Making the World a Safer Place

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. One of the first television crime dramas in the United States debuted in 1958. The same guys wearing rubber Halloween masks, one of them with a sawed-off shotgun. They've knocked off 16 pawnshops, liquor stores— Naked City told stories of detectives in New York's 65th Precinct. Each episode was I'm not saying the money he drifted off with is yours, but it's somebody, and it's good hard cash. The premise of the show? There are good guys and there are bad guys.

Let me tell you something, mister.

We've got you nailed pretty good. At the end of every episode, the narrator declared— There are 8 million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them. 60 years later, crime dramas haven't changed much. There are still good guys and bad guys. But the bad guys are now savage, remorseless, beyond redemption.

Slits their throats so they can't scream. What the hell's wrong with this guy?

Thinks he's Jack the Ripper.

The way we think about crime dramas is very similar to the way we think about crime. Homicide, robberies, and other kinds of violent crime have been spiking in many big cities in the United States in recent years. Coming after a long period of declining crime rates, this has caused people in many areas to demand solutions, to demand that the good guys catch the bad guys. But it turns out there are some profound mistakes we are making in thinking about crime Both in police dramas and in actual policing.

Why are people in this situation? Why are they making these choices? And importantly, what can we do as a society to make things better?

This week on Hidden Brain, a subtle insight that could radically transform our approach to crime. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Planet Visionaries. Professional climber and environmental advocate Alex Honnold hosts Planet Visionaries, a podcast spotlighting the people tackling climate challenges with real hopeful solutions. Throughout season 6, Alex brings together extraordinary changemakers for powerful conversations about grit, determination, and the power of hope to fuel our fight for a better future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, Initiative. This is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Southern New Hampshire University. The brain isn't fixed. It's flexible. That means we're always capable of transformation. A master's degree from SNHU can help you build the skills to become whoever you want— a leader, career changer, dream chaser. With no set class times and low online tuition, SNHU makes grad school possible. Because it's never too late to learn something new. Get started at snhu.edu/brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. In 2016, Sarah Heller began teaching a class on criminology. She was looking for a way to teach her students about the economics of crime. She turned to a respected source.

Where's the boy, String?

D'Angelo, shut your mouth.

It was the hit HBO series The Wire.

If you walk through the garden, you better watch your back.

The Wire is the story of Baltimore street crime and, you know, the drug gangs who are working there and the police who are trying to stop them and the way that it affects the citizenry of Baltimore.

If you haven't seen the show, we are going to have spoilers. Season 3 of The Wire features growing tensions between 2 leaders of a drug gang. One wants to run the business like a business. The other says, you don't get it. You're not a businessman. You're a criminal. Embrace it.

Yeah, so the whole season, or for even 3 seasons, you've gotten to know Stringer Bell, who's one of the heads of the gang. He's also sort of interested in trying to have some legal businesses and trying to develop a real estate career and balancing those 2 things. There's been sort of growing and growing Disagreement between him and the other person who leads the gang with him, Avon Barksdale.

You know what, I look at you these days, you know what I see? I see a man without a country.

Avon wants to think about gangs and territory and building up as a gang leader, and he disagrees with Stringer's desire to be more of a legal player and to minimize the violence.

What, 'cause I don't shoot up a block indiscriminately, I ain't hard enough?

In a climactic scene, Avon Barksdale betrays his friend and partner. Stringer Bell finds himself in a building, unarmed and alone, with an exceptionally violent criminal who holds a grudge against him. Stringer tries to reason his way out of the trap, but it doesn't work.

It seem like I can't say nothing to change y'all minds. Well, get on with it, motherfucker.

What was your students' reactions when you showed them this season? I mean, it must have been an engaging way to start a class that looked at the economics of crime and drug markets.

So I think in some respects it blows their mind, partly because it was the '90s and they don't know what the '90s looked like. So that's a learning experience too. But I think they learn to think about things not through the lens of politics or their prior beliefs, about what they think crime is like or what they think policing is like, but they learn to think about why are people in this situation, why are they making these choices, and how can we shape policy to improve the situation. Part of its use is that it helps students become social scientists and think about why do things work the way that they do, and importantly, why do people participate in crime, why are they willing to put themselves at sometimes mortal risk for this kind of lifestyle, and how does policing work, and what are police trying to do, and how well do they do it, and what's effective and what's not effective, and importantly, what can we do as a society to make things better?

I want to go back a second to that scene at the end of season 3 of The Wire, because of course there's a second subtext that runs through that scene that is again, I think, implicit in our understanding of how crime operates and what the police police do, which is that you have something happen. Someone gets shot. Stringer Bell's lying dead on the ground. And then the police come in, basically try and figure out what happened and try and solve the crime. And of course, that's the model that we have is that the only way in which we can intervene is once we know when something is wrong. And we have to investigate what happened and try and find the people who did the bad thing and bring them to justice. Can you just talk about that idea that in some ways, We have a fundamental model of how crime is supposed to operate that almost begins at the point that the trigger is pulled.

I think that's right. And I think part of the reason we might have that model in our head is because we are thinking about solving crimes. We want to wait to the point where something has gone wrong to then think about who did it, right? Which is sort of necessarily retrospective.

Intervening after the trigger is pulled means police are playing catch-up. Increasingly, some police departments, with the help of social scientists, have tried to be more proactive. They've found that if you collect large amounts of police data and crunch it algorithmically, you can start to predict future criminal activity. In a previous episode, we explored how gun violence spreads through networks of people like an infectious disease. It's a very specific kind of infection. Here's how sociologist Andrew Papachristos described it to me.

It tends to be very specific behaviors, risky behaviors, that put you in these networks.

And in some ways, it becomes much more like the spread of diseases through needle sharing or unprotected sex rather than catching a bullet from somebody sneezing.

There's lots of evidence that violence is very concentrated both among people and among geography. And so, you know, there's sort of A bunch of analytic work trying to figure out which blocks of which neighborhoods are likely to have the most gun violence. And there it's a little bit easier to think about how do we put police resources where the most crime is happening. There's lots of evidence that that is successful, and especially with violent crime, it does respond to increased policing.

But relying on police data to build a model of future criminal activity has 2 big problems. First, if you care about civil liberties, it could make you uneasy. If I think you are likely to commit a crime in the future, I might be tempted to monitor where you go and what you do, even though you haven't done anything wrong. There's a second big problem with building predictive algorithms from police data.

There's a lot of evidence that police data are not a perfect measure of underlying behavior, right? They're a combination of individuals' behavior and police decision-making, right, who they decide to stop, who they decide to arrest if you're using arrest records. And I think what the evidence suggests is that a combination of police officers' implicit bias and sometimes outright racism generates a set of arrests that don't mean the same thing for the same people, right, that they might be potentially, if police are more likely to arrest young Black men, then it's going to look like young Black men are riskier just because of police decision-making and not because of actual risk level. And it's these kinds of biases in algorithms that I think have become a really important central part of the conversation about how we should be using prediction methods.

Many critics have said police data might be very good at predicting future police behavior. Prior arrests the police make are a strong predictor of future arrests. But does this data really paint an accurate picture of offenders, the people actually committing crimes? Sarah, who now teaches at the University of Michigan, said police data cannot be simply taken to be an unbiased account of criminal behavior. Rather, it's an account of criminal behavior as observed by and reported to the police.

But then you have to stop and look at that and think, How do I know if this is a good prediction? And you might be very good at predicting police behavior, but in fact, you have no idea whether you're actually predicting actual offending behavior. And there's just no solution to that because we don't have other good measures of who's actually pulling the trigger.

So we have a lot of data from police arrest records and other police information. But as you say, when 2 people call the police to investigate different incidents, even if the incidents are more or less identical, the police response to those incidents might not be identical. And if they're not identical, then the data that goes into the police system is going to be biased not by the difference between the underlying incidents, but the difference in the police response to those incidents. I want you to talk a moment here about the insight that you had, which is that if we stipulate that predicting future crimes is difficult because of these biases that are implicit in the police records, what is the solution to that? Because of course, we are reliant on police data in terms of figuring out what happens. They're the people who we call when something happens, when there's a crime that takes place. So if you have this flawed data, how do you make more sense of it for it to become more useful?

So the realization that we had is that arrests for shooting and homicide are not our only measure of gun violence in the police data. We can also measure victimization.

Victimization. Go back to that scene at the end of season 3 of The Wire. Once the police find someone has been killed, they start to investigate. They carry out forensic tests. They conduct interviews. They make arrests. All of this information goes into the police database. If you are worried about police impartiality, you might worry about the integrity of this data. But there is one aspect of the data that is virtually certain to be uncontaminated by bias. It's the fact that Stringer Bell is lying on the ground dead.

What we have is a measure of whether someone is shot. And so almost all cases where someone is shot end up in police records because people seek medical treatment and the medical staff are required to tell the police.

So in other words, let's, let's say there's someone who gets shot on a street corner. It's possible that police have some leads on a suspect. It's possible that they find a suspect. It's possible they found the right suspect. It's also possible police bias is involved in identifying the suspect or tracking down the person. But the one thing we absolutely know for sure is we know the person lying on the street in a pool of blood. We know who that person is. And we know that that's happened.

That's right. And I think people might worry that in some cases, If you're shot, you would be afraid to go to the police. You might not want to report it to the police. But even if the police aren't there, even if you're not shot so badly that you're lying on the sidewalk, but you can walk away, you are very likely to go to the hospital to get medical treatment. Almost everybody seeks medical treatment, even if they're not willing to call the police. And once they do that, you still show up in the police data.

Sarah and her colleagues asked themselves a question. Police data about previous arrests were being used to identify people at high risk of future arrest. Could the same data identify people at high risk of becoming future victims? They got access to data from the Chicago Police Department over a 20-year period. The data included information about police arrests for minor crimes like vandalism to major crimes like shootings or robbery. Sarah and her colleagues built a machine learning model that crunched the data looking for patterns. It found a match. By looking at prior arrests and other police data, the model pinpointed people at high risk of becoming future shooting victims. How accurate was this prediction? Sarah picked out a sample of more than 300,000 people from the police database and tracked them over the next 18 months To see if the prediction was accurate.

It did sort of startlingly well, or it did sort of shockingly well, where if you take those 330,000 people, we have some predicted probability that each person is going to get shot in the next 18 months. Line them up in order of risk level and look just at the 500 people with the highest predicted risk. So the very smallest group with the very highest risk. And it turns out that of those 500 people with the highest predicted risk, 13% of them are shot in the next 18 months. And that's just a shocking risk of something as serious as a shooting victimization, right? So think about being in a crowded movie theater, about 500 people, and I tell you 13% of that group is going to be shot in the next year and a half. That's an extraordinary risk of potentially Lethal violence, it's a rate that's 130 times higher than the average Chicagoan. So we can find a relatively small group of people that are just at an extraordinarily high risk of being shot.

I mean, it almost seems spooky to be able to do that, to be able to say, I can tell you in the next 18 months who's going to get shot in a city of 3 million people. I mean, that's almost scary spooky.

It is a little bit disturbing. I mean, imagine someone coming to you and saying, you have more than a 1 in 10 chance of being shot in the next 18 months. months, it might in fact motivate you to participate in some of these programs that Chicago is now trying to offer. And it's certainly not perfect prediction, right? A 13% rate means there's also 87% of the people who are in that group who are not shot. It's not a perfect prediction. But the fact that we can find such a small group at such an extraordinarily high risk really sort of highlights, I think, the—

Yeah.

The fact that we should be doing more to help them, right? We know who they are. We don't know who everybody is, but we know a small set of people at such high risk that we really should be spending more to try to help keep them safe.

There is a huge obstacle in doing that. I'll explain more in a moment. But I want to stop and underscore Sarah's subtle insight. Using police records to predict who is going to be involved in crime in the future Runs the risk of the dystopian response you see in movies like Minority Report, where police go after criminals before they have committed crimes. It raises troubling questions about civil liberties, bias, and surveillance. But it becomes much less problematic to use the police data not to paint a picture of would-be shooters, but a picture of would-be shooting victims. If I told you that you were at risk of doing something bad in the future, you might bristle. But if I told you that you were at risk of something bad happening to you in the future, you might listen. It's what doctors do for patients every day. Why would it be hard to apply Sarah's insight to protect shooting victims? For that, you have to ask yourself a question: why would police data on past arrests be so effective at predicting which people would get shot in the next 18 months?

In criminology, there's lots of evidence that victims and offenders tend to be the same people. This is certainly not always true. You can think of a lot of examples where it's not true— domestic violence victims, for instance, or bystanders. But it is the case that the kinds of risky behaviors that lead you to be at risk of being shot may also be the same kinds of risky behaviors that make you likely to be an offender or be involved in other crime.

So the big obstacle to doing anything useful with Sarah's insight is us. When we see Stringer Bell lying on the ground, most of us don't say, what a tragedy. We say, what did he expect? If you run a gang, order hits on other people, someone is going to have you in their crosshairs. Sarah says the sheer cost of crime and the benefits of preventing it call for an overhaul in our thinking.

So I think policymakers have an innate understanding that prevention might be better than remediation, right? That if you can keep something that's very socially costly from happening, we should try to do that. And so that's not necessarily the model where you just wait till something happens and punish it and then hope that sort of changes future behavior. If what you're trying to do is prevent crime, then you want to think about all of the ways in which you can prevent it. And so that's not just stopping someone from pulling a trigger. It might also be stopping someone from being in a position where they would be at risk of being shot.

I'm wondering if one of the important insights from this work, Sarah, is the importance of thinking about people in some ways first and foremost in terms of their risk of victimization Instead of thinking about them first and foremost in terms of their risk for becoming perpetrators. There is an overlap between those 2 worlds, as we discussed. But if we think about you as a potential victim, in some ways, I think it changes the orientation with which people approach how they can think of you. The conventional model really is, we think that someone's a threat. How do we put a fence around them to keep them from harming other people? And the model that I hear you suggesting is, We fear that someone's going to become a victim. How do we put a safety net under them to keep them from falling?

I think probably we should just have you write our papers from now on, because I think that's a very eloquent way to put it, right? That if you think who's at risk of being a victim, it humanizes people. We want to stop all sorts of victimization, right? And that's true in terms of the way we allocate medical care, right? We try to sort of prevent harm from heart attacks and from depression and suicide, and we try to prevent harm from homicide as well. And so I think coming at it from that perspective, I hope will motivate people to take prevention more seriously, to not just see the problem of gun violence as there are bad people out there doing bad things, But to think about how can we help keep some of the most vulnerable members of our society safe.

There is a crucial mind shift that is demanded by this work. When we see Stringer Bell lying in a pool of blood, Sarah asks that our first reaction not be, well, he was a criminal. He had it coming. Instead, she's suggesting we say, This death, like any other shooting death, is a tragedy. How do we minimize such tragedies? She is suggesting that instead of watching out for people like Stringer Bell, we start to look out for them. Now, this can sound naive and idealistic. Some people may bristle at the idea that we should go out of our way to save the lives of people who have been previously linked to violent crime. But it turns out If you start to think of offenders in terms of their propensity to become victims instead of their propensity to commit future crimes, you can end up having a profound impact on both those things. That's when we come back. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Quince. We all have those pieces in our closet that we can count on— the versatile jacket, the perfect t-shirt. These are the pieces that make getting dressed easy, and that's what Quince does best. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials in designs that are timeless and timeless chic. Quince. Thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. And when the temperatures start to drop, Quince makes it easy to build on these everyday staples with versatile layers designed to keep you warm and comfortable all season long. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In 2004, Chris Blattman was having an interesting chat with a man in Nairobi whom he'd just met.

I was about 30 years old. I was an economics graduate student. I was working in Nairobi in Kenya And one day I was sitting for lunch in a little cafe, and a man strikes me up in conversation, super engaging. What am I doing? What am I working on? And as I'm turned towards him and away from my backpack, his pal grabs it and walks off with my laptop. Fortunately, not with my passport.

When did you notice the laptop was gone, Chris?

So, you know, probably it was only sometime afterwards when I got up to leave and wondered where my my backpack was, and I spoke to the police. You know, there's a cop there, and he was like, oh, did somebody, like, strike you up in conversation? And I said, yes. And he's like, yeah, that's what happened, kid.

Chris turned to local internet cafes to do his work and to stay in touch with colleagues. But the internet speed in these cafes was painfully slow.

It would be about 10 minutes for each Hotmail message to load up. And so it was customary to talk to the person next to you, and just, you ended up in a lot of idle chatter over your hour or 2 in the internet cafe. That was just the culture of the time. And so I purposefully sat next to a woman my age, and we ended up striking up a conversation. And she was a psychologist and a humanitarian worker who had been working in northern Uganda.

The chance meeting occasioned by the stolen laptop turned out to be important.

We wrote our dissertations together. We got our first jobs at Yale together. We wrote papers together. We have had 2 children together, more importantly, and we've now been married for 15 years.

Did you ever send a thank you note to the guy who stole your laptop? No.

If I ever meet him, I will give him a grateful hug.

After Chris finished his PhD, he began working at a think tank in Washington, D.C. One day, a colleague asked him out to lunch. He wanted Chris to meet someone he had been working with in Liberia, a man named Johnson Boar.

So Johnson is this sort of big, smiling, meaty man. And the one thing I knew about West Africans is that the one thing he probably had not had in, in a week or so was a huge mountain of rice. And so we, we went to a Pan-Asian restaurant. And that was how we bonded. He was like, finally, someone has offered me more rice than I can eat, which is, which is the secret to a Liberian's heart, it turns out.

Chris forgot about Johnson after that lunch. But sometime later, Chris found himself in Liberia. The country was recovering from civil war. In 1989, a warlord named Charles Taylor invaded the country and seized power. What followed was years of uprising and violence until Taylor was finally exiled to Nigeria in 2003.

When I arrived in early 2008, the country was in year 5 of peace. It had just had a democratic election that brought to power Africa's first female president. There were 15,000 peacekeeping troops. So it was a time of hope, but the place was decimated. When I was driving in from the airport, you would see just burned-out hulks of buildings everywhere. The Ministry of Defense was a blackened concrete pile. What few apartment buildings there were were totally burned out. There were no walls. It was just this concrete skeleton. And people had set up this 12-story tarp city on various floors of these buildings.

Can you paint me a picture of what the state of human development among people, especially young people in Liberia?

So this was a country that had been decimated by 14 years of political instability and war. Anybody who could get out got out. They went to Ghana, they went to the United States, they went somewhere. And anyone with an ounce of education or money did so. And the people who stayed behind were all displaced from their farm. from their apartment, and they'd lost everything they had. And if you were a young man and you didn't get out, there was a good chance you were pulled into one armed group or the other.

As the war ended, many of the people who had left the country came pouring back in. They were starting businesses, investing in the economy, getting into politics. But the young men and women who were left behind during the war still felt left behind after it was over. They were not included in this new wave of development. Instead, they found themselves returning to the life they knew.

These were the guys who would sell drugs or pickpocket. There was a growing amount of armed robbery, home invasions, and muggings. And if you were the, the president, or if you were the UN peacekeeping force, these guys were your number one concern because these were going to be the next insurgents, or they might be the next mercenaries for the civil war in the country next door.

Chris started working at a reintegration center where young men and women at high risk for violence were learning to farm. He ran into his old D.C. acquaintance, Johnson Boer. Johnson had been working with people displaced by the conflict and was helping out at the center. One morning, Chris awoke to shouts.

I can kind of hear this sort of rumbling and tumult, and we walk from our little hut and past the main building. And as we turned the corner, you know, the noise is getting louder and louder. And all 400 former combatants were striking, yelling, protesting in the yard. The food wasn't ready that day. The rubber boots hadn't shown up. All these little grievances spilled into what essentially became a riot. And there was Johnson standing in the middle of them. Saying, we have talked about this. Get your people back to their rooms. We have ways to deal with these disputes. This is not how we do it. Fix this because this is going to go wrong. And he got them back to the negotiating table just by singular force of will when everybody else on that campus had fled. And so this guy I'd met briefly in Washington, all of a sudden had something magical about him where he could operate and do things and had sort of a charisma and a bravery and a talent for this that I just wanted to get to know him better.

Chris started following Johnson around Monrovia, the capital.

So Monrovia is a city built in a Mix of jungle and swamp. It's like being in Florida at the height of summer. And we're wandering the red light market to try to find all of these young men living on the fringes doing these illegal activities, trying to understand how all that works. It's called the red light district because it was the site of Liberia's first traffic light. Not for the normal reason. That we have red-light districts, but it was also that kind of red-light district. It was everything.

The streets were lined with vendors selling fuel, used clothes, beauty products, cheap electronics. Here and there, men loitered around. Johnson took Chris into small shacks, drug dens, where they met former combatants engaged in illegal activity.

And we'd sit there and we'd just chat with these guys and we'd talk business. How do you make money? How many customers do you get? How'd you end up doing this? What's next? I do remember, like, coming out of this, one of these bigger drug dens, and you're kind of blinking in the sunlight. And as we were coming out, this, this guy comes to us from across the street, and he was shining shoes. And he gives Johnson a big hug, and they're talking and catching up. And I said, oh, how do you— so how do you guys know one another? And he said, well, I used to be like them. And he points Across the street to the drug den we just left. And then I went through Johnson's program.

As the days went by, Chris met more and more men who approached Johnson to thank him for helping them turn their lives around. Chris got curious. What was going on? They sat down together at a café to talk. Johnson told Chris he was inviting groups of young people on the fringes of Monrovia To attend a series of meetings.

Day 1, the first thing they would always do is they'd talk about how you present yourself. Because a lot of these guys, they're not showered. They don't take care of themselves. They're wearing tattered clothing. They don't look respectable. They look tough.

Johnson would introduce a special guest.

And he said, if you want, we've got a guy here who can give you a haircut. And by that, I mean he had a chair, a mirror, and a razor blade. And you'd shed your facial hair or the fuzz or whatever you have that signals that you're not a part of normal society can go. And you're not compelled to, it's just an option. And that was their big event, is maybe half the guys, he said, would do that. And the others would sort of sit back and say, I'm not so sure about this. And so it was just about, let's take that first baby step And on day 2, some of the guys who did get their haircut come back, and they've also gotten, you know, a polo shirt and maybe a pair of khaki pants, and they're wearing shoes instead of flip-flops, and their— the clothes aren't as dirty, and they're not as patched, and they're certainly not sending that, that sort of badass signal. And they're invited To talk about what happened the last day or two. Like, what was your experience? And most of them are like, it was amazing. Like, nobody recognized me. And when they did, they were laughing. And, and I went into this store and nobody kicked me out. And most of them just talked about how amazing this was.

Johnson told Chris that in subsequent meetings, he would talk to the young men about dealing with everyday violence, what to do when something bad happened around them.

They were finding themselves in a brawl once or twice a week. Their disputes would turn into yelling matches. Someone might get stabbed once in a while. And just managing these, like, everyday, like, interactions without violence is just hard. And it kind of seems inescapable. You know, we all have these relationships in our life, you know, maybe it's your son or your mom or something where you can just, you kind of lose your temper 6 seconds into the dispute. You don't do that with everybody, right? You can be totally calm and cool-headed with 49 other people that day, and then, and then just lose it like that. So we all have relationships like that. And the problem was that theirs just didn't devolve into yelling, or when they lost it, somebody could get hurt.

Johnson would ask the men to think about how their emotions flared up in these moments. What did it feel like to get angry?

And then people stand up and then they tell their story. Like, here's this time When, you know, I exploded and we lost our tempers and somebody got stabbed. And who else has a story like that? And then they'd also talk about, okay, like, what do you do in that circumstance? Like, how do you actually avoid that? How do you manage these hostile social situations? How do you manage that one relationship that goes from 0 to 60 in an instant?

So at some point soon after this, you go back and have a conversation with your wife and you tell her a little bit about what Johnson is doing. She's, of course, a psychologist. Describe to me what you told her Johnson was doing and how that conversation unfolded, Chris.

I said, do you remember that guy Johnson Bohr? We just wrote down everything he did in his program. Take a look at this. What does this look like to you? And she paged through and she read it. And she said, huh, this looks like cognitive behavioral therapy.

You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram Teen Accounts automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into Teen Accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about Teen Accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts. Working as a dedicated Fidelity advisor, I always ask, what's important to you? I'll look at those priorities and goals alongside your full financial picture to build a comprehensive plan designed to help grow and protect your wealth. With proactive portfolio insights and an eye on taxes, I'm here to help you make the most of your money. I'm Laura Maxwell, and I'm a dedicated Fidelity advisor.

Learn more at fidelity.com/wealth.

Investment minimums apply.

Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC, member NYSE SIPC. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Air France. Air France business cabin offers comfort throughout the journey with priority check-in, boarding, and lounge access. Onboard, enjoy menus from renowned French chefs, wines and champagne selected by a sommelier, and free high-speed Wi-Fi. When it's time to rest, settle into a fully adjustable lie-flat bed with added mattress comfort. The art of travel, elevated. Because Air France Business Cabin goes further in every detail to make your journey exceptional. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Several years ago, the economist Chris Blattman, now at the University of Chicago, met a charismatic Liberian. Johnson Boar was running a shoestring program of his own invention in the poorest areas of Monrovia. He was trying to divert troubled young men and women from a life of crime. Johnson didn't have a name for his program, But it was a form of cognitive behavioral therapy. Developed in the 1960s, CBT, as it's known, suggests that by paying attention to how we act and what we do, we can subtly change how we think and what we feel. At the core of the program is the idea of practice. If you practice behaving differently, Your outlook, thoughts, and emotions will follow. As an economist, Chris wanted to know if Johnson's brief 8-week program had any effects. He launched an experiment tracking about 1,000 young men in Liberia who were at high risk for crime and violence. Half were selected at random to go through Johnson's program. Chris remembers the setting of the first session. It was held in one of those buildings he'd seen coming in from the airport when he arrived in the country.

It was a 6-story skyscraper that was half-built when the war broke out. And at that point was just a concrete shell. So concrete floors, stairwell, and then open to the air. And we were on the 3rd floor. And we had sort of 20 scarred and half-broken plastic chairs in a circle. And Johnson and his assistants would stand in the middle and try to lead these guys in discussion.

Chris could tell that many of the young men at the meeting were there because of Johnson. But that didn't mean they were converts.

About half of them are slouched in their chair, their arms are crossed, they're looking very skeptically. They're also cautious because they're surrounded by a bunch of guys like themselves, which is almost never a good situation. So it's a circumstance where they also have to be cautious. Maybe they'd been in a fight with that guy the previous week. One guy was a real holdout, very hostile and tough in his demeanor, like, just don't mess with me. Slouched, arms crossed, frowning. Still there though. Still coming for the first day, still coming for the next few days after that. Not engaging. Not when people are given an opportunity to stand up and testify or tell some story or relate, was not engaged, but was just Checking it out, sitting at the back of the room. And then one day he came back, but of his own volition. He had gotten this haircut and trimmed his beard and was dressed nicely. And the only reason I knew it was him was because he sat down in the same chair that he was always in. And he was brought into the circle and he was engaged, but nobody made a big deal out of it, as if they knew that that wasn't the right thing to do. So it was really remarkable to see that change day by day of just— and how they tried to present themselves. So of the world and how that could change their own behavior.

The experiment divided the 1,000 young men into 2 groups. After half received Johnson's program for 8 weeks, the larger group was divided at random into 2 new groups. The first received a cash gift of $200. The other did not. Effectively, the experiment created 4 groups: men who received cash and therapy, Men who received cash alone, men who received therapy alone, and men who received neither. The initial results were promising. Chris decided to test something much more ambitious. Would there be any benefits after 10 years? He asked a large group of experts what to expect.

Most people thought that therapy alone would have no lasting effects whatsoever. And cash and therapy, the vast majority thought that the effects might be zero or at least steeply dissipate. Almost no one predicted that they'd persist in any kind of strength.

Chris recently finished tracking the men over 10 years. There were modest long-term benefits for the men who received therapy alone. For the men who received cash only, it was a whole different story.

For the men who received cash only, they changed their life in the short run, but the business that they started failed. Maybe they got rained out and damaged goods, or the police seized their wares, or they were robbed. And so within a year, they were no different than people who'd received neither program. And 10 years later, they were— they were no different.

But the men who received the therapy and the cash gift?

Persistently through the life of the project, after 1 month, after 1 year, after 10 years, the men who'd received the therapy followed by the cash, their behavior was totally transformed. And so they were half as likely to be selling drugs as the control group. They were half as likely to be engaged in thefts and muggings, to the point where it added up to an average of 26 fewer crimes per year per person that got both cash and therapy.

I mean, that's an astonishing finding, Chris. 10 years after an 8-week intervention and $200, you know, so the net total cost of the intervention is probably $500-some per person. 10 years later, you're seeing a— A 50% improvement. 50% reduction in robberies? I mean, that is— that is astonishing.

So it seems to come from the men who were the most far gone is where most of the crime and violence happens. And amongst those most far gone guys, this intervention in the first month helped them climb out of that hole. And the amazing thing is that once they climbed out of that hole, and even after, you know, a month after the intervention, they were less likely to be engaged in crime. They stayed out.

What do you think explains the fact that the cash transfer seems to have helped the cognitive behavioral therapy persist in terms of its effects, especially when the cash transfers don't seem to have done anything on their own?

I would say, you know, there, there is evidence that the therapy alone was impactful after 10 years. What the cash did, we think, is you finished therapy on week 8, and then you had to go and eat the next day, or you still had to find a place to sleep. And many men had to turn back to mugging or crime or drug dealing just to make ends meet, or at least that was their best option. But if we gave you $200, one is you had a little bit of extra money in your pocket to survive a bad week without turning to crime. You could get some shelter, you could get some food, you could get some better clothing. And you also had enough money after that to maybe start a shoeshine stand or a little petty business. And that gave you a chance to practice your skills. So if CBT is about practice, and if behavior shapes thinking, Then it was this positive reinforcement and an ability to keep practicing the good behaviors and the new you and this new image and identity you'd put on for size. And it really entrenched it such that some months later when the money was gone, you had an extra 2, 4, 6, 8 months of practice.

So there have been a number of programs in the United States as well that have asked, can we apply therapeutic interventions to basically address challenges of crime, and someone could look at your results in Liberia and say, great, Chris Blattman has found the magic pill. All we need to do is give people CBT and some money, and we've solved the crime problem in many cities. What's the problem with that kind of thinking, Chris? Yeah.

I mean, imagine you went to your doctor, and you were halfway through describing what was wrong with you, and she said, Stop right there. Tylenol and radiation. We're going to cover all the bases. That worked for the last guy. It'll work for you. You would instinctively know that you need to get a new doctor. And yet we elect a mayor in Chicago or New York, and and we want them to tell us the secret is Tylenol and radiation. We want them to say, "Oh, New York did stop and frisk," or "New York did hotspots policing." New York did CBT or something, and just let's take this off-the-shelf solution, must work for us. And we skip over that important step of diagnosis and say, wait a second, do we have the same kind of violence as that place? Do we really understand? Because there are some different roots of violence, and the treatment has to fit the diagnosis.

Chris and Sarah Heller, whom we heard from earlier in this program, are running an intervention along the lines of the Liberian study in Chicago. It's based partly on Johnson-Bohr's insight that you can change the course of people's lives with therapeutic interventions. And it's based on Sarah's insight that thinking about people as potential victims rather than as would-be perpetrators has the capacity to both reduce their risk of becoming victims and their propensity to commit crime. The data out of the Chicago intervention is still preliminary.

There's some incredibly promising results, a huge reduction in arrests for shooting and homicides, uh, more than a 50% improvement. On the other hand, they're slightly more likely to be arrested for other types of violent offenses, not nearly as serious, but not running in the same direction like we expected. And then in the middle, they're actually less likely to get shot themselves. But it— that decrease is not so large, nor is it what we'd say is statistically significant. And so on average, it's kind of ambiguous. On the other hand, if you weight these things by their cost to society and the cost to the young men, it's unambiguous that this is just a huge improvement.

What works in Mondrovia might not work exactly the same way In Chicago. The only way to figure out what works in a given area is to spend time diagnosing the problem and conducting careful evaluations of different interventions. But there are broad insights from the work that Chris and Sarah and many other researchers are exploring. One of the most important is that the old model of crime show dramas with good guys chasing bad guys and bad guys never changing their ways— That model is wrong.

We kind of assume these people are born into this and stuck and nothing will change, that they're hardened criminals or hardened killers. And I think what we see is that's just not true. That most of these young men want a way out of this life. They will take it if you give it to them. And then if whatever you're offering them works, there's a good chance they'll get out of that life or at least be a lot less violent.

Chris Blattman is an economist and political scientist at the University of Chicago. He's the author of Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Quirrell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our unsung hero today is Kerri Hoffman. Kerri heads up the Public Radio Exchange, or PRX. She's one of the leading strategists across all of public radio. And over the last few years, she has been a great friend to Hidden Brain. As I launched Hidden Brain Media, I've had many conversations with Kerri about podcasts and radio shows and the larger art of building stable, self-sustaining, high-quality journalism. She's always thoughtful, always generous, and wicked smart. Thank you, Kerry. I'm really grateful. If you're a supporter of Hidden Brain, thank you. If you're not, please help us to produce more shows like this. When you support us, you're telling us you have our back. Go to support.hiddenbrain.org. Again, if you would like to help us keep building the show you love, go to support.hiddenbrain.org and pitch in. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon. Having lots of choices sounds like it would be great. Who doesn't want more flavors of ice cream? It turns out the answer is us. Too many choices can make us anxious, overwhelmed. I'm Shankar Vedantam, host of the Hidden Brain podcast and YouTube channel. Each week, Hidden Brain brings you fascinating, science-backed insights about human behavior. So the next time you have to choose, choose Hidden Brain on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Hi, it's me, your gutters. Everything is totally fine. There's just a lot of debris up here, and I've been managing it mostly on my own. I just thought you could find someone on Angie to clean me up. I could really use it.

Your gutters have waited long enough.

Find a pro at angie.com. The real cost of a break-in isn't your valuables.

It's the feeling that your home stopped being safe.

SimpliSafe keeps danger away from your family with 3 layers of protection. 1, smart AI cameras and live US-based agents help stop intruders before they break in. 2, we sound the alarm at points of entry.

3, our agents request emergency response.

Plans starting around $1 a day. Right now, get 60% off your new system with professional monitoring at simplisafe.com/SXM.

Outdoor deterrence plans start at $49.99 a month. Visit simplisafe.com/licenses for alarm license information. You wouldn't take financial advice from a 72 hours in a single day alpha influencer, would you? Same goes if you're in a car accident or any accident.

Who you choose matters.

That's why Morgan& Morgan exists. They're the largest injury law firm in America, and they've built their reputation by actually winning cases, not just talking about it. Over 1,000 lawyers across all 50 states and $30 billion recovered.

Injured?

Go to forthepeople.com/podcast. That's forthepeople.com/podcast.