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Scientific Encounters
Human behavior is the outcome of multicausal pathways. For example, in the theory of planned behavior, beliefs, intentions and perceived behavioral control are all parts of a causal chain that lead to a behavior, whether it’s cramming for an exam or stealing a car. The outcomes of behavior provide information relevant to beliefs, intentions and perceived behavioral control and so are part of the causal chain. Intervening at any point in the chain may change the behavior.
A root cause is not fixed: its effects are not fixed. What gets the ball rolling may not keep it going. What keeps it going may change. What keeps the ball rolling may lose potency with repetition, or be worn down by contrary forces. In other words, causal pathways are subject to decay.
An open science collaboration of researchers conducted replications of 100 studies published in three top psychology journals. Of the original studies, 97% had significant results. Of the replications, just 36% had significant results. Per the study authors, “collectively these results offer a clear conclusion: A large portion of replications produced weaker evidence for the original findings” (Collaboration, O.S., 2015). Replication studies have also been done in economics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, ecology, and organic chemistry. All arrived at the same clear conclusion.
“Property crime fell from the early-1990s onwards because of security improvements, particularly to vehicles and households. As fewer young people became involved in property crime, fewer progressed to violence (which is fortunately rarer), and fewer crimes were committed in which violence also occurs, such as robbery and aggravated burglary.” - Professor Graham Farrell, School of Law/University of Leeds. (Letter to The Economist, June 7, 2025 issue)
“News organizations increasingly use the terms “climate emergency” and “climate crisis” to convey the urgency of climate change; yet, little is known about how this terminology affects news audiences...[The results of our study] showed no effect of terminology on climate change engagement; however, “climate emergency” reduced perceived news credibility and newsworthiness compared to “climate change.” …No interactions with political ideology were found.” - Feldman & Hart (2021) Upping the ante? The effects of “emergency” and “crisis” framing in climate change news.
Grandiosity refers to a sense of specialness and self-importance that might lead you to:
boast about real or exaggerated accomplishments
consider yourself more talented or intelligent than others
dismiss or try to one-up the achievements of others
believe you’re above rules or ordinary limits
fail to recognize that your actions could harm others
lash out in anger when someone criticizes you or points out a flaw in your plans
— from “What is Grandiosity?”, PsychCentral
AI Overviews are a wonderful tool but shouldn’t be considered the final word on a topic or query. They are, however, a good place to begin an exploration.
With that in mind, I’ll start subsequent Survive and Thrive posts with an AI Overview on the topic under consideration and then proceed to whatever more I’ve found out in my own explorations.
Why does this matter? Because longitudinal studies have found that students who performed worse in PISA at age 15 are less likely to attain higher levels of education by the age of 25, and are more likely to be out of the labor market entirely, ie, not in education, employment or training. For many, a lifetime of economic hardship and reliance on public services follows.
Part of this performance gap can be explained by socio-economic and language factors, e.g., poverty and lack of fluency in the language used on the tests. I imagine age at immigration matters as well: a person who immigrates as a teenager will likely find school harder in their new country than someone who arrived as a baby. Following this logic, I’d expect second-generation immigrants - born in a country to at least one foreign-born parent - would have little difficulty adapting to a country’s education system and so their PISA scores would reflect this.
Immigrant students often do worse on PISA assessments than non-immigrant students, especially in industrialized countries. However, the performance gap between immigrants and non-immigrants varies considerably across countries. For example…
Per the above chart, American 15-year olds have been reading at roughly the same level (on average) as they were 20 years ago. Surprisingly, their reading performance held up rather well during the pandemic years, despite the challenges of extended school closures, remote learning and the high absenteeism.
This post was going to compare police response times (RTs) in the ten most dangerous US cities with the RTs of the safest cities (link). Unfortunately, none of the dangerous cities had decent RT data, except for Oakland, California. But we’re in luck! Oakland has great data, not only for RTs but also for police staffing levels, both across several years.
1. Curiosity …
There is no hard-and-fast threshold for an acceptable clearance rate. That said, Oakland’s rate is abysmal. No wonder Oakland’s the most dangerous city in the US!
These posts will explore factors that are thought to influence violent crime rates, such as police response times, clearance rates, conviction rates, sentencing norms, and demographics. I will limit my exploration to the 10 safest and 10 most dangerous cities listed in the above chart, the better to reveal patterns of influence. Hopefully, these cities keep good records.
The authors don’t tell us why Medicare and insurers are increasingly relying on prior authorization, nor do they address the prevalence of unnecessary or low-value medical care or the risks associated with such care. That’s a huge omission. Potential harms should be weighed against potential benefits, the better to find solutions that preserve benefits while reducing harm. As for the prevalence and risk of unnecessary and low-value care, evidence suggests that up to one-fifth of healthcare spending is wasted on such care and around 10% of patients are harmed in the process.
“False consciousness [is] the notion that people are so misled about reality that they act against their own interests. What was once the preserve of Marxists, flummoxed that workers refused to lose their capitalist chains, is now the fall-back position for the modern [left], which worries that voters cannot accurately comprehend the world in which they live.” - Are voters as clueless as Labour’s intelligentsia thinks? The Economist, November 30, 2024.
These survey results reveal broad support for a get-tough approach to crime before 2000. Then, as the crime rate dropped, American attitudes softened - until crime rates rose again, a trend the following chart documents…
The FBI’s crime rates are based on arrests, whereas people in these states’ Criminal Legal System have been convicted of crimes. What I’d like to see is how much arrest rates diverge from conviction rates, and why they diverge, e.g., plea deals, diversion programs, prosecutorial discretion/approach to criminal justice, overzealous police over-arresting without sufficient evidence, etc. I imagine the prevalence of these various factors vary according to state, jurisdiction and local politics.
Does that mean science writers should avoid expressing opinions regarding the significance of whatever they’re writing about? No, but they should do so in the spirit of science: with an abundance of caution and plenty of hedging. Above all, they need to take care not to mislead or exaggerate.