The Psychology & Economics of Community Development: How Impending Death Affects Adolescents

November 18, 2011 • Blog, Public Policy, Thoughts • by
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A couple of nights ago, my wife and I were having dinner with some friends when the topic of conversation turned to social problems in lower income communities. My wife is a therapist who has worked with low-income individuals and families, and the couple we were having dinner with both work in those kinds of communities as well and so we were all very passionate about the subject.

During the course of conversation my wife brought up the fact that many of the clients she worked with had a sense of foreshortened future, i.e. that they would not live very long. She said that a lot of the adolescents she worked with anticipated dying by age 25. This idea, while surprising, was confirmed by our two dinner guests.

I think this has massive policy implications. We all make decisions about investments based upon their return, with some investments having short-term returns while others mature over a longer period of time. People with a sense of foreshortened future won’t ever make long-term investments. If you don’t expect to live past 25, why make an investment that wouldn’t benefit you until you were in your 30s? It would be completely irrational to do that.

So long-term investments, like education, are irrational. Why would you spend all that time and money going to school when you wouldn’t live to reap the benefits.

Other cost-benefit analyses would be altered by short-term horizons as well. You will be more likely to engage in riskier behaviors because the immediate benefit of the risky behavior is more likely to outweigh the costs, if the costs would be aggregated over a long time horizon. Why not commit a crime that could benefit you today when you don’t expect to live long enough to pay the consequences?

We cannot expect people to make long-term investments until they no longer have a sense of foreshortened future. Offering a person hope is just as important as offering them an education, because until they have the hope, they will never invest in the education. I think this shows that in community development, changing the psychology of the community is just as important as changing its economics. The two are intricately connected.

On Martian Psychology

November 3, 2011 • Blog, Research, Science • by
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Tomorrow, six men will have successfully a completed the round-trip to Mars. Of course they didn’t actually go to Mars, they never even left the Moscow car park where their capsule has been for the last 520 days, but the six men of the Mars500 mission will emerge tomorrow.

The year and half long experiment tested what it would be like to send a team to Mars. They even simulated delayed communication with Earth, as a call to Mars would take days to arrive and then get a response. The crew is said to have survived quite well (though after reading Mary Roach’s Packing for Mars I’m less inclined to believe the rosy press release) which is actually quite important because the psychology of space travel is a big impediment to long duration missions.

The crew was made up of people of four nationalities and communicated with a wide range of support staff back on “Earth”. Its impressive that no one opted to leave the mission early, which would have been allowed, and that they seem to be doing alright.

You can watch them open the capsule here. For more read this article from Wired.

Proof

August 24, 2011 • Blog, Measurement & Evaluation, nonprofit • by
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Should non-profits be forced to prove that their interventions actually work? All too often the strategies and programs employed by non-profits seemed haphazard and have no real basis in scientific research. That does not mean however, that proof should be required.

Proof is a tricky thing. For one, attaining scientific proof of something is very difficult, requiring lots of time, money, and people. Second, as discussed in this post from Tactical Philanthropy, proof seemingly declines over time. “For all the perceived precision of a large study “proving” that something is true, the fact remains that over time our understanding of facts and truths change.”

The post quotes a New Yorker article title The Truth Wears Off that is quite interesting.

“The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.

But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology.”

This is not to say however, that non-profits shouldn’t strive to understand the effect their interventions are having. All too often non-profits flee from facts and cling to anecdotes. They never step back and examine the impact they are having on the communities, people groups, or issues they are seeking to affect.

Scientific proof should not be the goal, but ignorance is unacceptable. A balance must be struck that seeks to understand affect without necessarily scientifically proving it.