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Episode: The science of fighting crime with Nick Cowen

Author: TED
Duration: 00:32:57

Episode Shownotes

Criminologist Nick Cowen doesn't just analyze crime — he studies how to prevent it. As a professor at the University of Lincoln in the UK, he explores the unexpected factors that influence crime rates. Nick joins Adam to discuss how social norms and incentives helped the UK curb drunk driving,

and the two talk through the science behind what actually drives individuals and societies to change outdated and dangerous behaviors.Available transcripts for ReThinking can be found at go.ted.com/RWAGscripts

Summary

In this episode of 'WorkLife with Adam Grant,' criminologist Nick Cowen examines the significant reduction of drunk driving fatalities in the UK between 1980 and 2020, driven by shifts in social norms, law enforcement, and cultural changes. Cowen discusses the interplay between individual behaviors, public perception, and crime prevention strategies, highlighting how incentives and community attitudes can create safer environments. Ultimately, he emphasizes that reshaping societal beliefs about acceptable behavior is crucial for effectively tackling crime.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (The science of fighting crime with Nick Cowen) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

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00:02:04 Speaker_02
In the UK, we reduced drink driving fatalities from 1980 to 2020 by around 85%.

00:02:17 Speaker_04
Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast on the science of what makes us tick with the TED Audio Collective.

00:02:25 Speaker_04
I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking. My guest today is Nick Cowan. He's a criminologist at the University of Lincoln in the UK.

00:02:41 Speaker_04
I recently read a riveting article that he wrote about putting an end to drunk driving.

00:02:46 Speaker_02
Nick made me rethink some of my core assumptions about how to fight crime. They're seeing that fewer people are drinking and driving. They'll then feel, oh, that's actually kind of deviant. It's kind of abnormal in this community.

00:02:58 Speaker_02
And that's when you see the cultural change. So my kind of take in this article is that culture, at least for some things, can be surprisingly malleable. Let me start by just asking you, how did you become a criminologist?

00:03:13 Speaker_02
I did my PhD in politics, or what you guys in the US would call political science. It turns out that in the UK especially, we produce too many political scientists. But lucky for me, it turns out we don't produce quite enough academic criminologists.

00:03:29 Speaker_02
It turns out that they were recruiting in criminology, and I published a little bit on in criminology already from, you know, my perspective as a political scientist basically on what kinds of criminal justice policies work to reduce crime.

00:03:43 Speaker_02
And then in the interview, the panel were, you know, they liked me, but they were a little bit skeptical. And they said, like, so, you know, you've been studying politics up until now, what makes you qualified to talk about crime?

00:03:55 Speaker_02
And I said, well, you know, I've been studying political behavior. and political behavior often involves a lot of fairly sharp edges, ambition, motivation, disagreeability, willingness to burn people if necessary.

00:04:08 Speaker_02
These are all characteristics that one finds in criminal behavior as well. And so, they agreed and they thought they could, you know, give me a trial on probation, and I've been in this role as a criminologist for five years now.

00:04:20 Speaker_04
I thought there might be a little bit more of a personal origin story, like you were a Batman fan as a kid.

00:04:25 Speaker_02
I suppose everyone's always interested in crime fiction. I grew up in Oxford, and we have a great long-running series. There's this chap called Inspector Morse.

00:04:35 Speaker_02
Basically, there's a murder every week in Oxford, which is not very accurate because there aren't that many murders in Oxfordshire, typically.

00:04:43 Speaker_02
But they show the lovely architecture, the rural Oxfordshire, and there's some darkness always hidden in that landscape. News about crime is the thing that tends to dominate any media almost as soon as it becomes popular.

00:04:57 Speaker_02
So I understand that when the printing press was invented, the first thing that it was used for was obviously to translate the Bible into the vernacular. That's kind of what famously happened.

00:05:08 Speaker_02
The very next thing that happens is a bunch of newsletters about horrific crimes taking place, especially kind of intrafamilial violence happening throughout Germany. That becomes the next thing that the new medium is used for.

00:05:20 Speaker_02
And, of course, the medium that we're on right now, podcasting, that's kind of elevated and kept afloat by an enormous range of very popular true crime podcasts. So, yeah.

00:05:31 Speaker_04
Well, this is going to be even better. This is going to be a true crime data podcast. I remember I loved detective novels as a kid. I read a ton of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, and then sort of graduated to adult mysteries.

00:05:46 Speaker_04
And it always bothered me that these detectives, like the Sherlock Holmeses, spend all their time trying to solve crimes, and none of it trying to prevent them.

00:05:56 Speaker_04
And that's what I love most about your work, is I think it actually tells us how we can stop it as opposed to solve it. That's what I want to talk about today.

00:06:05 Speaker_04
Let's begin with your grandfather, because I think the paradox of your grandfather, to me, it was poignant. So tell me a little bit about how he spent his days versus his nights.

00:06:16 Speaker_02
My grandfather was someone I looked up to a great deal and still look up to. He kind of transitioned my family from a working class family into a middle class family by kind of studying hard and becoming a doctor. He worked in army medicine.

00:06:32 Speaker_02
He was deployed to Africa and then later on, he treated people who had fought in the Korean War. And he became a general practitioner, so what I think in the US you'd call a primary care physician.

00:06:43 Speaker_02
And he was, for many decades, a kind of dedicated member of his community. And he would often take time out of his scheduled hours to make sure that people in his local community who had an illness were doing okay, that it hadn't got worse.

00:06:57 Speaker_02
He was anxious and conscientious, basically. That's my kind of character trait as well. At the same time, my grandfather would drink and drive on occasion.

00:07:08 Speaker_02
And he would do this typically when engaged in other kind of these elevated social activities that he was always interested in. So things like the theater, the opera, he was also a keen golfer. And these events in his day would always involve drinking.

00:07:24 Speaker_02
And yet the main mode of transport for most of his life was driving. And so he would frequently end on these kind of evenings and nights home, drinking a bit too much and making his way home driving.

00:07:36 Speaker_02
And a few times he told me about this story when driving home after one of these events, He knew he was over the limit, was driving slowly, but perhaps not quite so steadily as normal.

00:07:49 Speaker_02
And a police officer noticed, pulled him over, and breathalyzed him. And this was probably one of his most frightening events of his life, because he told me about it several times. Miraculously, according to him, it came up negative.

00:08:02 Speaker_02
Thinking back, I sometimes imagine if the police officer was looking at this guy who looks very anxious and afraid, seeing this police officer, and clearly perhaps not a danger, albeit he shouldn't really be on the road, maybe the police officer decided of his own accord that it was going to be negative and thought that the warning that he'd been pulled over would be enough.

00:08:24 Speaker_02
So, we don't know for sure. I suspect, subsequently, my grandfather probably drank somewhat less after having that experience.

00:08:32 Speaker_02
Notably, he did not eliminate his drink driving, so it would have been a marginal reduction rather than a total reduction, but he was aware that he was being watched.

00:08:41 Speaker_04
There's a lot of research in psychology on the illusion of invulnerability and how it tends to be more pronounced in professions like medicine. I've read some studies of doctors where they say things like, well, I'm a doctor, so I'm protected.

00:09:00 Speaker_04
I'm sorry, what exactly does that mean? In a couple of studies that Dave Hoffman and I did, we found that physicians were less likely to wash their hands before and after patient contact than nurses were.

00:09:10 Speaker_04
It was because they kind of walked around thinking, well, either I had a superior immune system to begin with, or I've developed one over the course of my time working in a hospital.

00:09:20 Speaker_04
And it's just, it's mind-boggling to me that people so smart can be so dumb.

00:09:26 Speaker_02
I think my grandfather, it's true that as a doctor, you know, someone who'd gone through medical school and had excelled in his own area, yes, he probably did have some confidence that he dealt with life and death.

00:09:37 Speaker_02
And perhaps his experience in the military as well may have given that sense of confidence to have a little bit too much to drink and think he could still be in full control on the road.

00:09:47 Speaker_04
So let's talk about how to then change the behavior of people like your grandfather.

00:09:52 Speaker_04
The first thing that I was really struck by when I learned about your work is I didn't realize how much progress we've made in the West on preventing drunk driving deaths. Talk to me a little bit about the statistics there.

00:10:05 Speaker_02
In the UK, we reduced drink driving fatalities from 1980 to 2020 by around 85%. So in 1980, there were 1450 fatalities attributed to drunk driving. In 2020, there were only 220. The impact in the US is a little bit less.

00:10:28 Speaker_02
So we went from, in 1980, 28,000 drunk driving deaths, and in 2020, there were 11,654. So that's somewhere between a half and a two-third reduction.

00:10:42 Speaker_02
So still impressive, but perhaps not an order of magnitude, which is closer to what we're talking about in the UK.

00:10:48 Speaker_04
Why have drunk driving deaths gone down? And secondly, why are you having so much more success in the UK than we've had in the US?

00:10:56 Speaker_02
we're thinking about the reduction in deaths, there's obviously a lot of other stuff that's going on besides behavioural change. So we've changed the way that cars work. These days, even a minor collision usually causes a lot of crumpling.

00:11:10 Speaker_02
And the reason for that is we'd rather total a car and save the passengers and the drivers than to have a car that can survive minor collisions. At the same time, things like trauma surgery and emergency medicine in general has improved a great deal.

00:11:26 Speaker_02
That means that we can convert more injuries due to drink driving into things where people recover and therefore they don't appear in the fatality statistics.

00:11:36 Speaker_02
On the other hand, when we look at those statistics, we find that total incidents, certainly in the UK, have dropped a great deal as well. So all kind of collisions and accidents that are associated with drink driving, they've all gone down as well.

00:11:49 Speaker_02
So although I'm sure there's some shift in the categories, it still appears to be behavioural change that's happening.

00:11:56 Speaker_04
That's encouraging.

00:11:56 Speaker_02
We'll take it. It's encouraging. It's encouraging. I think there's an enormous amount of variation how much drink driving is happening in a given region in the United States. The United States is a lot more spread out.

00:12:07 Speaker_02
Probably the distance between a bar and a home is going to be a lot larger. It's a much more of a driving culture in the US compared to the UK.

00:12:16 Speaker_02
I think that in cities, the situation has improved a great deal with the kind of emergence of ride-sharing apps and other alternatives. But there's still probably an enormous number of rural areas that are probably very sporadically policed.

00:12:30 Speaker_04
I thought you were going to blame American culture more, that we've just done a poorer job stigmatizing drunk driving here than you have in the UK.

00:12:38 Speaker_02
One of the key ideas in this article that I wrote is that culture is in some ways downstream of policy. There's this idea that it's like, okay, so culture is this kind of really difficult thing to shift.

00:12:50 Speaker_02
It's been around for thousands of years or hundreds of years. a century. But it turns out that for certain norms, a bit of deterrence and just actually having police say, oh, that thing you're doing, we don't want you doing that anymore.

00:13:02 Speaker_02
We don't want you drink driving, at least we don't want you drink driving at this level. And if you're prepared to go out and enforce it, then that firstly, people will be less likely to drink and drive in this case.

00:13:13 Speaker_02
And then subsequently, because they're seeing that fewer people are drinking and driving, they'll then feel, oh, that's actually kind of deviant. It's kind of abnormal in this community. And that's when you see the cultural change.

00:13:24 Speaker_02
So my kind of take in this article is that culture, at least for some things, can be surprisingly malleable and policing can play a role in changing culture.

00:13:34 Speaker_04
So one of the things that's really fascinating to me about your perspective, Nick, is that it dovetails with

00:13:39 Speaker_04
With Betsy Levy Pollock's research, which we talked about on the show a few months ago, she's found that when it comes to promoting reconciliation in post-genocide Rwanda and also stopping bullying in schools, that if you want to prevent bad behavior, changing people's perceptions of social norms is a driver.

00:13:57 Speaker_04
It hadn't occurred to me, though, that this would apply to serious criminal activity like drunk driving.

00:14:03 Speaker_04
So tell me, what's the best evidence that's convinced you that changing perceived norms and creating a sense of stigma is an active ingredient here?

00:14:14 Speaker_02
Yeah, so I think my evidence comes from a fantastic economist called Patricia Funk, who has written a number of papers on the role of social norms and crime. We know the criminal justice system, especially policing, can play a role in reducing crime.

00:14:31 Speaker_02
We know that poverty can play a role, especially for some types of acquisitive crime and other forms of kind of stress and deprivation in areas where people like that live. They're going to be more likely to be victimized.

00:14:44 Speaker_02
And yet, when you put all those factors together, you can only explain a small amount of the variance that one sees. So, variations between countries, within countries, and even from neighborhood to neighborhood.

00:14:57 Speaker_02
Enormous differences that are kind of going on there that are hard to explain. Bonk has some models that suggest that what's going on is that there's a difference between criminal justice costs of committing a crime and the moral costs.

00:15:10 Speaker_02
And the moral costs are the kind of internal feelings of kind of shame and deviance and general bad feeling that are associated with committing crime.

00:15:19 Speaker_02
And basically, if you're already in a high crime area, perhaps you might be a victim yourself on occasion, then you're more likely to think that committing a crime is appropriate if it kind of achieves your ends or it's maybe a way of expressing yourself or of perhaps demonstrating that you're someone who shouldn't be trifled with.

00:15:37 Speaker_02
It might be an element of self-defense and pride that's kind of going on there. One interesting thing is that it implies that it might be quite hard to maintain what you might think of as a medium crime equilibrium in a particular neighborhood.

00:15:50 Speaker_02
Basically, either you've got low crime, and it's like a self-enforcing kind of virtuous cycle, or you've got fairly high crime, and the presence of a high amount of crime in turn induces subsequent higher crime as well.

00:16:04 Speaker_02
So it kind of like settles at a relatively high crime equilibrium. Another piece of evidence that Funk offers is sanctions without penalties. She uses the example of sanctions for failing to vote in countries where it's illegal not to vote.

00:16:19 Speaker_02
And she finds that levying like the sanction which might be nothing or it might be a small fine. radically changes people's attitudes towards voting. People think, okay, I better vote.

00:16:31 Speaker_02
Even if the cost of voting, like the actual practicalities of getting it together and going out and voting, is actually more than, say, the cost of the fine, people will still think, oh, well, it was a fine, so it was wrong.

00:16:43 Speaker_02
Therefore, I'm going to go out and vote.

00:16:45 Speaker_04
How do you square that with the Gneezy work on a fine is a price, where if you fine parents for picking up their kids late from school, they basically start to think, oh, well, this is cheap daycare.

00:16:57 Speaker_04
Now I have after-school babysitting that I've paid for.

00:17:00 Speaker_02
Yeah, I think I heard that via Michael Sandel. He made that an important part of his argument about not putting a price on everything. I think quite a large number of people don't view a fine as a fee.

00:17:12 Speaker_02
Like, the labeling is important for a lot of people.

00:17:15 Speaker_04
So the other kind of evidence that you highlight, which I think is compelling, is the evidence that we need to be really careful about the anti-drunk driving messages that we send out.

00:17:26 Speaker_04
because sometimes by saying, like, drunk driving is bad and you shouldn't do it, you inadvertently signal that that behavior is widespread. And so we need to highlight that it's not. I really liked the quasi experiment that you mentioned in Montana.

00:17:44 Speaker_04
We're just sharing that Four out of five young adults in Montana don't drink and drive. Just disseminating that statistic was enough to change people's perceptions. Hey, this behavior is not as common as I thought it was. Maybe I shouldn't do it.

00:18:01 Speaker_02
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I was impressed by the theoretical basis for that study. It seemed very subtle and very much in line with what we know about social norms.

00:18:14 Speaker_02
There's a kind of thin line between having a message that drink driving is bad and alternatively accidentally signaling that drink driving is badass. That's the kind of thing you want to avoid. That's very well put.

00:18:30 Speaker_02
So I think this is kind of the weirdness of thinking about crime as being criminal justice as making people think that something is inappropriate rather than making them think that it's wrong explicitly.

00:18:42 Speaker_02
What you kind of want people to feel is that it would be wrong in their little milieu, that people are going to think that you're kind of, in order to influence behavior, it's like you kind of want to make people think the behavior is icky, not wrong or harmful.

00:18:57 Speaker_04
Well, one of the things I found intriguing about this perspective is it captured something that's always bothered me about the way that people talk about culture in organizations.

00:19:06 Speaker_04
There's a famous line misattributed to Peter Drucker, he never actually said it, which is culture eats strategy for breakfast.

00:19:14 Speaker_04
And it's supposed to remind leaders and managers and policymakers that you shouldn't just pay attention to the way that you're solving problems and setting goals and just sort of trying to execute your vision.

00:19:26 Speaker_04
You should also pay attention to the values and norms you create. And I've always been bothered by that because, well, your strategy influences your culture. If your strategy is corner-cutting, you're going to build an unethical culture.

00:19:40 Speaker_04
If your strategy is long-term prioritization of solving people's problems, then you're going to build a more caring culture and a culture that is less likely to be sort of narrowly focused on immediate self-interest.

00:19:53 Speaker_04
And so I really like the way that you've highlighted how actually policy formulation in the context of crime can influence people's perceptions of culture. It's surprising to me that drunk driving would not have been stigmatized a couple decades ago.

00:20:09 Speaker_04
It seems to me self-evident. I would have assumed that both people know how much drinking alcohol impairs judgment, and also the consequences are so severe. You could kill someone. You could lose your own life. Why take the risk?

00:20:25 Speaker_04
I guess the question is then, what happens to stigmatize drunk driving? And then how does it interfere with somebody's likelihood of sort of changing their choice in the moment?

00:20:39 Speaker_02
I kind of have this idea that I've been working on called the occasional suspect as an alternative to the usual suspect.

00:20:47 Speaker_02
And police authorities typically deal with usual suspects frequently, daily basis sometimes if they're kind of like community police officers. And the thing about usual suspects is that they aren't very tempted by the pull of social norms.

00:21:01 Speaker_02
So they're not too worried if something is stigmatized. The vast majority of people actually probably, if anything, are kind of particularly cognizant of social norms, perhaps more so than the legal norms around them.

00:21:13 Speaker_02
And so I think kind of what happens is people realize that drinking and driving is risky, but if they see other people taking that risk, then they're going to think like, well, it appears to be considered an acceptable risk.

00:21:26 Speaker_02
And people aren't necessarily running the calculations about how risky it is. So if other people are doing it, then they're thinking, well, other people seem to think it's a risk worth taking.

00:21:35 Speaker_02
I think the prospects of sanctions and the prospects of people looking down on you if you decide to drink and drive probably happens the week before or in the hours before you arrange to go out for a drink.

00:21:49 Speaker_02
And basically, it's probably when people prepare how they're going to get home afterwards.

00:21:55 Speaker_02
I think if people are not planning ahead, then there's a very good chance that someone is, even in this current environment, still going to get behind the wheel.

00:22:05 Speaker_02
I think where the incentives and the deterrence happens is in the decisions that lead up to that moment where people find themselves in a position of like, okay,

00:22:13 Speaker_02
Am I going to get a cab home and then in the morning get a cab out and then drive the car home at some expense, loss of money, loss of resources, or am I just going to risk it?

00:22:28 Speaker_02
And that's a situation where ideally you don't want people putting themselves into. You want them thinking ahead like hours before so that doesn't even become a question. They've already decided that they're leaving the car at home for this night.

00:22:41 Speaker_04
So your thesis is that through advertising campaigns and through also just observing the behavior of their peers, that people came to see drunk driving as more shameful.

00:22:53 Speaker_04
And then as a result of that, they're more likely to take a cab or an Uber or Lyft or public transportation. than they are to take their car. They're more likely to assign a designated driver if they go with a group.

00:23:05 Speaker_04
And so that planning up front, because they don't want to violate a social norm of doing something that's both dangerous and sort of unacceptable, is enough to lead to better planning.

00:23:17 Speaker_02
Is that right? Exactly. I think that's the main mechanism for the way most people are making those decisions. But my argument is that to kind of jumpstart that kind of social norm change, you need to actually have police activity.

00:23:31 Speaker_02
So the mere fact that you've got communications telling people that it's wrong and it's a crime and you could get in trouble. Without actually having people get into trouble, it doesn't have quite the same impact.

00:23:44 Speaker_04
My intuitive understanding of deterrence is you create frequent or severe punishment. And that leads people to say, well, I don't want to get caught and I don't want to go to jail, so I'm not going to do this crime.

00:23:58 Speaker_04
And what you're saying is actually not quite, that what happens is the average person isn't that worried necessarily about getting caught and punished, but rather they see the punishment as evidence that this behavior is no longer acceptable and therefore they don't want to do it.

00:24:17 Speaker_04
And so it's not that laws lead people to sort of make these utility maximizing decisions of like, I've got to avoid the negative outcome, but rather that they lead people to change their sense of what social norms they want to follow.

00:24:32 Speaker_02
The other thing about this is if we understand that most people would be absolutely shocked to actually be confronted by a police officer and be in trouble, or even worse, to come before a judge. So they're not used to that kind of thing.

00:24:44 Speaker_02
That means that merely getting sanctioned just a little bit, so, you know, potentially just a talking to by the judge.

00:24:52 Speaker_02
In the UK, we have some disposals that are called conditional discharges or absolute discharges, where they say, we're not doing anything, but you've admitted the offense, and it's on your record. So no actual penalty.

00:25:04 Speaker_02
For a lot of people, that can be extremely strong evidence that the community does not like their behavior, and that will be deterrent enough.

00:25:13 Speaker_02
And so that means that it's generally a good idea to focus on certainty of detection rather than the severity of the sanction.

00:25:22 Speaker_04
It reminds me of a distinction that Jim March made between what he called the logic of consequence and the logic of appropriateness. Logic of consequence is, how do I get the outcome I want?

00:25:32 Speaker_04
And logic of appropriateness is, what should a person like me do in a situation like this?

00:25:39 Speaker_04
I hear your take on preventing drunk driving as suggesting that people make their drunk driving decisions, or at least most people make them, according to a logic of appropriateness, not a logic of consequence.

00:25:51 Speaker_04
And if we change our laws and we change our policies, then we change people's views of appropriateness, and in turn, we shift their choices.

00:26:01 Speaker_02
They're absolutely right that people are basically thinking about what's appropriate.

00:26:05 Speaker_02
They might be saying it's about morality, but really their moral framework is going to be highly influenced by what they deem to be appropriate in their social context.

00:26:13 Speaker_04
I base my views of right and wrong primarily on harm, and so if a choice is obviously harmful, then I think it's pretty clear that that's going to be a moral issue.

00:26:25 Speaker_04
Now, is there a tradeoff, Nick, between prevention of crime and injustice of punishment?

00:26:33 Speaker_04
Because it seems to me that one of the things you're suggesting is that if we were to take that kind of harsh punishment into the UK or into the US, there's a very good chance that racial minorities are going to be disproportionately punished in the context of traffic stops, for example.

00:26:51 Speaker_04
And then do we just exacerbate our mass incarceration problem in the US?

00:26:55 Speaker_04
If you're suggesting we need harsher punishments to stigmatize behaviors we want to stop, and we need increased police presence for some of these, doesn't that increase the risk also then that some people will be disproportionately and unfairly punished?

00:27:10 Speaker_02
Comparing the United Kingdom and the United States can be quite useful here because, of course, no police force is perfect.

00:27:16 Speaker_02
But as it happens, things can be a lot cooler when doing a traffic stop in the United Kingdom because police officers aren't armed by default in the UK. And that's because the civilian population is almost totally disarmed.

00:27:29 Speaker_02
And due to the nature of the political situation and kind of polarization in the United States, it's hard to see how reduction in kind of gun violence or kind of gun ownership is going to come soon.

00:27:41 Speaker_02
My results that have proven useful for the United Kingdom ought to be addressed with care in the United States.

00:27:48 Speaker_02
On the other hand, thinking from the racial justice dimension, my argument is not that we need kind of draconian disproportionate punishments. quite the opposite. Rather, what we want instead is punishments to be little and often.

00:28:03 Speaker_02
You can probably curb a great deal of the worst punishments by kind of correcting people at an earlier stage. So the great thing about breathalyzing people is that it's before they've actually done any harm.

00:28:15 Speaker_02
They've merely probabilistically risked harm. And that means you don't want a situation where you have to punish someone that much. Literally, a short driving ban is a very strong punishment for someone who hasn't actually seriously harmed anyone yet.

00:28:30 Speaker_02
And if it stops them from actually killing someone by accident later down the line, then you've corrected someone's behavior and you've actually saved on the possibility of having to send someone to prison for committing a much more serious offense.

00:28:47 Speaker_00
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00:29:03 Speaker_00
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00:29:13 Speaker_00
And it can even help manage stress, which I know that we all need, especially as we get closer to the holiday season.

00:29:22 Speaker_00
When I'm waking up in the morning, I just simply breathe into the device for a few seconds and it'll tell me instantly whether I am burning fat or carbs and then the app will give me a little guidance for the rest of the day.

00:29:35 Speaker_00
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00:29:49 Speaker_00
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00:30:22 Speaker_04
So, okay, you ready for a lightning round? Okay, all right. I've never done this before.

00:30:25 Speaker_02
Let's see how it goes.

00:30:26 Speaker_04
What is the worst advice you've ever gotten?

00:30:29 Speaker_02
Don't worry about publishing, just finish the PhD.

00:30:34 Speaker_04
That is terrible advice. How about the best advice?

00:30:38 Speaker_02
right in the morning before someone has the chance to ruin your day. Do you have a favorite crime show or podcast? This is like a shout out to all sociologists and criminologists is if you haven't watched The Wire, you have to watch The Wire.

00:30:51 Speaker_02
It's actually like a kind of little sneak peek into all the elements that make up like the origins of serious crime from like the first season where it's like looking at the role of the drug trade to kind of like spiraling out into the rest of the city and understanding the economic and social aspects of it.

00:31:07 Speaker_04
What is an unpopular opinion you're willing to defend?

00:31:11 Speaker_02
I think it could be worth going after casual drug users with fines in order to basically deter and to dry up the supply of consumers of drugs. What kinds of drugs are we talking about here? In the UK, cocaine is a massive problem.

00:31:30 Speaker_02
If we're serious about stopping the drug trade, you actually have to target the consumers, in this case the occasional suspect, rather than the usual suspect, the drug dealers who have already priced in the cost of going to prison.

00:31:45 Speaker_04
Wow. What's a prediction you have for the future of crime?

00:31:49 Speaker_02
I suspect we're going to see a lot fewer road-based deaths once more and more of private transport becomes automated, and that thanks to AI.

00:32:00 Speaker_04
Things to look forward to. And what's a question you have for me?

00:32:04 Speaker_02
How useful do you find economic theory for explaining behavior within organizations?

00:32:12 Speaker_04
not very useful, with apologies to economists.

00:32:16 Speaker_02
That's fascinating, because as a non-economist, I find economics extremely helpful. Maybe it's because the kind of actors I'm dealing with are sometimes a bit too rational.

00:32:27 Speaker_02
Once they figure out how the criminal justice system works and exactly what the costs and benefits of engaging with it are, might become quite inured to many of the costs. They start pricing it.

00:32:37 Speaker_02
And because they haven't got quite the same pull of social norms, means that they behave a little bit more like people in economic models.

00:32:45 Speaker_04
Well, that's a think again moment for me. I've anchored too heavily on all the departures from rationality that humans are capable of.

00:32:53 Speaker_04
But if we're talking about criminal masterminds who respond more strongly than the average person to costs and benefits and incentives, then I think there's a lot of value there. I was thinking more about sophisticated microeconomic theories.

00:33:10 Speaker_04
The basics of thinking about individual responses on a supply and demand curve or thinking about how people respond to incentives. Yeah, very useful. Just not particularly interesting to me.

00:33:23 Speaker_04
One takeaway from this conversation for me is I used to think about incentives as changing the behavior of people who are following a logic of consequence, and social norms as shaping the behavior of people who are operating on a logic of appropriateness.

00:33:39 Speaker_04
And one of the things that you've taught me is actually there's a spillover from one to the other, that incentives can influence people's perceptions of what's appropriate, and therefore we shouldn't overlook them.

00:33:50 Speaker_04
You argue that this might even be true for murder. That the reason that killings have gone down so much in the course of nearly a millennium is in part that it's no longer acceptable to kill someone after a family feud or a drunken fight over honor.

00:34:12 Speaker_04
How strongly do you believe this?

00:34:14 Speaker_02
Well, I'm open to alternative explanations, but I'd say that's the explanation to beat right now.

00:34:20 Speaker_02
I think from what we understand, the natural world in which we evolved, so in which our cognitive capacities developed, was, so far as we understand it, a lot more violent than the world that we're living in now.

00:34:33 Speaker_02
So we're attuned to engage in defensive, sometimes offensive violence by our nature. Nevertheless, Across a great deal of the human world, we now see that homicide in particular is very rare.

00:34:49 Speaker_02
Even up into the 18th century, you'd still find that dueling among certain classes was like just the right thing to do. It wasn't just something that happened.

00:34:56 Speaker_02
It was something that's like, oh, if you're not willing to do it, if you're not willing to get your dueling scars, there's something wrong with you. You're not defending your honor.

00:35:02 Speaker_04
Given all the expertise you've accumulated, if you could sit down with your grandfather now and try to convince him to stop driving drunk, what would you say?

00:35:12 Speaker_02
I mean, it would be difficult going back into the 1970s because it wouldn't be true. But what I try and tell him is that his friends don't drink and drive anymore. Now, that would be the best intervention that you could make.

00:35:24 Speaker_04
You've definitely changed my thinking about how to prevent crime. And I know many of our listeners will feel the same. Thank you, Nick.

00:35:31 Speaker_02
Oh, thank you so much, Adam.

00:35:36 Speaker_04
Talking with Nick made me realize that we focus too much on consequences and too little on appropriateness.

00:35:41 Speaker_04
Yes, you can motivate people with carrots and sticks, but we underestimate the power of shifting their views of what's socially acceptable and unacceptable. The best way to change behavior is often to change perceived norms.

00:35:58 Speaker_04
Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is part of the TED Audio Collective. And this episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic Standard. Our producers are Hannah Kingsley-Ma and Asia Simpson. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar.

00:36:11 Speaker_04
Our fact-checker is Paul Durbin. Original music by Hansdale Sue and Allison Leighton-Brown. Our team includes Eliza Smith, Jacob Winnick, Samaya Adams, Roxanne Highlash, Banban Cheng, Julia Dickerson, and Whitney Pennington-Rogers.

00:36:27 Speaker_02
I think about The Wire every day. Mark Zuckerberg thinks about the Roman Empire, I think about Avon Barksdale's empire.