The science of fighting crime with Nick Cowen (Transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

[00:00:00] Nick Cowen: In the uk, we reduced drink driving fatalities from 1980 to 2020 by around 85%.

Hey

[00:00:13] Adam Grant: everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to rethinking my podcast on the science of what makes us Tick with the TED Audio Collective. 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 Cowen. He's a criminologist at the University of Lincoln in the uk and I recently read a riveting article that he wrote about putting an end to drunk driving. Nick made me rethink some of my

[00:00:43] Nick Cowen: core

[00:00:44] Adam Grant: assumptions about how to fight crime. I.

[00:00:46] Nick Cowen: 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, uh, abnormal in this community. 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? Uh, 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.

It it, it turns out that they were recruiting in. Criminology and I'd published a little bit on, in, in criminology already from, you know, my, my perspective as a political scientist, basically on what kinds of criminal justice policies work to reduce crime. And then in the interview, the panel were, you know, they, they, 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? And I said, well, you know, I've been studying political behavior. And political behavior often involves a lot of. Fairly sharp edges, ambition, uh, motivation, disagree ability, uh, willingness to burn people if necessary.

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

[00:02:16] Adam Grant: I thought there might be a little bit more of a personal origin story, like you were a Batman fan as a kid.

[00:02:21] Nick Cowen: I suppose everyone's always interested in kind of crime fiction. I grew up in Oxford and we have a great, uh, long running series. It's this, this chap called Inspector Morse. Basically there's, there's a murder every week in Oxford, which is not very accurate 'cause there aren't that many murders in, in Oxford Shear.

Uh, Ty typically. Um, but uh, you know, they kind of like show the, the lovely architecture, the rural Oxford shear, 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. So I understand that when the printing press was invented, the first thing that was used was that it was used for, was obviously to translate the Bible into the vernacular.

That's the kind of what famously happened. The very next thing that happens is a bunch of newsletters about horrific crimes taking place, especially kind of intra familial violence, uh, happening throughout Germany that. Becomes the next thing that the, the new Medium is used for. And of course, the medium that we are on right now, podcasting that's kind of elevated and kept afloat by, uh, uh, enormous range of very popular true crime podcasts.

So, yeah.

[00:03:27] Adam Grant: Well, this, this is gonna be even better. This is gonna be a true crime data podcast. Mm-Hmm mm-Hmm. 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 and. It always bothered me that these detectives, like the Sherlock Holmes, has spent all their time trying to solve crimes.

None of it. Trying to prevent them. Mm-Hmm mm-Hmm. 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 wanna talk about today. Let's begin with your grandfather. 'cause I think the paradox of your grandfather, to me it was poignant.

Uh, so tell me, tell me a little bit about how he spent his days versus his nights.

[00:04:12] Nick Cowen: My grandfather was someone I, I, I looked up to a great deal and still, still look up to, he kind of transitioned like my family from a working class family into a middle class family by kind of studying hard and becoming a, a doctor he worked in, in army medicine.

He was deployed, uh, uh, to Africa and then later on he treated. People who had fought in the Korean War and he became a, um, general practitioner. So what, what I think in the US you'd call a primary care physician, and he was for many decades, a kind of dedicated member of his community. And he would often, um, you know, uh, take time, you know, out of, 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.

You know, he was, he was anxious and conscientious basically. That's kind of my kind of character trait as well. Uh, at the same time. My grandfather would drink and drive on, on occasion. Um, and he would do this typically, uh, when engaged in other kind of these, uh, elevated social activities that he was always interested in.

So things like the theater, uh, the opera. He was also a keen golfer. And, uh, these events in his day would, would always involve, uh, drinking. 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.

Uh, uh, driving and a, a few times he told me about this story when, you know, driving home, uh, after one of these events, he knew he was over the limit was driving slowly, but perhaps not quite so steadily as, as, as normal, and a police officer noticed, pulled him over and, uh, breathalyzed him. And this was probably one of his most frightening events of his life.

'cause he, he told me about it several times. Miraculously, according to him, it came up negative. 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. So we don't know for sure. I suspect subsequently my grandfather probably drank somewhat less after having that experience. Notably, he did not eliminate his drink driving, so it would've been a, a marginal reduction rather than a total reduction.

But he was aware that he was being watched.

[00:06:37] Adam Grant: There's a lot of research in psychology on the illusion of invulnerability. Mm-Hmm. And how it tends to be more pronounced in professions like medicine. Mm-Hmm. I've read some studies of, of doctors where they say things like, well, I'm a doctor so I'm protected.

I. And you're like, what? I'm sorry. What exactly does that mean? In a couple of 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. 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, and it's just, it's mind boggling to me that people so smart can be so dumb.

[00:07:22] Nick Cowen: I think my, my grandfather, it's true that as a doctor, you know, someone who, who had 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 and perhaps his experience in the military as well may have, uh, 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.

[00:07:43] Adam Grant: So let's, let's talk about how to then change the behavior of people like your grandfather. 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, the

[00:07:59] Nick Cowen: statistics there.

In the uk we reduced drink driving fatalities from 1980 to 2020 by. Around 85%. So in 1980 there were 1,450 fatalities attributed to drunk driving. In 2020, there were only 220. The impact in the US is a little bit less so. We went from, in 19 80, 20 8,000 drunk driving deaths, and in 2020 there were 11,654.

So that's somewhere between a half and a two third reduction. So still impressive, but perhaps not an order of magnitude, which is like closer to what we're talking about in the uk. Why have

[00:08:44] Adam Grant: drunk driving deaths gone down? And secondly, um, what, why are you having so much more success in the UK than we've had in the us?

[00:08:51] Nick Cowen: When we're thinking about the reduction in deaths, there's obviously a lot of other stuff that's going on besides behavioral change. So we've changed the way that cars work, uh, these days. Uh, even a minor collision usually causes a lot of crumbling, and the reason for that is we'd rather total a car and save the passengers and the, and the drivers than to have a car that can survive, uh, uh, mi minor collisions.

At the same time, things like trauma surgery and emergency medicine in general has imp. Proved a great deal, and that means that we can convert more injuries due to drink, driving into things where people recover and they therefore, they don't appear in the fatality. Statistics. 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. As, as well. So, although I'm sure there's some shift in the categories, it still appears to be behavioral change that, that, that's happening.

[00:09:51] Adam Grant: That's encouraging. Yeah. We'll take it. It's encouraging.

[00:09:54] Nick Cowen: It's encouraging. Uh, 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. Probably the distance between a bar and a home is gonna be a lot larger. It's a much more of a driving culture in the US compared to the uk.

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

[00:10:25] Adam Grant: Uh, I th I thought you were gonna blame American culture more that, that we've just done a poor job stigmatizing drunk driving here than you have in the uk.

I.

[00:10:33] Nick Cowen: One of the, the key ideas in this article that I wrote is that culture is, in some ways downstream of policy. There's this idea that's like, okay, so culture is this kind of really difficult thing to shift. It's been around for thousands of years or hundreds of years or 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, we don't want you doing that anymore. We don't want you drink driving. At least we don't want you drink driving at this, 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, in, in this case. 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, uh, abnormal in this community. 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, and policing can play a role in changing culture.

[00:11:30] Adam Grant: So one of, one of the things that's really fascinating to me about your perspective, Nick, is that it dovetails with, 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. It hadn't occurred to me though that this, this would apply to serious criminal activity, like drunk driving.

So tell me what's, what's the best evidence that's that's convinced you that. Changing perceived norms and creating a sense of stigma is an active ingredient here.

[00:12:10] Nick Cowen: Yeah. So I, I think, um, my, my evidence comes from a, a, 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. We know that, uh. 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 gonna be more likely to be, uh, to be victimized.

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. Enormous differences that are kind of going on there that are, are hard to explain. Bunk has has some models that suggests that, um, what's what's going on is that there's a difference between criminal justice costs of committing a crime and the moral costs.

And the moral costs are the kind of internal feelings of kind of shame and, and, uh, deviance and, um, and general bad feeling that are associated with committing crime. And basically, if you are already in a high crime area, perhaps you might be a victim yourself on occasion, then you are more likely to think that committing a crime is appropriate if it kind of achieves your, your ends.

Or it's maybe a way, uh, of, of expressing yourself or of perhaps demonstrating that you're someone who. Who shouldn't be trifled with 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, um, it might be quite hard to maintain what you might think of as a, a medium crime equilibrium in a particular neighborhood.

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 as, as well. So it kind of like settles at a relatively high crime equilibrium. Um, mm-Hmm.

Another piece of evidence that that funk offers is, is sanctions without penalties. She uses the example of sanctions for failing to vote in countries where it's illegal not to vote. 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.

So. People think, okay, I better vote. And even if the cost of voting, like the actual practicalities of getting it together and going out and voting is actually more than say, um, the cost of the fine, people will still think, oh, well it was a fine, so it was wrong. Therefore, I'm gonna go out and vote.

[00:14:41] Adam Grant: How do you square that with the g?

Work on a fine as a price where if you find parents for picking up their kids late from from school, they basically start to think, oh, well this is cheap daycare. Now I have afterschool babysitting that I've paid for.

[00:14:56] Nick Cowen: Yeah, I, I think I heard that, uh, via Michael Sandel. He made that an important part of his argument about, uh, not putting a price on everything.

I think quite a large number of people don't view a fine as a fee. Like the labeling is important for a lot of people.

[00:15:11] Adam Grant: So the other kind of evidence that you highlight, which I, I think is compelling, is the evidence that we need to be really careful about the anti drunk driving messages that we send out.

Because sometimes by saying like, drunk driving is bad and you shouldn't do it, you in inadvertently signal that that behavior is. Widespread. And so we need to, we need to highlight that. It's not, I really liked the, the quasi experiment that, that you mentioned in Montana. We're just sharing that like four out of five young adults in Montana don't drink and drive.

I. Um, just disseminating that statistic was enough to change people's perceptions. Hey, like, this behavior is, is not as common as I thought it was. Maybe I shouldn't do it.

[00:15:57] Nick Cowen: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I was, I was impressed by a theoretical basis, uh, for that study. It seemed, um, uh, very subtle and very much in line with what we know about.

So social norms, um, 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. I. That's the kind of thing you want to avoid. Yeah. That's very well put. So I think, I think this is kind of the, the weirdness of thinking about, uh, crime as being, uh, criminal justice as, as, as, as making people think that something is inappropriate, rather than making them think that it's wrong explicitly.

What you kind of want people to feel is that it would be wrong in their little milieu, that people are gonna think that you're kind of, Ooh, I, I don't like that. In order to. To influence behavior. It's like you kind of want to make people think the behavior is icky, not wrong or harmful.

[00:16:53] Adam Grant: Well, one of the things I, I found intriguing about this perspective is it, it captured something that's always bothered me about the way that people talk about culture in, in organizations.

Um, there's a famous line, misattributed to Peter Drucker, he never actually said it, um, which is Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Mm-hmm. And it's supposed to remind leaders and managers and policy makers that you shouldn't just pay attention to the, the way that you're solving problems and setting goals and just sort of trying to execute your vision.

You should also, you know, pay attention to the values and norms you create and. I've always been bothered by that because I'm like, well, your strategy influences your culture. If your strategy is corner cutting, you're gonna build an unethical culture. If your strategy is long-term prioritization of solving people's problems, then you're gonna build a more caring culture and a culture that you know is less likely to be sort of narrowly focused on immediate self-interest.

And so I really like the way that you've, you've highlighted how actually policy formulation in the context of crime can influence people's perceptions of a culture. It's surprising to me that drunk driving would not have been stigmatized a couple decades ago. I. It seems to me self-evident. Like I, I would've assumed that both people know how much drinking, alcohol impairs judgment.

Mm-hmm. And also the consequences are so severe. Like, you could kill someone, you could, you know, you could lose your own life. Why take the risk? I guess the question is then what happens? To stigmatize drunk driving, and then how does it interfere with somebody's likelihood of, of, of sort of changing their choice in the

[00:18:33] Nick Cowen: moment?

Uh, I, I kind of have this idea, um, that, that, that I've been working on called the occasional suspect as an alternative to the usual suspect. 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, 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. And so I, I think kind of what, 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.

And, and people aren't necessarily running the calculations about how, 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. I think the prospects of sanctions and the prospects of people looking down on you, if you decide to drink and drive.

Probably happens, you know, the week before or the, in the hours before you a, a arrange to go out for a drink and basically it's probably when people prepare, uh, how they're going to get home afterwards. I, I, I think if, if people are not thinking, they're not planning ahead, then there's a very good chance that someone is.

You know, even this current environment still going to get behind the wheel. I think where the, 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, 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 gonna risk it? 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.

[00:20:37] Adam Grant: 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. Mm-hmm. And then as a result of that, they're more likely to take a cab or an Uber, 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. And so that planning up front, because they, they don't want to violate a social norm of doing something that's both dangerous and. Sort of unacceptable is enough to, to lead to better planning,

[00:21:13] Nick Cowen: is that right? Exactly. I, I think that's the main mechanism for the way most people are making those decisions.

But my, my argument is that to kind of jumpstart that kind of social norm change, you need to actually have police activity. So the, the, the mere fact that you've got communications telling people that it's wrong and it's a crime, and, uh, you, you could get in trouble without actually having people get into trouble.

Doesn't have quite the, the same impact. My intuitive

[00:21:40] Adam Grant: understanding of deterrence is you create frequent or severe punishment and that leads people to say, well, I don't wanna get caught and I don't want to go to jail, so I'm not gonna do this crime. 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.

And so it's not that that laws lead people to sort of make these utility maximizing decisions of like, I've gotta avoid the negative outcome, but rather that they, they lead people to change their sense of what social norms they wanna follow. The

[00:22:28] Nick Cowen: 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. That means that, uh, merely getting sanctioned just a little bit. So, you know, potentially just a, a talking to by the judge. In, in the UK we have some disposals that are called, uh, conditional discharges or absolute discharges where they say, we are not doing anything, but you've admitted the offense and it's on your record.

So no actual penalty. 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. And so that means that it's generally a good idea to focus on certainty of detection rather than the severity of the sanction.

[00:23:18] Adam Grant: 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 consequences.

How do I get the outcome I want? And logic of appropriateness is. What should a person like me do in a situation like this? I hear your take on preventing drunk driving is 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.

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.

[00:23:57] Nick Cowen: They're absolutely right that people are basically thinking about what's appropriate. They, they might be saying it's about morality, but, uh, really their, their moral framework is gonna be highly influenced by what they deem to be appropriate in their social context.

[00:24:09] Adam Grant: I base my, my views of right and wrong, primarily on harm. And so if a choice is obviously harmful, then I think it's, it's, you know, it's pretty clear that that's gonna be a moral issue. Now, is there a trade off, Nick, between prevention? Crime and injustice of punishment. 'cause it, it seems to me that one of the things you're suggesting is that if, if we were to take that kind of, of harsh punishment into the UK or into the us there's a very good chance that, uh, racial minorities are gonna be disproportionately punished, uh, in the context of traffic stops, for example.

And then do we just exacerbate our mass incarceration problem in the us? If you're suggesting we need harsher punishments to stigmatize behaviors, we wanna 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.

[00:25:06] Nick Cowen: Comparing the United Kingdom. The United States can be quite quite useful here because of course no police force is perfect, 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 and due to the, the nature of the, 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 going to come, uh, soon. My results that have proven useful for the United Kingdom ought to be addressed with care in the United States.

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 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, uh, breathalyzing people is that it's before they've actually done any harm. They've merely probabilistically risked harm, and that means you to not in 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.

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.

[00:26:43] Adam Grant: So, okay. You ready for a lightning round?

[00:26:45] Nick Cowen: Okay. Alright. I've never done this before. Let's see how it goes. What is the worst advice you've ever gotten? Don't worry about publishing. Just finish the PhD.

[00:26:55] Adam Grant: That is terrible advice. How about the best advice I.

[00:26:59] Nick Cowen: 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. 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.

[00:27:28] Adam Grant: What is an unpopular opinion you're willing to defend?

[00:27:32] Nick Cowen: I think it could be worth going after casual drug users with fines in order to basically deter and, and to dry up the supply of consumers, of of drugs. What kinds of drugs are we

[00:27:48] Adam Grant: talking about here

[00:27:49] Nick Cowen: in the uk? Uh, cocaine is a massive problem. 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 of, of, of, of going to prison.

[00:28:06] Adam Grant: Wow. What's a prediction you have for the future of crime?

[00:28:11] Nick Cowen: I suspect we're going to see a lot fewer road based deaths once more and more of private transport becomes automated. And, uh, tha thanks to ai,

[00:28:21] Adam Grant: things to look forward to. And what's a question you have for me?

[00:28:25] Nick Cowen: How useful do you find, uh, economic theory for explaining behavior within organizations?

[00:28:33] Adam Grant: Not very useful with apologies to economists.

[00:28:38] Nick Cowen: That's fascinating. 'cause as a non-economist, I find economics extremely helpful. Maybe it's because the kind of actors I'm dealing with are perhaps sometimes a bit too rational. I. 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, to many of the costs, they start pricing it and because they haven't got quite the same pull of social norms means that they behave a little bit more like people in in, in, in economic models.

[00:29:06] Adam Grant: Well, that's a thing again, moment for me. I've anchored too heavily on all the departures from rationality that, that humans are capable of. But if we're talking about criminal masterminds who respond more strongly than the average person to, to costs and benefits and incentives, then I think there's a lot of value there.

I was thinking more about sophisticated microeconomic theories, the basics of. Like thinking about individual responses on a supply and demand curve, or thinking about how people respond to incentives, like Yeah, very useful. Just not particularly interesting to me. 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.

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. You argue that this might even be true for murder. Mm-Hmm mm-Hmm. 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. How strongly do you believe this?

[00:30:35] Nick Cowen: Well, I'm, I'm open to alternative explanations, but I'd say that's the explanation to beat right now. I think from what we understand, the natural world in which, you know, we evolved so in which our kind of cognitive capacities, uh, developed was so, so far as we understand it, a lot more violent than the sort of world that we are living in now.

So we're kind of like attuned to engage in defensive, sometimes offensive violence, like by our nature, nevertheless. Across, across a great deal of the Cuban world. We now see that homicide in particular is, is very rare. 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. 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, you know there's something wrong with you. You're not defending, your Honor,

[00:31:24] Adam Grant: 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?

[00:31:33] Nick Cowen: 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.

[00:31:46] Adam Grant: 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.

[00:31:52] Nick Cowen: Oh, thank you so much, Adam.

[00:31:57] Adam Grant: Talking with Nick made me realize that we focus too much on consequences and too little on appropriateness. 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.

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. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Original music by Hans Dale Sue and Allison Leighton Brown.

Our team includes Eliza Smith, Jacob Winnick, Samaya Adams, Roxanne Highl, Baba Chang, Julia Dickerson, and Whitney Pennington Rogers.

[00:32:49] Nick Cowen: I think about the wire every day. You know, mark Zuckerberg thinks about the Roman Empire. I think about Avon, Barksdale's Empire.