Headline of the Day

How to Get 7th Graders to Smoke

—Adam Mastroianni, on why so many interventions designed to help people do the opposite.

It should be noted here that the people who devise these interventions, and those who are called on to attempt to implement those inventions are remarkably impervious to any data which might show that they do not work, particularly in the area of anti-drug programs:

 ………

That’s just one random paper from the 80s, but the literature is littered with similar well-meaning interventions that failed or backfired:

• “Scared Straight” programs, where at-risk youth go to prisons and get yelled at by prisoners, famouslydo not work and maybe make students more likely to commit crimes.
  
  
• The Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E) program I had to do in elementary school, where a cop came to class and told us about all the drugs we weren’t supposed to take, also doesn’t do anything.
  
  
• A big trial of mindfulness training in UK schools maybe made kids a bit more depressed, and two attempts to teach psychotherapy principles to students in Australia both failed.

Those programs all harmed kids or failed to help them, but don’t worry, we also harm adults sometimes, or fail to help them:

• Social scientists have invented lots of programs that try to make people less prejudiced. Every review of these programs concludes that they either don’t work or they don’t work in the ways we want or we don’t know if they work.
  
  
• Researchers came up with their best attempts at getting Democrats and Republicans to like each other more, and all of their ideas got outperformed by a Heineken commercial.
  
  
• You know those signs on the highway that say things like, “Drive safely! Over 20 people have died on this highway so far this year!”? They maybe cause more people to crash and die.

The basic point here, and it might seem obvious, is that when people have problems, the best way to address this is NOT to attempt change the people.  The best way to address this is to change the environment, and the associated with those environments.