Adonis Diaries

Theory of crime epidemic: What is “dispositional” explanation for events?

Question:  Of the two explanations that  predict having a predisposition to criminal behavior and actually committing a crime, which alternative is the most plausible?

First explanation: The group of adolescents living in a clean and stable neighborhood, an active and sensible community, but whose family environment is violent and crude is more predictive that it will eventually commit a higher rate of criminal activities than other situations and conditions;

Second alternative: The group of adolescents living in family environment that practice standard moral values and exhibit strong moral support, but surrounded with violent and crude neighborhood would actually exhibit a higher rate of criminal acts.

It is of no use following the conventional argument that family is the cornerstone of real behavioral actions: A family provides a strong defensive nature against criminal behavior in the first few years of upbringing, but it is the daily environment and peer pressures that offer the catalytic situations for committing an actual criminal act.

Countless experiments with adoptive children versus regular families have shown that, besides genetic inheritance, it is the peer influence in the immediate surroundings that constitute the adolescent characters for actions, as is the case for smoking behavior.

We process information in a global manner by reaching for a “dispositional” explanation for event (which means interpreting other people’s behavior by overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits) as opposed to a contextual explanation.  If we are told that the gym is dimly lighted and the basketball player is not expected to shoot well, we still favor the player in the well lighted gym who did slightly better, even if he is actually far less talented than the other player.  This general tendency is called the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE).

The human brain has to rely on a “reducing valve” to creating and maintaining the perception of continuity, because if we have to evaluate every event according to its specific situation, we are overwhelmed and become too confused to attend to our myriad of activities and train of thoughts.

For example, a person is in many instances hostile, fiercely independent, passive, dependent, aggressive, warm or gentle depending on who he is with, when, and how, but we tend to reduce his character by stating that the person is either hostile with a façade of passivity or he is warm and passive with a surface defense of aggressiveness.

Thus, we tend to underestimate the minor criminal acts in the specific situations within the environment we are surrounded with, such as overcrowding graffiti views, fare-breaking, window cleaning harassments on intersections or panhandling in our tendency to believing that lawlessness is the rule.

In the cases of smoking and suicide, it is the specific context that turns to be the dominant factor.  For example, emulating a role model who was really cool, who didn’t care about people’s opinions of his behavior, a risk taker, sexual precocity, a trend setter and generally categorized as extrovert.

Take for example the case on suicide trends that sometimes verge on epidemic in specific locations.  In Micronesia Islands in the Pacific suicide was never committed until…  For two decades in the 70′s and 80′s, male adolescents In Micronesia Islands hanged themselves by leaning forward and letting the noose strangulate the blood from reaching the brain; male adolescents committed hanging for lame excuses because it became a fashion to experiment with how it feels:  Suicide became a popular theme in songs and graffiti.

Suicide by hanging was becoming a message to emulate the “permission” given by a role model and charismatic adolescent who took his life because he was in love with two girls and could not choose between one of the two who both gave birth simultaneously.

Suppose that this role model killed the two girls he was in love with?  Do you think the adolescent in Micronesia Islands would have switched from suicide to assassinating girls?

Researchers have demonstrated that whenever a front page account of a suicide by a renowned person is shown then, the rate of suicide increases for ten days before the rate returning to normal.  Furthermore, the kind of suicides is very similar to the detailed account of the suicide in the dailies, as if people are imitating the clear message of their role models.

In general, the few kinds of communicators described as connectors, mavens and salesmen are the messengers who re-package a message to communicate it appropriately and who can tip the point toward an epidemic.

In addition to locating the few individuals who are fundamental in spreading the epidemic it would be good to remember that human communication has a set of counterintuitive rules and your intuitions need to be tested and validated.

Note 1: The article was inspired by the chapter “The Broken Window theory of crime epidemic”

Note 2: The theory of the Broken Window book that crime rate fell in New York City because of strategic police alternatives was proven wrong.  The effect was insignificant because the factor of legal abortion that didn’t produce unwanted children of the vast pool of potential criminal juveniles were no longer in the streets