all the expertise you've accumulated. If you could sit down with your grandfather now and tried to convince him to stop driving drunk, what would you say? I mean, that would be difficult .

going back into the thousand. Nine hundred and seventies because IT wouldn't be true. But what I try and tell him is that his friends don't drink drive anymore. That would be the best intervention that you could make.

You've definitely changed my thinking about how to prevent crime, and I know many of our listeners will feel the same.

Thank you, nick. Ah, thank you so much.

Talking with neck made me realized that we focus too much on consequences and too little unappropriate ness. Yes, you can motivate people with carrots and sticks, but we underestimate the power of shifting their views of what's socially acceptable and unacceptable. The best way to change behavior is often to change perceived norms.

Rethinking is hosted by me, adam grant. The show is part of the ted audio collective, and this episode was produced in mixed by cosmic standard. Our producers are handy kingsland mow in asia simpson.

Our editor is aliAndra sallis AR. Our fact checker is paul derbin original music by hcl seo and elson later Brown. Our team includes a lizer Smith jack of winter atoms and high lash bambang chain, Julia dickson and with pennant Rogers.

I think about the wire everyday, you know, Marks look about things about the Robin empire. I think about even on bark stales empire. P R X.