Kurt Nelson  0:07  
Hey, grooves, welcome to behavioral grooves. I'm Kurt Nelson

Tim Houlihan  0:10  
and I'm Tim Houlihan. On this show, we like to address the big questions on why we behave like we do using a behavioral science lens,

Kurt Nelson  0:19  
and what are we trying to understand in this episode?

Tim Houlihan  0:22  
Tim Well, Kurt, I'm glad you asked, because today we're diving into one of the most misunderstood topics in America, violence, and specifically gun violence. Our expert guest and researcher to discuss this topic is Jens Ludwig, a professor at the University of Chicago, director of the crime lab and one of the nation's leading authorities on crime and Social Policy.

Kurt Nelson  0:45  
Yeah. Jen's new book unforgiving places, comes from more than 20 years of research that he's been doing right in Chicago, right in his hometown, right. And spoiler alert, our conversation with the Jens might challenge some of your most entrenched assumptions about violence. Yeah,

Tim Houlihan  1:04  
you're likely to get new insights on this topic, whether you're on the left or on the right of this argument, Jens brings data to the discussion that sheds a fresh light on the discussion that we simply can't ignore. Yeah.

Kurt Nelson  1:17  
Now Jens argues that the difference between a safe neighborhood and a violent neighborhood often isn't about bad people, bad characters or even too many guns in this one neighborhood. It's about how situations and context shape our decisions, often in the wrong way. Exactly.

Tim Houlihan  1:38  
Jen's research is based on decades of data with insights from behavioral science, his studies of neighborhoods in Chicago show that violence is often less about evil intent and more about ordinary people making catastrophic decisions in unforgiving environments. It's often about how changing just 10 minutes of one person's life could change the trajectory of many people's lives.

Kurt Nelson  2:03  
Yeah, and we talk with Jens about what behavioral science teaches us about this violence, why eyes on the street can literally save lives, and how education could have a positive impact to help reduce crime, not by raising income, as we thought before, but by improving metacognition and decision making.

Tim Houlihan  2:24  
And Kurt what is that metacognition thing?

Kurt Nelson  2:27  
Again, it's our ability to think about our own thinking. It's thinking about thinking,

Tim Houlihan  2:33  
okay, okay, got it. And what's great about this conversation is how hopeful it is. Jen's research points to simple, scalable solutions like fixing vacant lots or rethinking education and helping people pause before they go tilt.

Kurt Nelson  2:50  
So grab a strong pour of some keep an open mind brew and get ready for a fascinating conversation about violence, decision making and the power of context. We hope you enjoy our conversation with Jens Ludwig.

Tim Houlihan  3:12  
Jens Ludwig, welcome to behavioral

Speaker 1  3:14  
grooves. Thanks so much for having me on. It's really a delight to be here. It is our pleasure as

Tim Houlihan  3:19  
well, and we're gonna start with our famous speed round. And we'd like to know first and foremost, first and foremost, would you rather learn a new Excuse me, would you rather learn a new instrument or a new language? New instrument? Oh, good. That's so great. What anything come to mind?

Speaker 1  3:35  
I would love to learn how to play the drums. My oldest daughter was a percussionist in school, and I just felt super jealous the whole time seeing her get to learn all of

Kurt Nelson  3:44  
that. Wow. My, my 15 year old is taking drum lessons right now. And is it noisy? Is it noisy? Man, some days I can, you know, I'm up on the second level, and drums are in the basement, and doesn't matter, you can still hear him. It's fun, but yeah, so, all right. All right. Jens, are you a coffee drinker or a tea drinker or something else?

Speaker 1  4:11  
Is both? I'm ambidextrous.

Kurt Nelson  4:16  
Okay, all right, so we have had many people, this is a common question that we have, and some people have a routine where it's coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon. Are you one of those people? Or does it whichever fits my fancy? When I see it,

Speaker 1  4:31  
I would say, what? Whatever is within reach. Wow, it's a little bit. Have you, have you seen the movie, you know, to get the right sort of mental image of my my daily caffeine consumption. Have you ever seen the movie Sid and Nancy? I have not about Sid Vicious, yeah, that gives you a little bit of the flavor. It's like me going to the faculty lounge for a coffee. Is a little bit like a junkie going for their fix. Wow. Wow, yeah, I'm not, I'm not proud for the kids listening to that, to

Tim Houlihan  5:06  
the podcast and a great musical illusion right there.

Kurt Nelson  5:09  
Yeah, so I'm visioning this. If you could actually just get a drip into your veins of caffeine, you might go with that, with the SID, Sid and Nancy, okay.

Tim Houlihan  5:24  
Oh, back to me, sorry about that already. Okay, so basically, true or false crime is pretty much committed by just really bad people.

Kurt Nelson  5:36  
False we're going to talk about that. We're talking about very, very sure we're going to talk about that

Speaker 1  5:42  
counter intuitively. So false

Kurt Nelson  5:45  
counter intuitively. I love that part. Yeah, and this is, again, a true or false question for you. Has a very, maybe not quite as clean of an answer on this, but is violent crime largely a result of just having lots of guns around? True or False? From your perspective,

Speaker 1  6:08  
I it is true, but not the whole story.

Kurt Nelson  6:13  
Yes, that's when that's, that's, that's what we're gonna talk I would say like true,

Unknown Speaker  6:17  
but not the whole truth. Would be one way to say it. Yeah,

Kurt Nelson  6:21  
okay. It's not, not the court of law. It's, you know, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It is just part of the

Tim Houlihan  6:26  
truth. Okay, okay. We're talking the end about unforgiving places your new book, and maybe we should just start there, because you've actually, let's start with how you got into this and how long you've been studying this because this isn't a passing fancy This is not something you just decided to pick up. You know, a couple years ago. You've been at this for a long time. Give us a little hint into your journey before we actually get into talking about your results.

Speaker 1  6:55  
Yeah. So I went to, I went to college in sort of a medium sized city in New Jersey called New Brunswick. It's in the middle of the state between 1986 and 1990 and you know, for anyone who knows anything about crime, the dominant thing that was happening with crime in the late 80s in the United States was crack cocaine was sweeping over cities all across the country, causing a huge rise in gun violence everywhere. And I was a volunteer soccer coach for the New Brunswick recreation department, where our team would field as many kids as could fit into my Ford Escort. So you don't have to be a soccer expert to realize 11 kids don't fit in a Ford Escort. So our record was not very good, but I would go, you know, neighborhood to neighborhood to pick kids up and then drop them off after the games. And so that was my first real exposure to seeing what the problem of gun violence looks like up close in neighborhoods where moms are trying to raise their kids. And I was an economics major in college, so I was really interested in, you know, data and analytical thinking and how that could be used to solve problems. And I was like, This feels like a much more important problem to be thinking about. Then how to make an extra one or two percentage points on a stock trade kind of thing. Then I go to graduate school. I work at Georgetown for 12 years. I come to the University of Chicago in the fall of 2007 and that fall there's a doctoral student named Amadou sis who defended his doctoral dissertation, and then two weeks later, gets shot and killed coming home at 130 in the morning from an ice cream social, his apartment was not very far from my office here at the University of Chicago. This led to a lot of soul searching at the university like you know, we've won more Nobel Prizes than any other university in the world, and yet we're not having impact, literally in our own backyard. What could we be doing more of this was on the heels of a National Academy of Sciences report that reviewed all the evidence about what we know about how to prevent gun violence in America, and the conclusion was nothing, nothing that would be useful for policymakers. So my suggestion was We Should that is the sort of problem that a great urban research university like the University of Chicago should try and solve. Let's start a research center that works with the government as a sort of R and D partner to figure out what's going on with this problem and what can we do about it that turned into the University of Chicago Crime Lab, and the book, in many ways, summarizes the lessons from doing that for the last nearly 20

Kurt Nelson  9:36  
years. Fantastic. And again, it is a super well researched book. But I want to go back to the speed round questions that we had, right So, so you know, the first one was, crime is pretty much committed by really bad people, which you said at emphatic no. And then the other part was that is crime just largely a result of having lots of guns around, which you gave a more of a nuanced. A response to, can you expand on both of those? Because I think your book does a really nice job and of laying out, you know, there are these kind of myths that the that we hold, that this violent crime is caused by a couple things, and you kind of lay that bare.

Speaker 1  10:18  
Let me maybe start off with. Let me start off with the gun question. First perfect. I think if you look at the conversation about gun violence in America, it really is overwhelmingly dominated by debates about gun control. And I think there are a lot of people who conclude that, you know, we're a country of 400 million guns and 330 million people. We have very different gun laws from most other rich industrialized countries around the world. We have way more murders per capita than most rich industrialized by a lot than any other rich industrialized country, and almost all of the difference in murder rates between America and Europe, Japan and so on. Almost all of that difference in murder rates is driven by more murders with guns here. And so it's very understandable that people look at this and say, it is all about guns. Yeah, and you know, there is a sense in which that's very true, in that there's good research that shows that when you have more guns around, on net, the murder rate goes up. That need not have been the case conceptually, because I would just point out, like the same the thing that makes guns so terrible from a crime perspective is they're very easily concealed and they're very lethal. The same thing that makes them so damaging, from a crime perspective, makes them very useful in a self defense perspective. And so like small, frail old people, are now able to defend themselves against much bigger attackers and more numerous attackers and whatever. So it's an empirical question, not an ideological question. And so it turns out that the data so I say that because when I say more guns lead to more murders, I'm not making a personal political statement. I am making a factual statement from the from the data and the evidence. Okay, so, so now the now the caveat, right? So more guns lead to more murders, but there is still an enormous amount of variability in murder rates and violence rates among places that have similar levels of gun ownership. So for instance, if you look at Switzerland and Canada, they have very similar rates of gun ownership, but Canada has a murder rate that's multiple times what you see in Switzerland or closer to home. I'm here in my office at the University of Chicago in the Hyde Park neighborhood on the south side, and if I just walk about a mile south of where I am, there are two neighborhoods, South Shore and Greater Grand crossing right across the street from each other, Dorchester Avenue. They have exactly the same gun laws, because there are two neighborhoods in the same city, and yet one has a murder rate that's twice as high as the other. Greater Grand crossing has far more murders than South Shore. And so what that tells you is that guns matter, but there's a lot more that matters on top of that. And so the way that I have come to think about it is like a very kind of simple, but I think useful heuristic about what's going on is gun violence equals guns plus violence. That is, guns are part of the story, but so is the willingness of people to use these readily available guns to hurt one another. And in some sense, that's like an optimistic kind of conclusion, that the story is not all about gun control. Because if you're a member of the American public and you're looking at the gun violence problem, and you can't problem, and you care a lot about this, and you can see that the politics of gun control are what they are in the United States, for better or for worse, right? So again, not a political statement, but they are like World War One trench warfare. We're kind of like stuck in a stalemate. And a lot of people look at that and say, there's nothing that can be done, but there is actually a lot that can be done by changing the willingness of people to use guns to hurt one another, and that then leads into your other question about So, why do people engage in this violence?

Tim Houlihan  14:11  
Yeah, yeah. So, so, thank you for proposing that question to yourself. I appreciate that. Say.

Speaker 1  14:20  
Well, yeah, to jump in and, and, okay, so yeah, no.

Kurt Nelson  14:27  
And I think, but you bring up a really good point, right? There is this aspect of how we as as a society often look at this part. And again, we're, you know, we're all Americans here. We're sitting this and it is a, it's an issue around the world. It's very magnified within the United States of all of this. And there is the sense that, I think that some people get that, well, there's nothing we can do. We're so entrenched in our two kind of forms. The two sides of this issue, that there's, we're never going to get any change, or it's going to just, if it is, it's going to go back and forth between whoever is in, in gets elected. And yet, that's not the message that you send with this book. You send a very different message. And so let's talk about if, if gun violence, if guns aren't the only contributor to this. But it's not just really bad people either, that are creating these the that are doing these horrific crimes. And you bring up some really good examples in the book about these people who are, you know, this is a a student. This is somebody who's never done any violent thing in in the past, yet in this situation was brought up. So what is it around that that that does drive these crime rates, and particularly the difference between Greater Grand crossings and South Shore?

Speaker 1  15:55  
Yeah, so let me again, at the risk of being too much of a professor and adding some nuance. Let me, let me. Let me share with you a quote that I think really sort of was transformative for me in my own thinking about the problem. So I was with my friend sandal molanot and anood Shah, two amazing behavioral scientists. We were all in the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center. I should clarify for work. Yeah, we were allowed to leave at the end of the day. So we were, we were inside the facility, and one of the team members in there said, Is this him saying this? I'm repeating it. He said, you know, 20% of this, so this is where the juvenile justice system justice system in Chicago holds the kids that they think are at highest risk for violence. So you've got to, like, go through all these metal detectors, you know, you can imagine. And so he's saying, like, 20% of the kids in here are psychopaths. If you let them out, they're going to hurt other people. And so what I don't want to do is, I don't want to give the misimpression that there are not psychopaths in the world. So the data suggests that something like 1% of all American men are psychopaths, and they're found in every walk of life, professors, politicians, you know, you name it, right, criminal and so. So there are Jeffrey dahmers in the world and that kind of thing, right? But he was saying, 80% of the of the kids in here, I tell them, If I could give you back just 10 minutes of your lives, none of you would be here. And I think that really highlights kind of the mindset shift that I'm hoping the book helps people with because it's you know, as you guys know, even better than I do, like we the fundamental attribution error in psychology says that all of us look at the behavior of other people and over attribute that to something about their character rather than something about their situation, right? And so it's totally understandable that when you see somebody do a crime, especially like the most damaging violent crime. Like, how could you not look at a bad act like that and attribute it to, like the bad character of the person? And the whole book is trying to help people see, like, why that is such an intuitive way to interpret what's going on, but not right? And you know, and part of the way that I do that is I tell a lot of stories in the book about my own behavior, and I point out, like I engage in a bunch of like violent behavior for that 80% of people is a lot like behavior that all of us engage in all the time. The main difference is like, you know, I'm living in a very well resourced neighborhood, Hyde Park, and now I'm, you know, where, when I make a mistake, I can describe in a second what I mean by a mistake. But when I make a mistake, it leads to an embarrassing story, when a 16 year old growing up in a neighborhood one mile from here, where there are lots of gangs, drugs, guns, when they make a mistake, it's like life or death consequences instead. And so it's not like my mind works differently than theirs. It's the situation is just fundamentally different. And so I think you know one way to kind of high level sort of see another way to kind of see the mindset shift is when you look at surveys of Americans and you ask people, why do you think? Why do you think people engage in violent crime? Most Americans fall into one or two of two camps, like one camp says, Oh, the problem of violence is all about, you know, morally bad people who are just not afraid of what the criminal justice system is going to do to them. So the only thing that you can do is disincentivize violence by threatening people with harsher punishments. And the US has basically run that experiment since 1970s like our incarceration rate, as everybody knows is, has increased dramatically and so on. So. Yeah, most Americans who don't fall into that camp fall into another camp, which says, no, no, violence is actually due to economic desperation. It's people doing whatever it takes to feed themselves and feed their families. And so the only way to solve prevent violence is to disincentivize it by making the alternatives to crime lucrative enough so people don't choose crime. And I think the interesting thing you know, given how hyper polarized we are as a country, the one of the interesting things about this is like the left and the right implicitly agree, or implicitly share the view that before anybody pulls a trigger. They're doing a kind of Gary Becker, rational economic benefit, cost calculation about the, you know, the pros and the cons before they pull the trigger. And you know, another way to sort of make sense of the 10 Minute comment that the juvenile detention center staff members saying is, like, that is not what people are doing. No, right and behavioral science, you know, I was not trained as a behavioral scientist. I should say, like, I think there are some people who are like, I've got this behavioral science hammer, and everything looks like a nail to me. And I am like, I have the zealotry of the Convert where I started off caring about gun violence, and it's like, I just want to understand this, and if it turned out to be incentives and deterrence, if it turned out to be, you know, blood pressure, or, I don't know what right like, I would have just and I wound up concluding that behavioral science turns out to be the best way to explain this. And you know, as you, as you all know, one of the key lessons from behavioral science is that our minds work in two different ways, of which we are aware of only one right? And so there's like the deliberate, rational, or potentially rational voice in our head system, two thinking, slow thinking, whatever you'd want to call it, but we also have a series of automatic responses that happen below the level of consciousness that are useful in helping deal with routine, usually low stakes, day to day, sort of things. You know, deliberate thinking is effortful, so most of what our minds do is below the level of consciousness. These automatic, fast system one thoughts are effortless. They're fast. They, you know, help us out, and we could not live without them. But I think, you know, the argument that I make in the book is that those normally useful automatic system one responses can sometimes get us into trouble when they're over generalized and deployed in the wrong situations. Yeah.

Tim Houlihan  22:43  
Can you give us an example of that? Is this, the system one, system two. Stuff is really important to your to your argument here, yeah,

Speaker 1  22:50  
yeah, yeah. So let me give you a super mortifying example from my own, my own experience. And, you know, actually, let me yeah. I'll tell you the story, and then I'll, I'll tell you a sort of a funny story on as a coda. So, you know, I run this Research Center at the University of Chicago called the crime lab, and every Wednesday morning, bright and early, I have a group call with the senior leadership team of the crime lab. So I've got a 65 ish pound Hound Dog, German Shepherd mix named Iko. She's very much a lover, not a fighter. And so I put on my sneakers, I put in my headset, I leash her up, I go walk around Hyde Park and do this call. So one morning, Iko and I are walking around Hyde Park, and I hear the most blood curdling noise, and I turn and there's a dog, a giant dog, off leash, tearing down a driveway towards I go, and one of the things that I learned in that moment is that evolution has designed dogs to be able to look very frightening when they want to look frightening, so fangs bared, you know, like barking in the most blood curdling way, like drool and spit like flying the dog is like frantically, like, I have a huge adrenaline dump in that moment I'm

Tim Houlihan  24:11  
imagining, like the slow motion camera zooming in on the face of this terrorizing

Speaker 1  24:18  
beast and cutting back and forth between the terrorizing beast and my face like, oh my god, what is going on here? So this dog is tearing down the driveway. And now imagine that your mind was only sort of the rational voice in your head, sort of system two slow thinking here's what that part of my mind would have would have figured out I could see the owner of the dog chasing after the dog was another professor at the University of Chicago, and in fact, it was a parent of somebody in my kid's school, somebody I'm going to see at PTA meetings and, you know, potlucks for the next however many years, right? A neighbor, faculty colleague I would have immediately. Thought, the rational part of my mind would have thought, okay, thing one, surely this guy did not intentionally sick his dog on my dog. Like, why in the world would he do that? Right? So this had to be an accident. That would have been rational. Thing Number one, and thing number two, whatever the motivation, the worst, the worst case of my, you know, I could have stepped in between that dog and my dog. I goes big, but not so big that I couldn't have lifted her up. We, you know, we take i goes, got a delicate tummy. We take her to the vet at least once a week for all sorts of whatever, anyway, like, What's one more vet visit? The worst case that she's attacked, the worst thing to do would be to, like, get into this whole thing with this guy that I'm gonna have to see, like, forever. That's what the rational part of my mind would have, would have done. But, you know, the fact that the rational part of your mind is is so, like, mentally, mentally effortful. You know, when you're in a situation like that, I just like the huge adrenaline dump that I experienced means that that rational part of my mind was nowhere to be found. It was shut off and it was shut off and it was all just like automatic at that point. And you know, the thing that is very helpful about these sort of system, one fast thinking mistakes is it's not just that we're making mistakes, it's that we know something about the structure of these mistakes, like there's a little bit of predictable structure to them, which gives us a chance to figure out, like, what we can do about it, right? And I think that's really helpful, that we know something about these and so, like, one of the things that we know that your system, one fast thinking Self does is, you know, it, in order to be very fast, it engages in binary thinking, and so in, you know, conjuring up an assessment of the situation system, one is choosing between just two notches on the mental dial, totally fine and end of the world and the dog chasing down the driveway is clearly not totally fine, so that leaves system one with one other option, which is end of the world. And so all of a sudden, as the dog is going down the driveway, the feeling that permeated me was literally nothing in the in the world would be worse than having my dog attacked, and at that point, yelling like I used every four letter, seven, letter and 12 letter word. This is a very distinguished podcast. I will not summon your good reputation with, you know, all of the horrible words that I learned growing up in New Jersey. And you know, like the most horrible, horrible things and, and, you know, the other interesting part of this is from his perspective, you know, as you guys know, is even better than I do. Like the way that your system, one fast thinking self, forms, the way that all of our minds form a theory of mind of other people, like, what is somebody else thinking? What do they know is system one sets a default, which is what's in their head is the exact same as in my head, and then your system two slow thinking realizes, of course, that's not right. I'm going to adjust. But because system two slow thinking is effortful. We always under adjust, and we always assume that other people know more similar, similar to us than they actually do. It's called the curse of knowledge. Yes, as you as you know. And so here's what the curse of knowledge, again, predictable structure. Here's what the curse of knowledge. How that played out in this guy, in this other guy's mind, which is Jens surely knows. I know, you know, I the other guy know that this was a mistake. The dog slipped its leash. Why in the world would I sick my dog on this Rando walking down the street? It makes no sense. It's clearly a mistake. The dog slipped its leash. It's chasing down the driveway like and so it's a mistake. This guy knows it's a mistake. And then here he is yelling the most horrible, like, unspeakably filthy things at me in front of my house where my wife and little kids are having breakfast inside. And so I think the sort of the profound insight here is like, you know, we think about like violence as like a battle of good and evil. In my mind, I'm the good guy. I'm protecting my dog. In his mind, he's being treated unfairly in front of his family. He's the good guy. So why does conflict happen? Conflict happens because you have two partly because you have two people who are convinced that they're in the right, and all of a sudden this thing, just like, escalates in the most insane way, like, and we are, University of Chicago is one of the best, you know, best paying universities in the country. We are not out there screaming at each other for over. Money, right? And we're definitely not thinking about the opportunity cost of this going sideways, like, oh, I, I'm in this tax bracket, and so I've got to, like, Whatever, whatever we just literally were not thinking. And so I'm screaming, and he's screaming, and this whole thing is turning into a thing. There were two things that saved us there, right? One thing that saved us there is that neither one of us had a gun, right, right? And that is a situational factor that you know is not, unfortunately, not true in many neighborhoods in Chicago. And the second thing that saved us is the University of Chicago hires a bunch of private security guards to drive around in these like white or black cars with green lights up top. And one of them happened to be driving by at the time, saw us going back and forth, rolled down the window and said, is everything all right? Or do I need to call the University of Chicago police officer? And that broke it up and and that is another really important sort of Neighborhood Resource. Jane Jacobs, you know, 60 years ago, in her wonderful book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, was talking about the huge importance of eyes upon the street, the presence of neighborhood adults who could step in and help de escalate conflict before it escalates. And you know, I was lucky that there was this eye upon the street, because the Hyde Park is such a well resourced neighborhood. And if I go in one mile in any direction, here on the south side of Chicago, there are lots of neighborhoods where the people growing up there aren't as lucky to have as many eyes upon the street and as well resourced and so you know, that's an example of, like, the system one cognition, getting both this other guy and I to act in ways in which, like, clearly, 10 minutes later, we're like, oh my god, what were you doing? The environment, sort of de escalating it. And the funny maybe, like, Coda that I would just add to this is I was talking to Richard Thaler about the book here at Chicago. And he said, Oh, my God, I think you're a hothead. And I was like, oh, Am I really a hothead? Is, you know, is there something, you know, is this, like a mirror, I've been, you know, a mirror held up to me where, like, I don't know myself the way that I think. And so, you know, I was talking to, like this, like, not long after that, I was having lunch with a really distinguished philanthropist here in Chicago, like, really, really rich guy, very influential in the city, like, you know, one of the pillars of society kind of thing. And I'd send him a copy of the book, and we were talking about, you know, my dog experience. And he said, Oh, yeah, that happened to me once recently. I was like, What did you do when this other dog attacked yours? And just very cheerfully, like, you know, he was describing the weather. He said, Oh, I just picked up the other dog and body slimmed it. Oh, I am. I am much more. I think I am, no, I think I am much more in the middle of the distribution. And failure must just be in the in the nice tale of the distribution. So I think it's failure who's the nice outlier, rather than me,

Kurt Nelson  33:15  
rather than you being the hot head. That's

Unknown Speaker  33:17  
my conclusion here.

Kurt Nelson  33:22  
Hey, grooves, we want to take a moment away from our conversation to thank you for listening to behavioral grooves. If you enjoy the conversations we're having and want to help us keep the groove going, here are a few simple ways that you can support the show.

Tim Houlihan  33:35  
First off, subscribing to our sub stack is a great way to stay connected with us between episodes. The weekly newsletter provides you with cool insights that are beyond the episodes, and they get delivered straight to your inbox.

Kurt Nelson  33:47  
And if you haven't already leaving a review or a rating of the podcast on a platform like Apple or Spotify or YouTube, helps other curious minds discover us. And there's two great things about that. One, it gives us a boost. And two, it costs nothing

Tim Houlihan  34:04  
and it only takes a second, but it makes a huge difference for us. Plus, we love hearing from you, so don't be shy. Leave us a review or give us a quick thumbs up.

Kurt Nelson  34:14  
We're coming up on 500 episodes, and we're doing this because we love the conversations we have with our guests.

Tim Houlihan  34:19  
Yeah, we also want to do it because we love bringing you insightful behavior, changing content every week, and we hope that some of those insights will help you find your groove.

Kurt Nelson  34:33  
I love that. And yeah, I mean, we've had Richard on the show, and so next time we get him, I'm gonna have to ask him he's that far side. Jens, you brought up something in that conversation. You talked about eyes on the street. And this is, I think is a really interesting part, at least for me in the book, it was really kind of fascinating in just that whole aspect of it. I think there was a piece though, that for me, because eyes on the street aren't necessarily always. Security guards, right? They could be parents, they could be shop owners, they can be in other pieces around there. So one thing I wanted to know is, A, how are you talked about the structure of cities and how that so if you could give a little bit about how that impacts this, but then B, do the eyes on the street have to intervene, or is it just the fact that they're there? Does that make a difference? In other words, if that security guard had just driven by but not rolled down that window, is that enough? Because you see that or that you know, the grandmother sitting on the porch looking at you, and you go, Oh, crap, you know, help us understand both.

Speaker 1  35:46  
Yeah, let me maybe take the take the second part. First, which is like, I can tell you from, you know, as part of trying to understand the gun violence problem, I spend a lot of time, like, out around the city of Chicago, talking to lots of people, and you know, one of the things that you hear lots of people say, like people sort of in the street involved with gun violence, and police officers involved with gun violence and in their own way, when, you know, when they have Service weapons, is just this idea of tunnel vision. And I can tell you, when I was getting into it with my neighbor, I had super tunnel vision, yeah, you know, like you could have had the National Guard. I mean, this is, you know, on the heels of the National Guard about the show up in Chicago to help with public safety, or or whatever is like the National Guard could have been marching down my street, or this street, and like, I would not have have noticed it was only the security guard, like, actively intervening and putting themselves into my attentional window. That was the thing that sort of triggered my rational self to be like, Oh, my God, what are you doing, kind of thing. And so that's, like, that's a hype. I don't think that we have, like, great evidence on on that. But my conjecture would be that it has to be something that sort of very actively puts itself into the person's attention. I think, on the second, you know, on the other point, I think, you know, one way that, here's one way to sort of one way to think about the AHA that I've taken from this. So this summer, we did a conference in London with the UK Government to try and help them think about how to solve their biggest public safety crisis, which is knife violence. And that just really puts this, you know, they're super concerned about people stabbing each other with knives and bicycle spokes. And I thought, what, you know, for us that would be like a miraculous success rather than a crisis. And is there just putting the international differences in the and the reason it's all relative, yeah, it's all relative. And you know, the reason that I mentioned that is like, as part of that, I was looking at survey data for UK residents. And I think I'm sure the same thing would be true in the US, where there's a survey that asks people, you know, here are 50 city agencies rank order them in terms of their importance in your mind, for public safety. And you know, it's like police, courts, correctional system, whatever. Here's what you know, most people would never, ever, ever think of as being like relevant in any way for public safety. Or if they think it's relevant, they think it's like a fifth order rounding error kind of thing, which is the Parks Department and the planning department, right? Like you would be like, Why in the world are you wasting your time telling me about what the Parks Department and the and the and the City Planning Department are doing? And I think that really gets to why the like, if, if you think about Jane Jacobs eyes on the street, you'd be like, of course, everybody's heard of that. You know, everybody knows that's really important. Everybody does not know that's really important. Because when you ask the public what they think is really important, they don't think about like, changing the physical environment and the social environment of neighborhoods, right when, when they're actually pushing their government to do things. And here's the way in which that's sort of so important, is how we design our cities and communities really shapes the degree to which there are people out in public or not out in public. And so let me give you some and this is coming from the data like let me give you some examples. So there was a wonderful study out in LA that looked at what happened when marijuana dispensaries were open and closed as a result of like random regulatory changes as City Council fought back and forth about whatever. And the interesting thing about marijuana dispensaries is they generate a lot of foot traffic, and so what you can see is. When the marijuana dispensary closes, and you see the same thing with restaurants opening and closing, by the way, too. It's not specific to marijuana dispensaries, but when any sort of retail establishment closes, foot traffic goes down and violence goes up by 1020, 30% kind of thing. Wow. Similarly, like there was a an amazing randomized experiment by a team at the University of Pennsylvania many years ago, where they partnered with the city of Philadelphia. They I grew up outside of Philadelphia in New Jersey, so I'm, I know the city. I love the city. Go birds and they're, you know, Philadelphia, like lots of rust belt cities, has tons and tons of vacant lots that I can tell you from firsthand experience, living on the south side of Chicago for a long time, these can be like, really, let's say unappealing places. You know, overgrown grass. People use it as a trash dumping ground. You know, used needles, used condoms, like you name it. You will see it in these vacant lots. And so what the super clever University of Pennsylvania team did is they worked with the city of Philadelphia to randomly pick a set of vacant lots to fix up and turn into pocket parks. And you know, most people will be like, that's fine, but it's clear that that's irrelevant for public safety. What are you talking about. It turns out that when you turn this like nasty vacant lot into a pocket park, the survey data suggests that people now spend way more time out in public, and the police data show that shootings go down again by 1020, 30% kind of thing, right? And so just think about that. It's like these two changes, like, do you have stores or not? Do you have lots of vacant lots or not? Or nice pocket parks seem totally irrelevant from the public's perspective. Think about the problem. But these are really big changes, and these are not expensive changes to the neighborhood. And the reason that this is so important, I think, is like, you know, we've had several mayors of Chicago in a row now say publicly some version of we are never going to solve the gun violence problem in chicago until we solve the poverty problem and the segregation problem and the social isolation problem. And, you know, those are problems that people have been worrying about for at least 100 years in Chicago. So if it were true that those were the only root causes that you could change to affect gun violence, you would basically be condemning the city of Chicago to gun violence like this for, who knows, maybe another 100 years, right? But I think the exciting thing about these behavioral science insights about gun violence is what it tells us is that the list of root causes that matter for gun violence is longer than we had appreciated, and the extra items on that root cause list are much easier to change through public policy than the root causes that we've spent all this time thinking about, and that helps you see that this problem is much more amenable to change than I think we've long assumed.

Kurt Nelson  43:13  
Yeah, so with what you just said, and this was the thought that I had when I was reading the book. It's been a lot of talk about broken windows theory, and, you know, it's gotten lambasted, mostly, I think, in relation to how police have been responding to to that in the way that that is but what you just said reminds me a bit of broken window like that you are going to the the environment around you indicates, you know, a perception or a societal kind of okay Ness with different pieces and different aspects. Am I? Am I wrong in that?

Speaker 1  43:57  
Yeah, yeah. Thank you for for raising that so, you know, if you, if you go back to, like, the intellectual origins of of the broken windows idea, as I'm sure you guys know, it comes from a wonderful study that Philip Zimbardo did, yeah, where he put, you know, he left a car in, you know, An abandoned car on the streets of the Bronx, which, you know, back in the 70s or 60s, whenever he did, it was a very different sort of place than now and then, on the streets of Palo Alto. And you know, as he describes it, like in the Bronx, the car was just stripped in an hour. And in Palo Alto, it was just sitting there unmolested for several days, and then Zimbardo breaks a window, and all of a sudden, within an hour, that's right, so that's the intellectual genesis of the idea of broken windows, which, you know, I was talking to a cop about broken windows, like a guy who had been like a very senior police leader in a big department in the US, and he was like, you know, you. Uh, we the policing community inadvertently kind of besmirch the idea of broken windows by implementing broken windows as zero tolerance policing, right? And so, like, the way that police have wound up respond, you know, responding to the idea of broken windows is like, Let's arrest everybody for every minor thing. You know, you are jaywalking. You are sitting on your front stoop with a beer, rather than, you know, saying, like, please don't jaywalk. Please don't drink on your stoop. It's like you're going in kind of thing. And we can see that, you know, I've done research. Others have done research that says, like, those low level misdemeanor arrests are not very public safety enhancing. But we need not confuse, or we shouldn't confuse zero tolerance policing with the basic idea of like broken windows solving where, like a different way to solve broken windows is literally fix the broken windows, right? And you know, that is, it sounds ridiculously simple, and yet, and yet, you know, I think that's a lesson that I think is easy to get lost in the sort of very heated, kind of political environment that we're in right now.

Tim Houlihan  46:19  
Kurt and I talk about the Robbers Cave model that studied on in Oklahoma in the 1950s a lot. And we think it's really fascinating. You reference it in the book with regard to gun violence. Can you? Can you tell us what is, sort of, what the important corollary is in having in the way that you've looked at it, yeah.

Speaker 1  46:42  
Oh, let me see. Let me like, I think, one of the let me see if I'm, if I'm getting at the angle that you, that you have in mind, which is like, so let me, let me not presume a lot of knowledge. Sorry, this is a little bit. This is the part that you can let me, let me not. Let me not presume a lot of knowledge of the Robbers Cave experiment on the part of your audience, although many might know about the Robbers Cave study. So it's this like genius study, one of my I have a long list of favorite studies in psychology and behavioral science. You know, whenever you guys have a 10 hour episode, I'll come back on and we can talk

Tim Houlihan  47:27  
a marathon on episode, yeah.

Speaker 1  47:31  
So the Robbers Cave study is this insanely clever study where the researchers bring so it's Robbers Cave State Park, I think, in Oklahoma, right? And they bring a homogenous sample of like white Protestant Middle School ish boys to Robbers Cave State Park, and then they randomly assign them into two groups, and they give them different names. It was like the rattlers and the something, I don't know if you guys remember,

Unknown Speaker  48:05  
what the other the Eagles, the

Speaker 1  48:07  
rattlers and eagles. Thank you. And, um, you know, the the, I think there are two interesting things about the about that study. I think one is like, before they have the two groups ever interact, you know, when you only know that it's your group, they ask the kids about the other kids in their group, and they're like, Oh, these people are a big pain in the butt, and this kid snores, and this kid's messy, and that kid's just irritating and whatever, right? Like the irritants of living with other people,

Kurt Nelson  48:43  
normal, middle aged boy complaints, yeah.

Speaker 1  48:47  
And then they bring the two groups together and have them start to interact, and all of a sudden, you know, the rattlers are like, these eagles are horrible people, like, they cheat, they lie. They're just like, terrible, and the Eagles are like, these rattlers are horrible people, like, they're clearly, like, morally deficient. And, you know, and by the way,

Tim Houlihan  49:11  
at this point, the only difference is the names of the groups that they've been

Speaker 1  49:16  
given, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. And, you know, and I think that that with that, really, I think, speaks to is how, how susceptible Our minds are to and what a natural tendency Our minds have to shift into in group, out group thinking, right? And you know that is such a you can see how for a slow, flightless, hairless, basically defenseless species, cooperation and the ability to like have your group, and all of that stuff was very helpful for humans over the long arc of evolution. But you can also see all of the downside challenges then that come with that sort of in group, out group tendency here. And I think, you know, I think the data show very clearly that most shootings in the United States are not premeditated. They're not economically motivated and so on. There are arguments that go sideways and escalate, and someone's got a gun that, you know, just like my my dog story. But I think that happening against the context in which everybody's family and friends is so quick to think in terms of in group, out group, really, I think contributes to sort of fueling this right? Because it's not like so in Chicago is tied with LA for having, like, the biggest gang scene. And so in a world in which every block has its own click or set or whatever, when somebody in some you know, other neighborhood does something to somebody on my neighborhood, I don't think that person made a mistake in a 10 minute window. I think I always knew that those guys on that other block were as horrible as they've just demonstrated themselves to be, and surely that does not help with, you know, mitigation of retaliation and follow on. So yeah,

Kurt Nelson  51:17  
it's those damn rattlers, though. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker  51:20  
I was gonna, I was gonna say those damn eagles, but

Kurt Nelson  51:22  
yeah, well, you're on the wrong side.

Unknown Speaker  51:26  
But that is you say duck. I say rabbit, exactly.

Kurt Nelson  51:30  
Another really good reference to the Duck Rabbit image of our face here, there we go. Yeah. I think it's really fascinating, as you talked about, just all of these elements that we have around how we think this is. And as you said, that list of drivers of violence and different pieces is much longer than we give it kind of notice to. And then, as such, we can, we can actually impact it before we got on and started talking, we were conversing before. And one of the things that you brought up was this idea of education, and this idea of the role that education could play in the story, and particularly a little bit about metacognition. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Speaker 1  52:20  
Yeah, you know. So one of the this is going to sound like, like, I've, I've lost my mind and gone in a totally random direction, but I promise it's, I mean, it's possible I've lost it. People who lose their mind are the last ones to know.

Tim Houlihan  52:38  
We'll tell you later, yeah, okay, my

Speaker 1  52:40  
hypothesis is that I've not lost my mind, and this is going to be relevant. So I was listening to a podcast interview with Nate Silver a couple months ago, and, you know, he was, I'm not into poker. He was very into poker, and he was talking about, you know, one of the key ways in which people get much better at poker is they learn. Like, poker players have a saying called going on tilt. I don't know if either of you guys are poker players, but like, you know you're playing, you're counting your cards, you're sort of thinking about the optimal betting strategy. It's a very sort of cerebral game, apparently. And sometimes when people are playing poker like their emotion gets the better of them, they just get pissed off, like someone does something, it pisses them off, and then they just, like, start playing emotionally, rather than, like, rationally, intellectually. And the term that poker players have is you go on tilt. It's after, like a pinball machine. If you smack it, it gives you an on tilt error message, right? And Nate Silver is saying, like, good poker players, one of the first things that they learned is how to control themselves and recognize when they're going on, tilt, recognize their triggers, recognize when they're having that feeling, and sort of get themselves out of it. And the reason that I mentioned that in connecting this to your question about education is there's a really, you know, there's a really important insight there, which is like, that is something that people, apparently can learn. And you know, when a poker player realizes, like, at the end of the night they've lost, they normally win a bunch of money. At the end of the night they've lost a bunch of money, they look back on that and say, What did I do wrong? Poker Players have very strong incentive, this is their livelihood. They're very strong incentive to figure out why the bad nights are bad, and they're like, Oh, I lost my let me say, lost my stuff. I'll try and use my non New Jersey vocabulary, I lost my stuff. Why did I lose my so that you can start to see they're really introspecting on what their mind was doing and how they can what strategies they can use to overcome that, and they can get better at that because, you know, according to Nate Silver, that's really one of the reasons that you see this sort of positive trajectory in people's poker playing skill. And that sort of reflection on your mind and recognizing, like, when I would, you know, I would call on tilt like system one emotion is. Getting the better of you, and I would say, like the recognition of that. I would call that like metacognition, and then sort of stepping in and being a little bit more deliberate. So if poker players can learn that, then, in principle, it's something that could be learned. And once you realize that, then you start looking around and you're asking, Okay, what? What are the ways in which we could help people? We could sign everybody up to become poker players. That's one possibility. But what else might we do? And what else could we do at scale to help address this gun violence problem? And you know, the more that got me really interested in thinking like there's a very, very, very powerful research literature in economics that shows causally, that when people get more schooling, violence declines, and that relationship is not like I think historically, most people thought, oh, it's obvious why that happens. Because education increases your earnings, and once you've got more money, you're less likely to be involved, less need to be involved in crime and so on. But, you know, giving people more money does not it does reduce their risk of property crime, but it does not change their risk of violent crime. My, my story of arguing with this neighbor who's also a well paid University of Chicago faculty member, helps you sort of see that. So that got me really interested in so then, what is education doing? And when you read, you know, there's, I guess, a really great University of Pennsylvania psychologist, Jonathan Barron, has a term called actively open minded thinking. I think is the term, right? And he, he and others have talked about, like, how education stimulates that habit of mind. And you know, that's looks a lot like metacognition to me. It's like you're doing math. And you know, the first time that you do a math problem and you get it wrong, and then you get the graded assignment back, and you realize, oh my god, I just made a dumb mistake. So the next time you're doing your math homework, you do the math problem, and then a little part of your mind says, Why don't you double check that? Because you have a tendency to sort of go over a little bit too quickly, and then you redo it in the margin. All of a sudden, that math class, yes, it's teaching you math, but it's also taught you to reflect a little bit more on your mind. That is, it's taught you a little bit of metacognition there, inadvertently. Like, let me give you one other sort of example, which is, like, you're an English class and you read, you're reading a novel. Catch her in the Rye. You know, my daughter's about to start Animal Farm next week in seventh grade at her school, whatever, like, you read the book, you're sure that you've got an interpretation of what the book is about. You go to class, you have a discussion, and other people have different interpretations of what the book is about, and all of a sudden, you're like, huh, different people can see the same thing differently. There are different interpretations of like an objective thing. How do I know that my interpretation is right and and theirs is wrong? Or could mine be? You can again, see right inadvertently, what education is doing is getting you to be just a little bit more skeptical of your mind, especially that sort of system, one part of your mind and and giving you a little bit of practice of metacognition. And you know, the thing that's interesting about those examples is, like, there's survey data that suggests that, like, when you get more schooling, one of the things that it makes you better at is problem solving, including solving the problem of interacting with other people. But there's nothing in the K 12 curriculum that is explicitly about that, right? So the K 12 curriculum does that implicitly, and maybe a little accidentally and inadvertently. And so I think one of the really interesting, gigantic open questions for the field is like, if that really is the thing that education is doing that is reducing violent crime involvement, like, are there ways to be even more intentional and deliberate in fostering that in school, rather than doing it inadvertently? And I would also mention that, you know, there's a big, a huge national debate underway right now, which is like the AI robot overlords are coming and they're going to take everyone's jobs. What should schools? What are the skills that people need in the future so that people are not rendered obsolete? So people are doing things that algorithms can't and they're they won't be automated away. And all of the data by people like David Deming at Harvard and others suggest is like the key skills that are really hard to automate away with AI is novel problem solving and social interactions, which I would just say is a different form of novel problem solving. Sounds a lot like what actively open minded thinking helps you learn and metacognition and all of that. Sort of stuff. And so I think making, you know, rethinking education to be more intentional and deliver developing those sorts of metacognitive skills, I think, turn might be the key to making education much more helpful for addressing these huge social problems that everybody is thinking about, like, you know, the future of the economy, addressing this huge problem of gun violence and on and on.

Kurt Nelson  1:00:25  
Jens, you we have, we've had Annie Duke on the show multiple times. Annie Duke, former poker World Poker winner, lots of things now, is into decisions and doing a lot of work on decision making and how we can optimize that. And she has a as part of a alliance for decision education, about putting the more of that type of how we make decisions, thinking about meta cognition, into K through 12 curriculum.

Tim Houlihan  1:00:57  
And she's based in Philadelphia. Oh yeah, she

Kurt Nelson  1:01:00  
must. And she's based in Philadelphia, and and I, and as I was thinking that I'm going, you know, we should just do like poker playing one on one in school, a kids would love it, and B could teach it.

Speaker 1  1:01:14  
And if anybody for their poker class needs like the poker equivalent of the Washington generals, I'm their man.

Tim Houlihan  1:01:23  
So to get back to to the core of the book is about violence, and gun violence, specifically, through this all you're hopeful, right? You don't end your research, doesn't doesn't inform you that, forget it. We can't do anything about this. Can you tell us a little bit, inform us about why you're hopeful and what do you think could be done?

Speaker 1  1:01:47  
Yeah. So, you know, I think I'm I'm hopeful because, like, I understand why people are pessimistic. So, you know, I don't think that people are wrong to feel pessimistic. Because if you just look at our track record. You know, death rates from almost every leading cause of death have plummeted since 1900 there are two main exceptions, cancer, mortality, cancer. The math of cell division means that cancer, cancer will get all of us in the end. So cancer and homicide. So the homicide mortality rate today is almost exactly like what it was in 1900 and so if you're looking at this, you're like, this seems like an unsolvable problem. And I think the the reason that I'm optimistic is that we've just conceived of the problem incorrectly for at least 100 years. If you go back to the 1930s at least, you can see the presidential candidate, the two party candidates for president. One is saying we need bigger sticks, and the other is saying we need bigger carrots. This idea that it's deliberate behavior, the only solution is incentives, has been around for at least 100 years, and those incentive you know, changing incentives is really expensive, right? You want to change the incentive for crime, you've got to build a ton of prisons, or you've got to, like, mount a gigantic kind of New Deal, Great Society, like, whatever those are, like, hundreds of billions or trillions, or whatever dollars that you're that you're talking about, once you realize the problem instead is like people in difficult circumstances making bad decisions in tough 10 Minute windows that opens the door like it's much easier to help people avoid decisions that they will regret in 10 minutes than to change the fundamental incentives that their rational selves are really responding to and that, you know, things like zoning, there's a big abundance debate underway in the United States. Let's start that in the neighborhoods that are most wracked by gun violence. Let's make it easier to build stores and restaurants and whatever in the poorest, most violent neighborhoods, rather than like on the north side of Chicago that's already got plenty of whatever right. Let's prioritize changing the physical environment in the neighborhoods that are most wracked by gun violence. It doesn't take a lot of money to clean up a abandoned Park, and the data tell us that that matters a lot there. You know, we talked about the role of education in playing a big, big role here. And, you know, we've also been working on social programs that essentially also, you know, use these behavioral insights to help people learn how to go off tilt. And we've done this in basically zero cost ways in places like the juvenile detention center. This is why sandal and Anuj and I were in the juvenile detention center in Chicago is, you know, they there was a several year period where they had trained their detention guards to deliver these sorts of social programs that help people learn to not go on tilt. And we evaluated it like a randomized control trial. You see a 20% reduction in recidivism among the kids who are at highest risk. Violence involvement like you've got the adults already, you've got the facility, you've got the kids. The marginal cost is like a week of training and mimeographing the program booklets. A 20% reduction in recidivism at zero cost is a really good benefit cost ratio. Now give me five things like that that reduce violence by 20% and cost nothing. And I think we're really talking and so I think we're like, the doors are open now to doing a bunch of very pragmatic and none of these also push the same sort of political hot buttons that the incentive policies change, right? Because it's like, you know, you can see why there's a big political fight over the optimal level of incarceration. You can see why there's a big political fight over the optimal amount of like, resource redistribution. Set aside what your own politics are about this. Like, you can step back and see, like, this is going to be a hot button thing in America. But like, should we fix up vacant parks? Should we make education more metacognitive? Should we have kids in juvenile detention do behavioral science programming instead of watch TV has zero marginal cost? These are not political hot button things. They don't cost much money. They're not so I'm very, very optimistic, and I'm hoping that the book helps shift people in a more sort of socially constructive direction. Kurt, do

Tim Houlihan  1:06:25  
you have anything else before I get to dive into

Kurt Nelson  1:06:29  
a year? You're itching. I know

Tim Houlihan  1:06:33  
we've been doing this for I guess I've been easy read. Jens, if you were on a desert island for a year and you had a listening device which you could bring some music on, but you could only bring two musical artists with you, which two would you bring?

Speaker 1  1:06:51  
Yeah, perfect. So let me, let me give the explanation for the

Tim Houlihan  1:06:56  
answer before I, first of all, I should say perfect is a great way to start that answer.

Speaker 1  1:07:02  
I'm so glad that you said two is the key thing is, because, you know, one of the one of the, you know, being a parent has been like by a bazillion percent, like, the most amazing experience of my life. And I've got a, I've got a My youngest daughter is 12 right now. She's a seventh grader, and one of the most fun things for me has been for her to teach me about her music, and for me to teach her about my music. And so it's like, just, you know, you realize one day it's like, Oh, your kids have, like, these amazing personalities and just this kind of the richness of the relationship. And so the two artists that I would bring would be one that she taught me, and one that I taught, either taught her or brainwashed her into she has made me one of the world's biggest chapel Rowan fans. So chapel Rowan would be one of you know, I watched the like the video of Chapel Rowan at Lollapalooza last year. And I was just like, this is just like, the greatest thing ever. And then earlier this summer, for Memorial Day weekend, I convinced my my my daughter, to go with me to see AC DC at Soldier Field. And now, like, on her iPad, she's got, like, a whole heavy metal playlist. So AC DC and Chapel Rowan, that would be like, you know, the two picks that I would have, and why

Kurt Nelson  1:08:29  
it That's fascinating. So my 15 year old, again, fairly big chapel Rowan fan. I don't, probably not to that level, but definitely is on on their playlist. But I have also convinced them to have AC DC their pick on, and I've gotten them like, we do this thing in the car, like, all right, which lead singer is this? And they've gotten to the point of, and why am I drawing a blank on

Speaker 1  1:09:01  
on the two Bon Scott and Brian Johnson.

Kurt Nelson  1:09:05  
Thank you, Bon Scott and Brian Johnson. I'm a little embarrassed that I knew that was very good. I should know that I do this test with my with my child, as I guess is this, is this a you know, bond Scott, or is this Brian and then they're 99% right most of the time.

Speaker 1  1:09:20  
That's That's hilarious. I mean, I will administer, administering that quiz to my daughter, and I'll report back.

Tim Houlihan  1:09:29  
As far as I'm concerned, it's pretty much just about the guitarist. It's just about, certainly,

Speaker 1  1:09:37  
the guitarist at ACDC thinks it's all about the guitarist. Yes, we had like, a half hour guitar solo, and my daughter turned to me at some point and said, Is this ever going to end as I don't know.

Tim Houlihan  1:09:48  
I'm glad, I guess, I guess you brought up Sid Vicious earlier, and I'm glad you didn't say Sex Pistols. But I guess since Sid's dead, it kind of wouldn't be so great to do the Sex Pistols, and it wouldn't be so great to take. Your daughter to a sex

Speaker 1  1:10:00  
pistol No, no. That's exactly I've seen. If you've seen some of the videos of like sex pistol concerts back in the day, I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it really is saying something that like an AC DC concert would be super wholesome by comparison.

Tim Houlihan  1:10:16  
Grandparents now, yeah,

Speaker 1  1:10:18  
no, I know, I know. Or maybe great grandparents, I don't know. Yeah,

Kurt Nelson  1:10:21  
you know the Sex Pistols were coming. They had a tour, and then the their bass player, I forget who it is, broke their wrist, and so now it's on hold.

Unknown Speaker  1:10:32  
But Johnny Rotten, they were gonna do like a reconstituted they were

Kurt Nelson  1:10:36  
doing, and they were bringing back another player to take SIDS place. But yeah, place, they were doing a Sex Pistols tour, and I was like, going, it's the Sex Pistols. I didn't get to see him in the seven, like, nobody in America got to see them because they they, you know, they broke up well before you know this. But yeah,

Unknown Speaker  1:10:53  
I would be tempted to go if they come by. Yeah, I don't

Kurt Nelson  1:10:56  
know if I'd bring my kid, but I would definitely be tempted to

Unknown Speaker  1:10:59  
go. Oh, I know whether I'd bring my kid or not,

Tim Houlihan  1:11:03  
the answer is no, no, exactly. Jens, thanks so much for being a guest on behavioral grooves today. We've thoroughly enjoyed this. Thank you

Speaker 1  1:11:11  
guys so much for having me on. It was really super fun. I hope to come back again someday.

Kurt Nelson  1:11:21  
Welcome to our grooving session where Tim and I share ideas on what we learned from our discussion with Jens. Have a free flowing conversation and discuss whatever comes into our violent free brains. Tim,

Tim Houlihan  1:11:32  
violent free that talk about optimism. Jens is optimistic, but that is super optimistic. So do you

Kurt Nelson  1:11:40  
think do you think, do you think that that is possible to have a brain that doesn't have any that there is a super peaceful Gandhi esque, you know, Martin Luther King, Jr, non violent brain that, Like will always turn the other cheek. Is that possible?

Tim Houlihan  1:12:04  
Well, Gandhi is a good example of one guy who did that really, really well.

Kurt Nelson  1:12:10  
But do you think he never did he I mean, Gandhi got upset, he got angry, he got mad. He might have wanted to strike out at people. I mean, I would assume, I mean, I don't know. We don't know,

Tim Houlihan  1:12:24  
right? We don't know. But sadly, I'm envisioning an SNL skit where Gandhi gets violent over the copy machine or something. I'm sorry, that's terrible that that's running through my brain. But you but is your question? Do you think the majority of people?

Kurt Nelson  1:12:41  
No, I think is it even possible? Is for one Is it is it possible for one person to be so like entrenched in a non violent mindset that they will never react in anger, that they will never have the desire not saying that they act upon this that, but that there isn't that initial like, I just want to hit you, you're just pissing me off.

Tim Houlihan  1:13:13  
Well, I'm going to answer just because you asked the question. But very low level of certainty on this, maybe 5% level of certainty about this. But I think that, you know, got him a Buddha. You know that the Buddha was a non violent dude. We have, you know, Thomas Merton in more recent years, you know, was a, you know, a very non violent, compassionate guy and Gandhi, those are just three examples of people who come to mind as being as adults, were certainly very non violent in their approach. But that doesn't mean that they were that as children or as young teenagers, you know, with erupting hormones and stuff, they weren't, you know, I

Kurt Nelson  1:14:04  
would even argue, and I have no basis for this. So even less than your 5% have no basis for this. They were good at being able to act out their peaceful intentions to override those impulses to be able to have their prefrontal cortex and their identity that is surrounded with this idea of being a peaceful person so embedded in them that they would still potentially again My belief not not having any real basis of fact for this, anger, responses to situations people being assholes to them, the suffering and pain that you know somebody is inflicting on somebody else where they. Our initial response is to strike out in anger. I think it's a human nature condition. I think we override that with our prefrontal cortex and ability to think about consequences and long term situations and who that means I am as an individual.

Tim Houlihan  1:15:20  
So your presupposition is that everyone has an ability to be violent, no matter who you are, and it that it is executive function that overrides that, and can become a mindset and become a norm, and and that sort of thing.

Kurt Nelson  1:15:37  
Yeah, and so you might let you know minor inconveniences or minor aggressions against you respond without having that. But I think there is a presupposition, as you said, that we all have that within us, and I think, and this would have been something we should have asked Jens, right? It's like, yes, but some of this component of what we're talking about with Jens is this idea that this, like the violence part that happens isn't because they're bad actors, per se, it is most of the time they are normal everyday people, you know, getting A's in school, being really good, you know people, but are put in situations where they don't have the environment surrounding them, they don't have the training or background to be able to have their prefrontal cortex kick in, and this idea of like, let's Turn the other cheek, or let's walk away from this, as opposed to confronting it and letting that anger ensue.

Tim Houlihan  1:16:49  
Okay, I'm not sure if I if I totally agree with your even less than 5% confidence position, because I think that we have extremes, and the course is that this is all to say we don't know, you know, we don't know whether Gandhi was a raging fanatic beneath the surface and he built a life where he totally controlled himself and became, you know, this super pacifistic guy. I don't you, and I don't know, it's possible that somebody might know, but, but we don't know, but it does get to keeping us on different planes. A lot of what, of what generates these violent interactions is that there's two people who think that they're both, right?

Kurt Nelson  1:17:37  
Yeah, they're, they're two people in a situation that is highly emotional, that there have been some triggers, again, thinking of just Jen's own experience in, you know, the dog coming out and attacking his dog, right? There is a situation story, yeah, you know. And then the response is one that is not negative. And again, I think Jens would probably consider himself a non violent person, but in situations like that, you're you're not thinking rationally like you would want to. And I think everybody could be put into a situation like that, where the circumstances are, where again, right? It's hot out. Okay, we know that hot, hot temperatures increase violent crime by what, 5% or so, right? Or more, right? Yeah, or more. You know, he's tired. He hasn't he didn't have a good sleep. He might have just had an argument with his wife before getting, you know, and didn't have enough time to have breakfast as he's taking his dog out. I mean, none of this stuff is what he said, right? But this, these are all other things that lend itself into our emotions overriding our rational sense. Yeah, and

Tim Houlihan  1:18:59  
context matters, right? This is all these. Are all these contextual things that get under our skin, that are especially hard for us to see, but even more difficult for others to see. This is the that, when, when I notice, when, when I get cut off on the freeway, right? How many times have I brought this up? But I have

Kurt Nelson  1:19:26  
other driving we got to rename our podcast when Tim gets cut off the freeway because it's brought up like every, every episode for the past 10 I think, I think we just need to rebrand ourselves.

Tim Houlihan  1:19:39  
I need new examples. But this is so it's so clear to me, because it happens so often that that I have to stop my I do. I have to stop myself from from going, That guy's just an asshole, yeah, and say, I don't know what's going on. Was, was the that driver complete? Completely disassociated. Were they on their phone? Were they not paying attention? Were they did they have a bad morning? Did they not get breakfast? Did you know, what were the factors that led them to being in that particular disposition? Are they? Are they on their way to the hospital to see their child who just was in an accident? You know, I don't know, I don't know what, what the circumstances are, but

Kurt Nelson  1:20:24  
you're talking about context. And I think context is a really key piece here. And we know context matters. It's behavioral economics is all about emotions and context, right? I mean, it wouldn't be a field if that wasn't there. It's this idea that, look, we know stock brokers make Wall Street trades. Where you go, this is going to be the most rational thing I can think of. No, they are like a sunny day, you're going to be more likely to have the stock market go up than on a cloudy, gloomy day, right? There's simple little things doctors prescribing different like medicines. Again, you would hope that the doctor isn't being swayed by the weather outside or the way that something is presented. They're looking at the rational facts. But we know that's not the case. Why would we assume that violent crime has anything else but this emotional and context component that is put in exactly that's it? Yeah. And here's another piece, and I'm sorry I'm getting, I get worked up over this, but, and this was something that Jens talked about and really goes into in the book, is this idea that a there's the these contextual, the environmental pieces that we talked about, there's the emotion that comes, but there's also this learned response that people have. And Jens didn't even have this learned response when he got angry at the at the dog owner, but for people who are raised in communities or in context where if I let a small aggression go against me, I become the target for further and more aggression. And so I learned very quickly that I need to, I need to either respond in in kind, or even pre like, like, instigate this so that it doesn't happen to me. And when you learn that, that becomes part of how you view the world, your worldview is now shaped by that context within which you were raised. Now again, can you overcome that? Can you be a Gandhi and go, Oh, yep, hang on. I need to stop this, and I need to think this. Yes, but that isn't, as you said, fish and water. Do they realize they're they're swimming in water, right? I mean, it's the context all around us. It's, it's this whole piece that we have,

Tim Houlihan  1:22:45  
no matter what kind of environment you grow up in. So it might be an environment that, as you said, is is all about any minor infraction becomes something that you have to stand up to. Or it could be an environment where you argue with everything. I mean, I know, I know people who grew up in families where all they do is argue like there's always someone. And it's not just, Hey, have you thought about this? It's they. They just argue all the time, that that, and just as much as the learned environment could be, just be passive. Just let it go. Just, you know, there's those are all learned things. Those aren't just native genetic DNA kinds of things that we if we're not in the environment of arguing or being passive and we grew up in a different environment, like, how could you do that? How could you be that person? How could you just let that roll off the off your back, like water off a duck? That's crazy.

Kurt Nelson  1:23:39  
You have to do this, yeah. I mean, I yeah, there's different family dynamics, different community dynamics, variety of different societal components. I mean, we talk about Midwest passivity all the time, right? This is this ethos in the Midwest of the United States. I mean, how much of that is true? But there is a, there's a kernel of truth there, and it's part of our larger societal kind of norms that we, you know, aren't in that East Coast, like, Hey, man, you cut me off yelling at and doing and honking and doing all those different things. It's not how we operate here. And so that's a learned response. And then again, all of this is to say that crime is horrible and that we're not, you know, saying, hey, these people didn't do a bad thing. They did. We're just saying that there's a lot more that goes into it than that. They are just bad actors, and you need to be accountable for that. You have to be accountable for your actions. I mean it. You know that's, that's part of there. But I do loved, I loved Jen's statement of the was it the the guard or the guy in the Cook County Correctional Facility for the for kids, where he said, If I could give these kids just, just 10 minutes of their lives? Back. None of them would be here.

Tim Houlihan  1:25:01  
Yeah, yeah. I also like the the optimism and hope that Jens, you know, talked about this. It got me thinking about interventions. And, you know, we talked to, I don't remember, actually, who it was that we talked to, about the babies in the borough, example, in England, when they painted on the shop doors, they painted pictures of their kids, of their babies, yes, their own children. But in this, this infant form, and it, it had a positive kind of a cooling effect, right the the

Kurt Nelson  1:25:39  
pocket parks that Jens talked about in Philadelphia. Super cool. Fantastic now, and this is something I did also want to talk about, is the broken window theory, right? And I think the broken window theory got a huge bad rap, and rightfully so, because of the way that it was implemented in New York City and the police the way they handled it under Rudy Giuliani, right, where what they took as the as the broken window theory is that they would arrest people and lock them up for minor infractions, right? It wasn't, it wasn't the idea that, Oh, we'll clean the neighborhood up, we'll remove the broken windows. It's, we're going to catch the people that throw the stone at the window and lock them up before they can do a bigger, badder, you know, crime, which is not what broken theory window is saying. Broken window theory is saying that the environment that that worn out environment of broken windows run down places you know, graffiti boarded up windows, lends itself to people being more exactly violent in various different pieces. So it was actually even implemented incorrectly as how that went.

Tim Houlihan  1:27:03  
So yeah, and it took here, and there's still, still people who have that misconception that that the most minor infractions should be acted upon with severity in order to curb future behavior. But really it's, it's much more about environment as it looks the other aspect of hope is that I think there was this idea about, like, teaching poker in school to create, you know, metacognition. And it just like there's metacognition is a cool thing to be thinking about, thinking about how we think, thinking about how others think, you know, our conversation with that theory of mind, yeah, yeah. It's fantastic stuff to think about how little we know, but how much we can appreciate other people, just by giving some more thought to that. And it also, I also like this idea of helping teaching kids how to play poker, could help them think in bets, to think in probabilities well.

Kurt Nelson  1:28:01  
And I am very happy that we were able to connect Jens and Annie Duke. So hopefully it's something I would love to see something happen out of that, because I do think there is huge opportunity for our educational system to be improved, and by these little things, by by helping people have fun in learning, learning about, you know, betting and gambling and and statistics and all of these things, and thinking in bets which, all right, I'm only 98% sure that this guy, you know is being an asshole is much better than 100% sure does not seem like that much. We joke, but we know this, right? I mean, we're laughing at this, but a 98% if I'm 100% sure that you're an asshole, you know, any kind of other like, information I get about you in the you know, next two or three minutes probably isn't going to impact my perception that you're still an asshole, because I've already made that it's certainty. I've locked in on that. But if I'm 98% sure and all of a sudden you do something where that's not such an ass holy thing, maybe now i reassess myself and you're at 90% now. Oh, there's one more thing. Now you're down to 70% all right, all right. Am I gonna kick your ass because you're 70% likelihood to be an asshole? Maybe still, but

Tim Houlihan  1:29:38  
thank you for at least giving it some consideration before there was an ass kicking,

Kurt Nelson  1:29:43  
you just got yourself down to 55% that was a very thoughtful question.

Tim Houlihan  1:29:50  
All right, anything else you want to groove on, rant on.

Kurt Nelson  1:29:55  
No, I just, I love the idea of being this. What I love about behavioral science is that we are able to take these wicked questions, right, these big questions, and understand them with a different lens. And it's not saying that behavioral science is the answer to all of these, but they do give us insight into this. And again, you know, one of the things that Yen said at the beginning, right, is that, you know, violent what was it violent crime is, what was it? Emotion plus guns equals gun violence. Was that? Was that? What he said? What was the equation there? Well, gun violence equals guns plus violence. That's right? Yeah, yep. And so you could take the guns out of the equation, and you wouldn't have gun violence that. I mean, that's a that's a known thing, but given the society that we live here in, here in the United States, that isn't going to happen, no, probably in any time in the near future. So let's work on the other side of the equation, and let's make sure that we get this right. So

Tim Houlihan  1:31:05  
okay, good. Well, thanks for listening, everybody. We appreciate you checking out the grooving session and checking out this episode with Jens Ludwig because we really, really enjoyed our conversation. We're really enlightening to get an expert to talk about expert research was really pretty

Kurt Nelson  1:31:23  
great. Very much so. And if you enjoy the show, you will probably enjoy our Facebook group where we ask thought provoking questions for you, not just you know, we talk about the show sometimes, but more likely every week, you get three to five different questions during the week, like things like, when do you typically break a promise to yourself, or what helps you take that first step towards a goal? And not only do you get to have those kind of self reflection questions pop up in your Facebook so you're there and you can think about them, but you get to see what others and get some conversation moving forward. So these introspective questions, you know, can help you maybe find your groove. Who knows? You know,

Tim Houlihan  1:32:12  
what a cool idea, absolutely. And by the way, if you are enjoying the show, please leave us a review. Give us a quick rating. Those are two different things. Reviews and ratings are two different things.

Kurt Nelson  1:32:23  
So they are so what is a review?

Tim Houlihan  1:32:26  
Tim, review is words that you spell out sentences that coherently advise people on why you think behavioral grooves is the best thing that ever happened in the whole world.

Kurt Nelson  1:32:37  
But the rating is, what is a rating? Then what isn't that the same thing as a rating?

Tim Houlihan  1:32:42  
Just the ratings. Just click on the damn five stars and boom, you're done. That's it. One click. It's that. That's all it is. Yes, okay, we should also, we should also pitch we are. We've got, in the first quarter of of 2026, we will have a retrospective series on the work of Robert Cialdini, the founder of the influence paradigm, and the we'll be talking about, of course, we'll be talking about the pillars of influence, but also talk about how Robert Cialdini gets to be Robert Cialdini and all of the work that is incredibly revered, not only within the psychological community, but around the world. His stuff is

Kurt Nelson  1:33:25  
applied literally everywhere. The Godfather of influence, Jose is called multitude of hours spent interviewing Bob and a number of people who have been directly or not so indirectly influenced by Bob. So we look, hopefully, look forward to that, and with that, hope you take the information from this episode as you go out this week and find your groove. You you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai