From Seeds of Science, an article about education, research, and epistemic humility that includes most things that I have been saying about the topics for years. And saying it more engagingly (profanity alert).
How to get 7th-graders to smoke by Adam Mastroianni. Behavioral interventions on children at school seldom work, and even more discouraging, they often make things worse.
D.A.R.E. worked better than SMART as an anti-drug program, because at least it might have made things no worse, while the Emotions section of SMART resulted in more cigarettes, more alcohol, and more drugs. Scared Straight and mindfulness also made things worse. Thank God they didn't try to reduce violence and teen pregnancy.
This is also true of adults. All programs for Republicans and Democrats to hate each other less were less effective than a 2017 Heineken commercial. I remember this, and loved it.
The problem is that our illusion of explanatory depth is so deep when it comes to human behavior that we never realize how little we understand, which prevents us from ever learning more. Nobody thinks they can whip up an iPhone in their garage over the weekend, but most people think they know how to save the children, fix the schools, reform the prisons, overhaul healthcare, repair politics, restore civility, and bring about world peace. Perhaps that’s why we have iPhones and we don’t have any of those other things.
Terence Tao, who I mentioned recently, points out that there are lots of educational interventions that work. It's just that they only work at first, when everyone is excited for a new program and even the kids are signing on for a change from routine that they are told will make them smarter. When one scales these great ideas up, they stop working. Huh. Wonder what's up with that. That may even be what happened with my favorite brain-development program in Daviess County KY from 1997-2010. The initial results were encouraging, with test scores going up for 4th and 8th graders. But in the end, nothing.
Maybe the teachers were excited and motivated, the kids thought playing chess and musical instruments was more fun than penmanship lessons, administrators signed off with hope and joy and the community all came around to cheerlead. But as three years turned into eight years turned into thirteen, everything reverted back to standard schooling energy, even with folk dancing. Maybe. Whatever, it didn't work.
Some of these interventions changed people’s biases in the moment, but none of the effects lasted beyond 24 hours. And of course they didn’t! As soon as participants leave the lab, they go right back into the world that massaged those biases into the folds of their brains in the first place. You can’t permanently change implicit biases with 15 minutes of screentime, just like you can’t spray someone with a hose and expect them to stay wet forever.
Herbert Spencer wrote an essay noting that legislators know they cannot do much to change the behavior of their wives and children, and yet imagine that they can write legislation to change the behavior of millions. Life has made me defensive, but I see a bias in the Heineken ad. The right-wing characters all soften but the left-wing characters do not harden. And humanizing one's ideological enemies takes one only so far.
ReplyDeleteIt is potentially harder to control the people you love, Mr. Smith, than the ones you are happy to have shot for disobedience. Shooting lots of people does seem to produce effective outcomes, as demonstrated in China at Tiananmen Square and more recently in Iran almost everywhere.
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