The Nurture Effect - Anthony Biglan
The Nurture Effect - Anthony Biglan
The Nurture Effect - Anthony Biglan
“Read this book, please read this book! … The nurture effect impacts us
daily in our health, intelligence, behavior, emotions, work, and relation-
ships. The daily nurture effect even codes our gene expression—some-
thing my scientific colleagues and I only began to suspect one or two
decades ago, but have proof of now.€This book maps how we can inten-
tionally nurture ourselves, our loved ones, our communities, and even our
nations. All of this is based on rigorous practical science. If you want to
improve the now and better the future, read this book and apply the
nurture effect at home, at work or at school, and in your community.”
—Dennis D. Embry, PhD, president and senior scientist
at PAXIS Institute
“The Nurture Effect is a remarkably ambitious book that draws the blue-
prints for creating prosocial communities aiming to help people live health-
ier, value-directed, and enjoyable lives. Biglan explains how people can
work together to reduce suffering and improve quality of living for each
other, and supports these plans with reliable behavioral research.€ The
science of this book is captivating because Biglan expresses the ideas in an
understandable and practical manner.€ In other words, he simplifies the
science of human behavior so you can use it to improve your own commu-
nity. The Nurture Effect hits the ground running with clear, concise, well-
stated facts about creating a social context for people to experience a life
well-lived. Throughout the book, Biglan expands these ideas into the differ-
ent branches of community, such as family, schools, work, peer-relations,
and discusses how—when approached appropriately—they can make
lasting positive contributions to individuals. The perspectives you gain from
this book will not only assist you in helping your community to become
stronger and healthier, but will also help you as an individual to experience
those same positive outcomes.”
—D.J. Moran, PhD, founder of Pickslyde Consulting and
the MidAmerican Psychological Institute
“This work is Anthony Biglan’s magnum opus. He has pulled together many
ideas from multiple disciplinary domains. It is required reading for anyone
who is serious about fixing the problems in our education system and alle-
viating poverty. €Anyone who liked David Brooks’ The Social Animal will
also like this. Although Biglan is a self-identified and proud behaviorist, this
work shows his openness to other perspectives. I was especially happy to see
his new nuanced view of the role of reinforcement in human behavior
(pages 28-29). Intrinsic motivation is more powerful in the long term than
extrinsic motivation.”
—Brian R. Flay, DPhil, professor of social and behavioral
health sciences at Oregon State University, Corvallis,
OR, and emeritus distinguished professor of public health
and psychology at University of Illinois at Chicago,
Chicago, IL
“The author’s engaging writing style enables readers to appreciate the ele-
gance of applying knowledge based on rigorous research to develop and
apply evidence-based interventions that prevent problems and promote
well-being on a societal scale.”
—Marion S. Forgatch, PhD, senior scientist emerita at the
Oregon Social Learning Center (OSLC), where she
developed and tested programs for families with children
at risk or referred for child adjustment problems and
substance abuse
“The Nurture Effect is one of those rare books that draws from a lifetime of
careful scientific study to provide clear prescriptions—in language non-
scientists can understand—about how to make our world a better place.
Pushing back against contemporary fatalism, Anthony Biglan shows us that
we know more than ever about how to promote human flourishing. The
problem is that we’re not applying this knowledge as we should. The Nurture
Effect explains how we could change that, and, even more important, how
you can help make the change happen.”
—Jacob S. Hacker, PhD, Stanley B. Resor Professor of
political science, director at the Institution for Social and
Policy Studies, and coauthor of Winner-Take-All Politics
“In The Nurture Effect, Anthony Biglan offers a challenge and a road map
for making our society more effective and successful. His message is at once
simple and overwhelming. There is a science of human behavior, and we
need to use it.”
—Rob Horner, PhD, endowed professor of special
education at the University of Oregon
“Tony Biglan’s book puts forth a bold and thought-provoking plan to help
every community ensure that our young people grow into caring and pro-
ductive adults. It’s well worth reading.”
—Senator Merkley
The
Nurture
Effect
How the Science of
Human Behavior
Can Improve
Our Lives & Our World
â•… Acknowledgments ix
PART 1
Science Equal to the Challenge of the Human Condition
1â•… A Pragmatic Science of Human Behavior 11
PART 2
A Wealth of Knowledge About How to Help People Thrive
2â•… Nurturing Families 41
PART 3
The Larger Social Context Affecting Well-�Being
6â•… From People to Populations 127
PART 4
Evolving the Nurturing Society
10â•… In Caring Relationships with Others 195
vi
Foreword
Beacons are needed in exactly such situations. They cast light so that
what was unseen can be seen. They give direction so that instead of wan-
dering aimlessly, we can stay on course during long and difficult journeys.
And they allow us to mark and measure whether we are making progress,
providing reassurance that every step we take is bringing us closer to our
destination.
Tony Biglan brings four decades of experience on the front lines of
behavioral science to this far-�reaching, carefully argued, and compelling
book. A major prevention scientist, Tony knows many of the people who
have tested these methods; he himself was involved in key studies, policy
innovations, and legal struggles. He tells the stories of knowledge develop-
ers and of the people whose lives have been affected, showing in case after
case that these methods are powerful tools in the creation of deliberate
social change.
Tony is not content merely to list these solutions; he organizes them
and shows the core principles by which they operate: increasing nurtur-
ance, cooperation, and psychological flexibility, and decreasing coercion
and aversive control. He distinguishes empirically between the psychologi-
cal and social features that are engines of change, and the psychological or
social features that come along for the ride. And he nests this knowledge
in an examination of what might need to change for us to make better use
of it.
Over and over again, the same small set of features have been shown
to have profound and lasting effects. Spend a dollar on the Good Behavior
Game with children in first or second grade, and save eighty-�four dollars in
special education, victim, health care, and criminal justice costs over the
next few decades. Aggressive boys randomly assigned to play this simple
game at age six or seven had two-�thirds fewer drug problems as adults!
There initially may be a “too good to be true” reaction to results like
this, but Tony takes the time to walk the readers through the research,
and its quality and replication. As common themes emerge, unnecessary
skepticism gradually washes away and we begin as readers to wake up to an
incredible reality. Because of our belief in science and the hope it provides,
we as a society have spent billions on research to learn what works in
addressing our social and psychological problems. Today we have a moun-
tain of answers that could enormously impact our lives.
viii
Acknowledgments
Tony provides the means for parents and others to take advantage of
what we know right now. At the end of every chapter he provides sections
on action implications for particular audiences, and summarizes what has
been shown into a manageable set of bulleted takeaway points. He opens
the door that policy makers and the public might walk through by listing
the policy implications of what we know for the ability to better our chil-
dren and our society.
As the book progresses, you realize that our failure to work together to
ensure that research matters in the creation of a more nurturing society is
itself produced by features of our current system. Children are nested
within families, who are nested within communities. Communities are
nested within political and economic structures. All of this is evolving—Â�
but not always positively. Sometimes social evolution is crafted by orga-
nized forces linked to economic visions that are producing rapidly
increasing economic and health disparities. This wonderful book casts
light and provides direction even here. Regular people can play the social
evolutionary game too. We can develop our systems toward a purpose if we
have the knowledge and foresight needed to do so. This book provides a
healthy serving of exactly that knowledge and foresight.
In the end readers will know that together we can create a more nur-
turing and effective society, step by step. We have the knowledge to do
better—Â�much, much better. And ultimately we will follow such steps—Â�
knowledge of this level of importance does not remain forever unused. But
why wait? Why not act now? By bringing together the fruits of behavioral
and evolutionary science, the modern world can begin a grand journey,
buoyed up not just by the hope of science in the abstract but by the sub-
stantive scientific knowledge we already have in hand. We will learn more
as we go, but because of the hope that science represents, we as a human
community have already funded the knowledge developers who have
created this body of work. It is time to use what we have together created.
It is time to apply the science of hope.
—Steven C. Hayes
Foundation Professor and Director of Clinical Training
University of Nevada
Author of Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life
ix
Acknowledgments
xii
Introduction:
The Way Forward
all successful prevention programs, policies, and practices. If you look into
these programs, you find that all of them make people’s environments
more nurturing. They encourage families to abandon conflict. Step-�by-�
step, they teach people to support each other’s well-Â�being and develop-
ment. They convince families and schools to abundantly reinforce young
people for helping each other and contributing to their schools and com-
munities. They limit opportunities and influences to engage in problem
behavior. They encourage us to persevere in pursuing our most cherished
values, even while facing significant obstacles, including thoughts and
feelings that discourage us from trying. Nurturing environments are key to
creating a healthier, happier society.
We can make our environments more nurturing by widely implement-
ing the preventive interventions that research is identifying. But contextu-
ally focused behavioral science is also identifying how the larger social
context for families and schools must change to fully realize nurturing
environments in society. We have evolved a worldwide system of corporate
capitalism that has brought us great prosperity and unimagined techno-
logical innovations. But it also increases poverty and economic inequality
in developed countries and promotes materialistic values and practices
that undermine nurturance in families, schools, neighborhoods, and com-
munities. Although the behavioral sciences have not made as much prog-
ress on how to reform this larger social system as they have on making
families and schools more nurturing, the outline of what is needed is
becoming clear.
The tobacco control movement provides a good model for how to
achieve massive societal changes. In 1965, over 50 percent of men and 34
percent of women smoked. By 2010, only 23.5 percent of men and 17.9
percent of women were smoking (CDC 2011). These numbers represent
one of the twentieth century’s most important public health achievements.
When public health officials, epidemiologists, and victims of the cigarette
industry united to mobilize opposition to the unfettered marketing of a
product that was killing four hundred thousand Americans each year, they
moved a mountain. They formed a network of government agencies and
advocacy organizations that showed the public how harmful cigarettes are.
That created a growing movement that convinced most Americans that
the cigarette industry had been lying to them. It also mobilized support for
policies that encouraged people to quit—Â�or not start—Â�and educated them
2
Introduction
about the problem. Think of the last few meetings or social events you
attended. Was anyone smoking? Forty years ago, such events probably
would have taken place in smoke-�filled rooms. We have evolved a largely
smoke-�free society, despite powerful opposition.
Just as we have created a society in which it would be unthinkable to
light up a cigarette in the Kennedy Center lobby, we can create a society
where it is unthinkable that a child suffers abuse, fails in school, becomes
delinquent, or faces teasing and bullying. We could have a society in which
diverse people and organizations work together to ensure that families,
schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods are nurturing and that our capi-
talistic system functions to benefit everyone.
Addressing all the problems we confront might seem daunting. Would
we need a similar movement for each problem? Largely, we have that now:
Mothers Against Drunk Driving combats alcohol problems; the
Community Anti-�Drug Coalitions of America battle drug abuse; the
criminal justice system fights crime; schools foster academic success.
However, a broad, science-�guided social movement that works to ensure
that all facets of society support nurturance is possible.
This book is about how we can create such a movement. Nearly all
problems of human behavior stem from our failure to ensure that people
live in environments that nurture their well-�being. I am confident that, if
we marshal the evidence for nurturing environments and use the advo-
cacy techniques that worked so well for the tobacco control movement, we
can truly transform society. Not only will we have smoke-�free gatherings,
we will have communities that see to the well-�being of every member. We
will have less crime, mental illness, drug abuse, divorce, academic failure,
and poverty.
The benefits of this science-�based approach to transforming society
can extend well beyond prevention of individual psychological and behav-
ioral problems. At this point, we can use a wealth of accumulated knowl-
edge to evolve a society where people cooperate and care for each other.
From that fertile soil we can grow a society where businesses, nonprofits,
and governments work effectively for the common good. These claims
may seem incredible, but that is only because most people—Â�including
many behavioral scientists—Â�are unaware of the extraordinary advances of
behavioral science.
3
The Nurture Effect
4
Introduction
5
The Nurture Effect
As you can see, there are effective interventions for every phase of
development. In addition, many of these programs produce benefits long
after the program’s implementation. For example, the Nurse-Â� Family
Partnership reduced the number of children arrested for delinquency as
adolescents by more than 50 percent (Olds 2007). Finally, most preventive
interventions save more money than they cost. For example, the Good
Behavior Game, which helps elementary school children develop self-�
regulation and cooperation skills, saves about eighty-four dollars for every
dollar invested in it. It does this because it prevents problems ranging from
crime, smoking, and alcohol abuse to anxiety and suicide attempts (Kellam
et al. 2008).
The two most important environments for building a highly prosocial
society are families and schools. Virtually every problem we seek to prevent
emerges because of families and schools that fail to nurture prosocial
development. In chapter 2, I describe numerous effective family interven-
tions. In chapter 3, I describe what we have learned about how schools can
6
Introduction
nurture the social and academic skills of children from preschool through
high school. The third major influence on young people’s development is
their peer group. Chapter 4 describes how peer groups can influence young
people in harmful ways and how to prevent this.
However even in a world in which families and schools nurture devel-
opment, there will be many people who arrive at adulthood with signifi-
cant problems. Chapter 5 describes the tremendous progress in the
treatment of psychological and behavioral problems of adults over the past
four decades.
7
The Nurture Effect
food. I propose standards for determining when the need to regulate mar-
keting in the interest of public health outweighs the need to limit govern-
ment interference in marketing.
Chapter 8 addresses the problems of poverty and economic inequality.
The United States has the largest proportion of young people being raised
in poverty of any economically developed nation. We also have the highest
level of economic inequality. These conditions stress millions of families
and limit the effectiveness of even the best-�designed family interventions.
Despite much public discussion to the contrary, poverty and economic
inequality are far from inevitable. In chapter 8, I describe how the recent
evolution of public policy has contributed to these problems.
Chapter 9 examines the recent evolution of corporate capitalism.
Over the past forty years, public policy affecting economic well-�being has
shifted dramatically away from ensuring that every member of society has
at least a basic modicum of material well-�being. This is the direct result of
well-�organized and well-�funded advocacy conducted on behalf of some of
the wealthiest people and largest corporations in the United States. I
analyze this evolution in terms of the economic consequences that have
selected corporate lobbying practices and the resulting implications for
how we can evolve corporate practices that are more likely to contribute
to the evolution of a nurturing society.
8
PA R T 1
A Pragmatic Science of
Human Behavior
In the past 150 years, science has dramatically transformed a world that
was largely unchanged for centuries. In 1850, it took two and a half months
to get from New York to San Francisco. Today you can fly there in five and
a half hours. It took a month to get a letter from Utah to California in
1850; today you can talk to and see almost anyone in the world instantly.
In 1854, London was the world’s largest and most prosperous city. Its Soho
neighborhood suffered a cholera outbreak that killed over six hundred
people. Today, we would be shocked to hear that anyone died of cholera in
London.
Could the scientific study of human behavior produce similarly
remarkable transformations? They are well within reach. Yet because the
conflict, abuse, and neglect occurring in so many families have been with
us for millennia, they sometimes seem inevitable. In this book, I will
describe numerous tested and effective programs that reduce family con-
flict and abuse and ensure children’s successful development. The same is
true for schools. Throughout history, a sizable proportion of young people
failed to gain the social skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in life.
Thanks to careful research on the impact of school environments, we
have developed effective approaches to teaching and to nurturing social
skills and values that help young people become cooperative and caring
people. If these facts conflict with your impression of the state of schools
and families, it is because these science-�based strategies are not yet wide-
spread enough to produce massive change. But that will happen.
Then there are the so-�called mental illnesses. When I began to study
psychology in the 1960s, not one treatment procedure reliably alleviated
The Nurture Effect
12
A Pragmatic Science of Human Behavior
the relations of time and space (Isaacson 2007). The emphasis was on the
antecedent conditions that influenced the phenomenon of interest.
Darwin introduced a new model of causation: selection by conse-
quences. He wasn’t the first to recognize that species evolved (Menand
2001), but he was the first to see that it was the consequences of the char-
acteristics of species that determined whether a species would survive—Â�
and with it, its characteristics. This was a profound development in
scientific thinking. Humans readily discern antecedent causes. Indeed, the
tendency to see this kind of causation probably evolved out of the fact that
antecedent causation is so common and seeing it is vital to surviving. (In
fact, we are so inclined to look for antecedent causes of events that there is
a Latin phrase for the tendency to misattribute causation due to anteced-
ents: post hoc, ergo propter hoc, or “after this, therefore because of this.”)
Although the genetic mechanism that underlies species selection was
not known in Darwin’s time, most thinking about evolution in biology has
centered on genetic selection. However, the principle of selection by con-
sequences is also relevant to understanding the development of behavior—Â�
the epigenetic process that has only recently been recognized as playing an
important role in both biological and behavioral selection, the symbolic
process involved in human language, and even the evolution of groups and
organizations, such as those involved in capitalism (Jablonka and Lamb
2014; D. S. Wilson et al. 2014). Throughout this book, I will point out how
our understanding of human behavior and development is influenced by
consequences and how this understanding contributes to our ability to
evolve a more nurturing society.
Evolutionary thinking also contributed to the development of the phi-
losophy of pragmatism, which is the other defining feature of the science I
want to describe. Unlike mechanical analyses of causation, evolutionary
thinking starts with the unique event and its context. Evolutionary biolo-
gist David Sloan Wilson (1998) describes how features of the bluegill
sunfish differ within a single lake depending on whether they inhabit
open-�water or shoreline areas. An evolutionary analysis starts by studying
the phenomenon of interest and its context and seeks to explain the phe-
nomenon as a function of its context. This is true for behavioral explana-
tions as much as it is for the study of species and genes.
In his Pulitzer Prize–Â�winning book The Metaphysical Club (2001),
Louis Menand describes how the philosophy of pragmatism grew out of
13
The Nurture Effect
evolutionary thinking and the tragedy of the American Civil War. The
death of 600,000 shattered Americans’ certainty about their beliefs. A
number of prominent thinkers, such as Charles Pierce, Oliver Wendell
Holmes, William James, and John Dewey, began to evaluate their ideas
not in terms of their correspondence to the world they were said to
describe, but in terms of their value in achieving a goal. They focused on
the consequences of their ideas in the same way that evolutionary think-
ing focused on the success of species characteristics in a given environ-
ment. In both cases, the question was not whether success would hold in
every environment, but whether it worked in the particular environment
in question.
Once you start to evaluate your ideas in terms of their workability, you
must specify your goals. A variety of pragmatic systems have been devel-
oped (Hayes et al. 1993); they differ in terms of the goals they specify. One
version of pragmatism is what Steven Hayes (1993) has called functional
contextualism, in which the goal is to “predict-Â�and-Â�influence” behavior or
other phenomena. The phrase is hyphenated to emphasize a focus on sci-
entific analyses pinpointing variables that predict and influence behavior
or other phenomena of interest.
This approach to the human sciences guides my thinking. I don’t
claim that this is the one true way to do science. Indeed, it is not yet the
dominant way of thinking about science even in the behavioral sciences,
and I can offer no criterion to prove it is better than the mechanistic tradi-
tion. Mechanism and functional contextualism are simply different ways
of doing science.
I would argue, however, that if you choose to pursue predicting and
influencing individual behavior or organizational practices, you will be
more likely to identify malleable contextual conditions you can use to
influence whatever you are studying. And if you are studying a problem
like drug abuse, antisocial behavior, depression, or anxiety, your work may
contribute to finding more effective ways to prevent or ameliorate that
problem.
In sum, I believe that the progress in understanding how to improve
the human condition that I report in this book stems largely from prag-
matic evolutionary analysis, which has pinpointed critical environmental
conditions that select useful or problematic functioning, and has led to
increasingly effective interventions as a result.
14
A Pragmatic Science of Human Behavior
Helpful Babies
Humans have evolved levels of cooperation that are unprecedented
among primate species. You can see it even in babies. Say you are playing
15
The Nurture Effect
with a baby and begin to put the toys in a box. If you point to one of the
toys, the baby is likely to put it in the box (Liebal et al. 2009). If a baby sees
one person cooperate with another while a second person does not, the
baby will reward the first person but not the second (Hamlin et al. 2011).
Human babies are more likely than other primates to follow another’s
pointing or gaze. Thus, even before adults have socialized them, babies
show tendencies to be in sync with the social behavior of others, to infer
others’ intentions to cooperate, and to prefer cooperation in others.
Prosociality
These wired-�in tendencies are foundational for developing prosocial-
ity. Prosociality refers to a constellation of values, attitudes, and behaviors
that benefit individuals and those around them (D. S. Wilson 2007; D. S.
Wilson and Csikszentmihalyi 2008). Examples of prosocial behavior
include cooperating with others, working for their well-�being, sacrificing
for them, and fostering self-�development. These behaviors are not only
“nice”; they are the essential components of the success of groups. Prosocial
individuals contribute to others’ well-Â�being through kindnesses, produc-
tive work, improving their community, and supporting family, friends, and
coworkers, as well as creative acts of all kinds, from solving technological
problems to composing music or making an entertaining movie.
From an evolutionary perspective this makes great sense. All of these
behaviors and values contribute to group survival. Groups full of prosocial,
cooperative people can outcompete groups with selfish individuals. Doesn’t
this capture the problem our societies face? How can we suppress or
control the selfish actions of individuals in the interest of the group?
Examples abound: An employee steals from the company and the company
goes bankrupt. A father demands that family life revolve around his needs
to the detriment of his children’s development. Isn’t this the problem we
confront as a nation when, for example, a corporation acts in the interest
of its profits but harms others in the process?
Wilson’s evolutionary analysis lines up nicely with evidence about the
benefits of prosocial behaviors and values for the individual. Prosocial
people have more and better friends (K. E. Clark and Ladd 2000) and
fewer behavioral problems (Caprara et al. 2000; Kasser and Ryan 1993;
Sheldon and Kasser 2008; D. S. Wilson and Csikszentmihalyi 2008). They
16
A Pragmatic Science of Human Behavior
excel in school (Caprara et al. 2000; Walker and Henderson 2012) and are
healthier (Biglan and Hinds 2009; D. S. Wilson 2007; D. S. Wilson and
Csikszentmihalyi 2008; D. S. Wilson, O’Brien, and Sesma 2009).
We have been accustomed to thinking that highly skilled people who
place great value on supporting those around them are some kind of for-
tuitous gift to the community. But behavioral science is teaching us how
to create environments that foster these qualities. In an effort to promote
these qualities, my colleagues and I, working together within the Promise
Neighborhoods Research Consortium, have created an overview of the
social, emotional, behavioral, cognitive, and health milestones for chil-
dren at each developmental phase (Komro et al. 2011). These are “march-
ing orders” for any effort to increase the number of young people who
develop successfully.
17
The Nurture Effect
and other drug use; to fail academically; to have children at an early age;
and to raise children likely to have the same problems (Biglan et al. 2004).
Academic failure contributes to poverty and poor health and undermines
workforce productivity in ways that harm the entire society.
All of these problems affect people’s health. Academic failure, depres-
sion, and use of tobacco, alcohol, and other drugs are risk factors for our
most common and costly illnesses: cancer and cardiovascular disease
(Rozanski, Blumenthal, and Kaplan 1999; Smith and Hart 2002).
I led a review of research on adolescent “problem behavior” during a
year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, which
is now part of Stanford University. Ted Miller, an economist at the Pacific
Institute for Research and Evaluation, analyzed the costs of many of these
problems (T. Miller 2004). His estimate of the annual cost of antisocial
behavior, substance use, risky sexual behavior, school dropout, and suicide
is $608 billion in 2012 dollars. Note this analysis was just for youth problem
behavior. Although most of these problems begin when people are adoles-
cents, many continue into adulthood. Indeed, many are lifelong.
In talking about these problematic behaviors, I do not intend to blame
those of us who have them. One of my major goals in writing this book is
to convince you that these problems stem from our environments. Blaming
or stigmatizing struggling people for the problem is neither consistent with
the evidence nor likely to prevent or mitigate the problems.
In short, we have ample reason to prevent these problems and promote
prosociality. Behavioral science has fortunately pinpointed the kind of
environment needed to ensure the development of prosociality and prevent
virtually the entire range of common and costly societal problems.
Nurturing Environments
We can boil down what we have learned in the last fifty years to a simple
principle: we need to ensure that everyone lives in a nurturing environ-
ment. Such a simple statement may seem to fly in the face of the enormous
heterogeneity of behavior, genes, and environments. But all evidence
points to the fact that people become prosocial members of society when
they live in environments that nurture their prosocial skills, interests, and
values. Conversely, they develop various patterns of harmful behavior
when their environments fail to nurture them in specific ways.
18
A Pragmatic Science of Human Behavior
19
The Nurture Effect
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A Pragmatic Science of Human Behavior
21
The Nurture Effect
Ubiquitous Reinforcement
A common misconception about reinforcement is that it is involved in
human behavior only when we provide tangible rewards like food or stick-
ers. However, consequences constantly guide our behavior. My friend and
colleague Dennis Embry provided one of the best demonstrations of how
ubiquitous reinforcement is for human behavior. In 1974, he started gradu-
ate school at the University of Kansas Department of Human Development.
A number of Skinner’s disciples had settled there and were seriously
exploring the power of reinforcement. Dennis was working in the labora-
tory of Frances Horowitz, who was one of the first people in the world to
show that newborn infants learned through social reinforcement.
It isn’t easy to show scientifically that newborns respond to social rein-
forcement. Tiny babies have almost no ability to control their movements—Â�
except their gaze. The researchers rigged up a special screen on which they
could project slides in front of the newborn. Dennis and another grad
student were stationed behind a divider panel, observing the baby’s eyes.
One of them sat on the right of the baby and the other on the left. The
baby was propped up in a way that made it easy to look at or away from the
screen. There was also an audio speaker underneath the screen. The
observers could tell if the baby was looking at the screen from its reflection
in the baby’s eyes. When the baby’s pupils reflected the screen image, the
observers pressed a button that turned sounds on or off or changed the
screen image. This allowed them to study which consequences reinforced
the baby’s behavior of looking at the screen. If a baby looked at the screen,
the observers changed the image or sound to see whether the change
made the baby look at or away from the screen. Dennis says they learned
some astounding things. This is how he described it to me:
22
A Pragmatic Science of Human Behavior
back at the screen image (same picture) to “turn on” Mom’s voice.
They kept looking much longer at the image if they could hear
Mom’s voice; it was number one on the hit parade. As a guy, I was
distressed to discover newborns had no preference for Dad’s voice.
Little babies did not like to look at frowning faces, angry faces,
or disgusted faces; they liked to look at smiling faces. If a sad or mad
face came on the screen, the babies quickly learned that they could
look away and change the face on the screen to a smiling face.
Clearly pleasant faces and Mom’s voice were reinforcing what babies
looked at.
Over the last fifty years, thousands of researchers have explored the
scope and depth of Skinner’s assumption that human behavior is selected
by its consequences. Behaviorists have studied the effects of all kinds of
consequences. One of the most powerful reinforcers is simply human
attention. Why? Because it precedes virtually any other reinforcement you
might get from another person. From the day we are born to the day we
die, virtually anything we get from someone else—Â�food, drink, hugs,
touch, help, advice, approval—Â�starts with that person simply giving us
attention. We have also learned that many experiences are intrinsically
reinforcing. Engaging in physical activity, mastering a skill, playing, and
learning something new are all reinforcing.
Although there proved to be fundamental flaws in Skinner’s approach
to key features of human behavior, the relentless study of environmental
influences on behavior has produced a science that has proven its ability
to improve human well-� being immensely (Biglan 2003). In families,
schools, workplaces, recreational facilities, and institutions, we have
learned to richly reinforce prosocial behavior.
23
The Nurture Effect
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25
The Nurture Effect
example, Zielberger, Sampen, and Sloane Jr. 1968). But what made chil-
dren aggressive in the first place? The pursuit of this question led to work
that was unprecedented in human history. The direct observation and
analysis of the moment-�to-�moment interactions of family members revealed
that coercion is at the root of human conflict. Coercion involves using
aversive behavior to influence another’s behavior. When you realize how
pervasive this process is, you begin to see that reducing coercion is essen-
tial to creating a nurturing society.
Jerry Patterson was one of the first psychologists to show that rein-
forcement affects children’s behavior. I describe his seminal contributions
to behavioral parenting skills training in chapter 2. But I think his work
on coercion was even more important (Patterson 1982). He and his team
of researchers were the first to go into homes to observe interactions
between aggressive children and their parents and siblings. Observers
coded the talk of each person in terms of whether it seemed pleasant or
unpleasant and the immediate reaction of others. For the first time, scien-
tists studied in real time the consequences that each person provided to
other family members’ behavior and the effects of those consequences.
At the time, no one believed that such mundane interactions between
parents and children could produce career criminals. But Patterson and
his colleagues showed that these seemingly trivial events are the crucible
that molds lifelong patterns of aggressive, intimidating, and cruel
behavior.
You might think that families would shut down when strangers were
sitting in their living rooms, but they didn’t. Early in this line of inquiry,
researchers discovered that families with aggressive children couldn’t fake
good behavior—Â�even when instructed to do so. For families with a great
deal of conflict, negative reactions to each other are so ingrained that they
seem to happen automatically.
Patterson found that families with aggressive children—Â� usually
boys—Â�had more conflict and handled conflict differently from other fami-
lies. One person might tease, criticize, or needle another person. The
other person might deal with that by teasing back. Because neither person
liked what the other was doing, eventually one of them would escalate,
getting angry, shouting, or hitting. That got the other person to back off.
Patterson looked at this in terms of negative reinforcement. Rather than
a positive event, such as praise or attention reinforcing the behavior,
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A Pragmatic Science of Human Behavior
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The Nurture Effect
28
A Pragmatic Science of Human Behavior
Coercion in Marriage
Patterson’s work on coercion pinpointed for the first time the major
mechanism of human conflict. Although most of his empirical work
focused on aggressive children and their families, he also found coercion
at the root of marital discord. A book chapter he wrote with Hyman Hops
(Patterson and Hops 1972) proposed that the coercion process underlying
parent-�child conflict could explain why married couples fight. A host of
other researchers have since shown this to be true (for example, Weiss and
Perry 2002). Couples who aren’t getting along act in angry or quarrelsome
ways because this is intermittently successful in getting the other person
to stop being aversive.
Troubled couples I have counseled typically have several complaints
about each other. He gets angry and irritated when she doesn’t discipline
their child. She complains that he doesn’t help around the house. Both
think that if the other would just do what they say, things would improve.
But each resists being “pushed around”; and neither is willing to praise,
thank, or acknowledge the good things the other does because they think,
I shouldn’t have to, or fear that doing so will excuse their partner’s trans-
gressions. So over months and years, couples become locked into using
anger—Â�or silence—Â�to get the other person to back off or to punish the
other. No one has fun, but each is sometimes reinforced by the brief
respites from conflict anger produces. Although anger gets the other
person to back off, it never contributes to finding more peaceful and caring
ways to interact. Often the process ends in divorce.
29
The Nurture Effect
learn that even the behavior involved in depression can get others to stop
being aversive. In 1980, I began working with Hyman Hops at the Oregon
Research Institute on a study of whether coercive processes were involved
in depression. I had been studying depression in work I did with Peter
Lewinsohn at the University of Oregon, and I had read Patterson’s papers
on coercion. I thought coercive processes might be involved in depression,
and Hy had the expertise to develop a system for coding the behavioral
interactions of couples. We proposed to observe family interactions to
study how depressed women and their families interact. We were fortunate
to get project funding from the National Institute of Mental Health.
Our study (Biglan, Hops, and Sherman 1988) showed that depressed
women’s sad and self-Â�critical behavior is reinforced because it gets other
family members to reduce their aggressiveness. For example, we did a
moment-�to-�moment analysis of husbands and wives discussing a problem.
It showed that when a depressed woman’s husband criticized her or com-
plained, he would typically stop if she cried, acted sad, or complained
about her inadequacies. No one is having fun, but being sad brings a brief
respite from criticism, teasing, or angry behavior.
Nick Allen, an Australian psychologist, has since argued that depres-
sion has evolutionary roots (Allen and Badcock 2006). When others are
threatening, acting sad may decrease the risk of attack. Moreover, groups
that tended to those who were hurt or incapacitated might have had a
survival advantage compared with groups that left the weak by the side of
the trail.
I hope you can see how important the problem of coercion is. If there
is one thing that we can do to significantly reduce the burden to society of
all of the common and costly problems of human behavior, it is to help
families, schools, workplaces, and communities become less coercive and
more nurturing of children’s positive social behavior.
As the importance of coercion has become clear, family therapists
have focused on helping families replace coercive practices with gentler,
more effective means of reducing children’s aggressive and uncooperative
behavior and worked with parents to increase positively reinforcing inter-
actions with their children. Similarly, couples therapists help couples
abandon angry and argumentative ways of trying to get what they want
from their partner. They help couples listen to and paraphrase each other,
and they aid both partners in letting go of the feeling that they must
30
A Pragmatic Science of Human Behavior
31
The Nurture Effect
access to cigarettes was one of the reasons that so many youth were getting
addicted (Biglan 1995). Such sales have greatly diminished thanks to
stepped-�up enforcement and programs to reward clerks for not selling
tobacco to minors.
Youth access to alcohol also poses problems. Laws prohibiting sales of
alcohol to minors are seldom enforced. Many adults supply alcohol to
young people, calling it a rite of passage. Sadly, more than five thousand
people under age twenty-�one die each year in alcohol-�related car crashes
or due to alcohol-�fueled violence (National Institute on Alcohol Abuse
and Alcoholism 2013).
Then there is marketing. Young people witness a large volume of very
effective marketing for tobacco, alcohol, and unhealthful foods (Grube
1995; National Cancer Institute 2008; Nestle 2002). Limiting these influ-
ences would reduce youth consumption of these products.
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A Pragmatic Science of Human Behavior
33
The Nurture Effect
yucky, they could easily learn about hundreds of additional things if Mike
and Jen simply labeled them as “yummy” or “yucky.” “Yucky” can even be
used to override the naturally reinforcing effects of unhealthful foods. For
example, if Jen and Mike told Ashlyn and Grayson that Big Macs were
yucky, it could influence them to not want Big Macs.
This kind of symbolic processing has allowed humans to pass a vast
body of knowledge from generation to generation without having to expose
children directly to all of the things our language symbolizes. For example,
you don’t have to gain weight and have a heart attack in order to learn
that obesity can cause heart attacks.
Thus, human symbolic processing enables us to transcend the limits
of having to learn solely through exposure to the direct consequences of
our behavior. It enables us to persist even when immediate consequences
would not support our behavior. For example, one of the primary motiva-
tions for our pursuit of learning comes from our ability to imagine the
reinforcement we will achieve if our education leads to a good job or pres-
tigious profession. In short, our symbolic processes have been the force
that has enabled us to transform the world.
34
A Pragmatic Science of Human Behavior
and worry that the same thing might happen to me. You can think about
your child at school and worry that he is being picked on by other kids.
Although our thoughts about the future can make us thrilled in anticipa-
tion of good things to come, we are also prone to crippling visions of bad
things that might happen to us, thanks to our evolutionary bias to avoid
danger. Then, thanks to our verbal, relational abilities, we can inhabit a
terrifying world while sitting in a perfectly safe, quiet room.
In Robert Sapolsky’s delightful book Why Zebra’s Don’t Get Ulcers
(1994), he talks about what happens when humans think about the
dangers they can so readily imagine. A lion chasing a zebra instigates a
cascade of hormones that puts the zebra’s body into high gear. If the zebra
has the good fortune to have an older, slower zebra nearby, it escapes the
lion and the process is reversed. Hormones return to normal levels, heart
rate slows, blood pressure returns to normal.
But thanks to our minds, humans can be in the presence of threaten-
ing stimuli all the time. Did you ever have a conflict with someone and
find yourself lying in bed thinking about it? That person isn’t in your
bed—Â�the person might even be dead—Â�but there you are, still stressing
about him.
Sapolsky’s book is a compendium of the harm that chronic stress
causes: insomnia, colds, irritable bowel syndrome, ulcers, miscarriages,
memory impairment, major depression, hypertension, cardiovascular
disease, adult-�onset diabetes, osteoporosis, immune suppression, and drug
addiction. Stress can even stunt children’s growth.
Stress also affects our behavior. Stressed people don’t make good com-
panions, parents, siblings, doctors, lawyers, or friends. They are more irri-
table, angry, argumentative, anxious, depressed, and disinterested in others.
Think about how literality can affect whether families and schools
richly reinforce cooperation and prosociality or, conversely, descend into
conflict and violence. For example, say the mother of a young child has
trouble getting him to cooperate. Her own mother often talked about
willful children and how kids are born that way. Viewing her son’s behav-
ior through this lens, she readily becomes irritated with him. She also
overlooks and fails to reinforce times when he is cooperative. Over time,
she becomes increasingly punitive. The research I describe in chapter 2
reveals that the boy’s behavior can easily be changed by increasing rein-
forcement for his cooperation, and a good family therapist can help the
35
The Nurture Effect
mother learn this. But it will be hard to do as long as she continues to view
her son as willful and incorrigible.
Until very recently, at least in the Western world, the most common
answer to the problem of literality has been to try to control or get rid of
all the verbal lion attacks. In chapter 5, I describe how research by clinical
psychologists is helping people escape the curse of literality. Rather than
seeing the world through our thoughts, we can learn to step back, notice
that they are thoughts, verbally construct what we want in our lives, and
take whatever steps seem likely to move us in valued directions.
This orientation is what many psychologists call psychological flexibil-
ity. It consists of acting based on chosen values while being in contact with
what is happening within us and around us, and not trying to judge,
change, or control our present-�moment experience. The mother who
keeps having the thought that her son is willful can think about what she
wants for him and what she wants for her relationship with him. In this
context, she can notice her thoughts and her irritation and yet choose to
listen to him, notice when he is cooperative, and be attentive to him at
those times. In many instances, she may find that when she pays attention
to what he is feeling and how he is acting, she can help him become better
able to experience strong feelings and, rather than throw a tantrum or act
impulsively, do something that is more likely to get reinforced, such as tell
his sister that he wants his toy back.
Social environments can undermine psychological flexibility in
several ways. Teaching children they shouldn’t feel certain ways, such as
angry or anxious, can encourage a lifelong pattern of avoidance of such
feelings. And in order to successfully avoid such feelings, people need to
avoid the situations that bring on those emotions. This might work well in
some cases. For example, if you decide that your frequent arguments with
your spouse aren’t good for you because they often leave you feeling angry,
it might contribute to a more loving relationship with your spouse. On the
other hand, if you avoid other people because you feel anxious when you
are around them, that might prevent you from learning important things
or making valuable friends.
Our culture teaches us that it isn’t good to have “negative” thoughts
and feelings. This is often done in seemingly caring ways, as when someone
tries to get you to not feel so bad. But it is also often done quite punitively,
with statements like “I’ll give you something to cry about.” Both approaches
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A Pragmatic Science of Human Behavior
reflect avoidance on the part of the other person. People often don’t want
to feel what they feel when you tell them what you feel, so the message is
“Shut up about it.”
Thus, one key in promoting psychological flexibility is accepting
others’ emotions and thoughts so that we don’t purposely or inadvertently
motivate them to try to control, resist, or deny their experience. A second
thing that promotes psychological flexibility is using a detached and even
playful way of talking about thoughts (Hayes, Strosahl, and Wilson 1999).
Try putting the phrase “I’m having the thought that…” before every
thought you state. For example, I might say, “I’m having the thought that
I will never finish this book.” It puts a little space between me and the
thought. It is a thought, not reality. I don’t have to act on the thought. It
can just be there.
The third thing our environments can do to build psychological flex-
ibility is encourage us to be clear about and keep thinking about what we
want in our lives—Â�what we most value—Â�and what we can do that will
further our values.
37
PA R T 2
In this part of the book, I will describe how the scientific principles I
described in chapter 1 have helped in the development of interventions
that assist families, schools, and peer groups to become environments that
nurture human development and well-�being. I will also tell you about
recent advances in clinical psychology that have made it possible to ame-
liorate most psychological and behavioral problems—Â�not in every case,
certainly, but with a much greater success rate than ever before.
CH A PTER 2
Nurturing Families
Thanks to research over the last fifty years, we now have programs that
can help families reduce coercive interactions and become much more
successful in reinforcing and guiding young people’s development. If we
implement these programs widely, we can decrease the number of young
people who develop problems like antisocial behavior and drug abuse,
reducing incidence to much lower levels. In this chapter, I will describe
programs created to help families nurture children’s development from the
prenatal period through adolescence.
It all started in the 1960s with research on behavioral parenting skills
training. Many people contributed to this work, but Jerry Patterson was
the first to write a book for parents explaining the principles of reinforce-
ment in ways that could help parents make good use of them. The book,
written with Elizabeth Gullion, was Living with Children (1968). It described
specific things parents could do to teach young children to cooperate with
requests, not be aggressive, and follow common routines, such as going to
bed at a certain hour.
In 1972, when I was living in Seattle and had just started learning
about behavioral approaches, my sister Kathie and her daughter Robyn
visited on their way from Los Angeles to Rochester, New York. Kathie had
split up with her husband in Southern California two years before and had
moved back home to Rochester. Robyn had just spent her kindergarten
year living in California with her father and his second wife. Robyn’s
father had decided that she should return to live in Rochester with Kathie
because his new wife and Robyn weren’t getting along. Newly freed from
an unhappy situation, Robyn was testing all her limits and showing some
The Nurture Effect
42
Nurturing Families
43
The Nurture Effect
44
Nurturing Families
45
The Nurture Effect
2012). They concluded that for every dollar spent on the program, $3.23
was saved, a 223 percent return on investment.
46
Nurturing Families
infant for interacting, smiling, and laughing, and they increase hand-�eye
coordination, fine and gross motor skills, and emotion regulation skills.
47
The Nurture Effect
they need. What happens from age two until about age five, when they
enter kindergarten, can make the difference between eventually becoming
a college-�educated professional or a dropout. During these early years,
parents can use the hundreds of opportunities that arise each day to help
children develop the cognitive, language, and emotion regulation skills
that are vital to success as they mature.
48
Nurturing Families
about two minutes Ashlyn was back on the step stool helping prepare a
meal. I was stunned at how quickly the episode passed and asked Jen about
it. She said that whenever Ashlyn fell, she comforted her and then
prompted her to get back to whatever she had been doing. She also made
sure that Ashlyn’s return to action was richly reinforced, perhaps with
extra attention to Ashlyn when she went back to whatever she was doing
before she got hurt. At three years old, Ashlyn was learning the essentials
of self-�regulation, persistence, and resilience!
When I think about the complexity and subtlety of the moment-�to-�
moment interactions involved in building Ashlyn’s social, emotional, and
cognitive skills, I marvel that so many parents raise successful kids. But
once you understand the basic principle that a child’s skills are nurtured
by parents’ ongoing patient attention to the child’s developing interest in
the world and their support of the child’s emotion regulation, you have a
grasp of the fundamental features of programs that are helping a con-
stantly growing number of parents succeed.
As infants grow into childhood, they continue to develop new ways to
restrain the impulse to cry or get angry. Most parents get good at reinforc-
ing behavior that is incompatible with crying. For example, when our
grandson, Grayson, was two years old, he developed an ear-�piercing scream
that he used whenever his big sister took something he was playing with.
Thankfully, my son and daughter-�in-�law have taught him to instead ask
Ashlyn to give back the toy—Â�and also taught Ashlyn to do so.
My point here is that young adults’ ability to manage their emotions
in ways that allow them to negotiate with others without alienating them
is the result of literally thousands of interactions that occur on a daily basis
throughout childhood. Helping families develop their ability to nurture
emotion regulation is vital not only for children’s future well-Â�being, but
also for the well-Â�being of society. Children who don’t develop the ability to
regulate their emotions end up on a life path that often includes aggressive
social behavior, substance abuse, poor performance in school, and crime.
49
The Nurture Effect
50
Nurturing Families
it goes here on the board.” Within a few minutes, this cute little boy has
completely lost interest in the game. He gets out of his chair, walks over to
some cabinets, and tries to open them. His mom’s efforts to get him to
come back and sit down are fruitless.
Adults are quick to tell children what to do and correct them when
they are “wrong.” They focus on the situation from their perspective and
fail to see it from the child’s viewpoint. Often when children don’t do what
they are asked, parents get angry because they think their child under-
stands what they want and is being willful.
However, parents usually overestimate what children understand and
are capable of doing. The Incredible Years gets parents to follow their chil-
dren’s lead so that they are in sync with what the child is interested in and
can do. This reduces instances of parents telling their children what to do
and prevents children from losing interest in being with Mom or Dad.
When a parent connects with what the child cares about, they develop
mutually reinforcing interactions. In this program, a mom like the one in
the tic-�tac-�toe video would learn to notice what the child is looking at and
doing. She would be encouraged to do things that hold her child’s interest.
She might put an O on her ear. She might lay the X’s and O’s on the table
and see if her son wants to arrange them. She might tell him the names of
these objects and see if he can name them. If he can, she might ask him to
give her an O.
By helping parents follow their children’s lead, the Incredible Years
helps parents create interactions that are much more mutually reinforcing.
Too often, parents’ interactions with their children include criticism,
cajoling, pleading, and anger. By instead following the child’s lead, parents
can reinforce child behaviors such as talking to the parents, engaging in
fine and gross motor activities, cooperating, and persisting in challenging
activities. Parental patience, attention, and warmth are reinforced by the
child’s cooperative behavior—Â�and by all of the cute, warm ways young
children behave when they are enjoying an activity.
Think about how these interactions build a relationship of mutual
respect and caring. As your child gets older and spends more time out in
the world, you are going to need him to tell you what is going on in his life
in school and with friends if you are going to prevent problems and encour-
age good choices. How likely is it that he will tell you what is happening in
his life at age ten or fifteen if he doesn’t enjoy talking with you at age four?
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The Nurture Effect
52
Nurturing Families
Thriving in Childhood
If young children don’t have the kind of nurturing family I’ve been describ-
ing, they may have significant behavior problems by the time they reach
kindergarten. As described in chapter 1, if parents are harsh and inconsis-
tent in how they deal with unwanted behavior, they and their child are
likely to develop a growing repertoire of angry, cruel, and even dangerous
ways of trying to control each other. Yet even in later childhood it is not
too late to help children get on a path toward prosociality. Thanks to
research on family interventions over the last thirty years, we can help
families replace coercive interactions with warm, patient, and much more
effective means of helping children develop the prosocial values, capacity
for emotion regulation, and motor, verbal, and social skills they need to
thrive.
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The Nurture Effect
Jane was a mother at her wits’ end. She had two boys, Mike, age ten,
from her first marriage, and Kurt, age six, from her second marriage.
Mike had always been a shy and quiet boy who was easy to parent,
whereas Kurt was very difficult. He had colic as an infant and was
hard to soothe. He yelled so much that he developed nodules on his
vocal cords.
Jane said that she was increasingly worried about Kurt and his
constant escalation of aggressive behavior. He had started breaking
and throwing things when he was upset and saying he hated his
parents and brother. He was frequently angry and his anger often
escalated into rage.
Jane was also concerned about how often she and her husband
were resorting to hitting him. His father was quite stern. When
Kurt’s behavior became severe, his dad spanked him or slapped his
hand. Because Kurt was so unpleasant, Jane found that she was
spending less and less time with him and that she seldom had
positive interactions with him. But her deepest fear was that she was
developing a dislike of him. She was ashamed and scared about such
thoughts and feelings. She cried throughout the first two therapy
sessions about how this situation was ruining all the relationships in
the family.
Kurt’s dad refused to come in for family therapy, but he did agree
to not use corporal punishment for ten weeks and to not undermine
the therapeutic approach Jane was going to try. I began by teaching
Jane about the coercive cycle the family was locked into. I explained
that corporal punishment wasn’t likely to solve the problem because
it left Kurt angry at everyone, and because no parent would be
willing to use it every time a boy like Kurt misbehaved. As an
alternative to hitting Kurt, I taught Jane to use time-�outs.
Jane and her husband had tried time-Â�outs, but they hadn’t been
doing it correctly. They would yell at Kurt while he was in time-�out
and keep him in it for long periods of time. (Five minutes is plenty of
time for a six-�year-�old.) They often ended the time-�out with a long
lecture about Kurt’s behavior, which simply got him worked up again.
I then showed Jane how to increase positive reinforcement for
Kurt when he did what he was asked. Rather than let him watch TV
54
Nurturing Families
and play video games whenever he liked, Jane made access to these
activities contingent on doing what he was asked. I made sure that
Jane’s requests were clear and unambiguous, for example, “Please
come to the table” as opposed to “Dinner is ready.”
I also helped Jane set aside a special time with Kurt each day,
when she would read stories to him or play a game of his choice for
ten minutes no matter how the day had gone. As treatment
progressed, Kurt was eventually able to earn ten-�minute increments
of this special time for specific targeted behaviors, like picking up his
toys. This helped Jane get better at defining and reinforcing the
specific behaviors that Kurt needed to learn to take care of himself,
cooperate, and get along with others.
It worked. By the end of treatment Jane’s daily phone reports
about Kurt’s behavior indicated a big drop in Kurt’s problem
behaviors, with an incidence similar to that in families with
nonaggressive children. Jane also said that Kurt’s dad had committed
to never using corporal punishment again and that he was now using
time-�outs appropriately. In addition, she said that her special time
together with Kurt was the highlight of her day and that he had
softened and was more cooperative. Similarly, his dad was spending
more time with Kurt.
Notice how Kevin helped Jane and her family replace coercive
methods of trying to control Kurt’s behavior with much greater use of
positive reinforcement. When Jane had to deal with misbehavior, she used
time-�outs instead of corporal punishment. In essence, rewards became a
prosthetic device to get warm interactions going. Instead of Kurt behaving
coercively to get his parents to do what he wanted (which also motivated
them to be more punishing), Jane used higher rates of positive reinforce-
ment to foster Kurt’s more positive behaviors and get the family out of the
coercion trap. Also notice how, contrary to Alfie Kohn’s criticism of
rewards described in chapter 1, rewards worked very well in establishing
positive interactions between Kurt and his mother. Rather than Kurt
losing interest in what he did with his mom, they developed a loving,
special time that became the high point of each day. The reinforcement
provided by Jane’s loving interactions with Kurt became a major motivator
for him.
55
The Nurture Effect
56
Nurturing Families
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The Nurture Effect
often resulting in these kids being free to roam the neighborhood and
hang out with whomever they want.
Thus, nurturance is as important in early adolescence as in earlier
stages of a child’s development, though the details are a bit different at this
stage. Families still need to minimize coercive interactions that involve
criticism, yelling, and harsh punishment. Such interactions diminish
parents’ ability to influence early adolescents, especially in limiting their
involvement in risky behavior outside the home. And reinforcement is just
as important as it was when the child was younger. Parents’ warm involve-
ment with the child maintains their influence, and because it maintains
communication, it enables parents to better understand what is going on
in parts of the child’s life that they can’t directly observe. Limiting early
adolescents’ opportunities to engage in problem behavior becomes partic-
ularly important at this time, when such opportunities escalate.
Finally, psychological flexibility is important. Recall that psychologi-
cal flexibility involves pursuing our values even when our thoughts and
feelings seem to function as obstacles to such actions. For the parents of
early adolescents, this often means noticing worrisome, negative thoughts
they have about their children without succumbing to those thoughts. For
example, a father may have the thought that his daughter isn’t doing her
schoolwork, but rather than nagging her about it and communicating that
he doesn’t think she is a good student, it may be more useful to redouble
his efforts to be positively involved with her. If this seems a bit preachy, I
assure you that I wish I’d had this advice when my boys were in early
adolescence.
58
Nurturing Families
their feelings toward their children (Irvine et al. 1999). The result was a
reduction in antisocial behavior among children whose parents were in
the program.
Despite the program’s benefits, it proved difficult to get parents to
attend twelve sessions. Moreover, the intervention was expensive to
provide and reached only a fraction of the parents who might benefit from
it. For these reasons, Dishion, Kavanagh, and Stormshak developed a
brief, three-�session checkup to help individual families. In addition, it was
designed to be nonstigmatizing and could be used by any family, regardless
of whether they were having problems. Parents didn’t have to be incompe-
tent or admit to being incompetent to get assistance. After all, even
healthy people get a checkup.
This streamlined version of the Family Check-�Up was offered to all
parents with children in a series of middle schools in Oregon. A trained
parent consultant worked with school administrators to make parents
aware of the program. In the first session, the parent consultant befriended
the family and began to learn about how parents were handling common
problems and what their concerns were. The second session was a home
visit during which the consultant made a video of the parents discussing
common issues with their middle school student. In the third session,
parents got feedback that emphasized the good things they were doing and
received suggestions for how they could improve their handling of issues
they had expressed concern about. If parents felt the need for additional
assistance, they were offered two or three more sessions that focused on
how to use reinforcement to promote positive behavior, how to monitor
the child’s behavior and set limits, and how to improve family communi-
cation and problem solving (Dishion et al. 2002).
One of the most common issues for families involves monitoring and
setting limits on activities that could cause young teens to get into difficul-
ties. During this stage of development, young adolescents begin to spend
more time with peers. In a series of studies, Dishion and his colleagues
showed that when parents failed to monitor what their young teen was
doing, the youngster was much more likely to get involved in delinquency
and substance use (Dishion, Nelson, and Bullock 2004). For this reason,
parent consultants encourage parents to monitor where and how their
children spent their time after school, and if and when they completed
their schoolwork. Parents were encouraged to increase their use of rewards
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The Nurture Effect
for desired behavior. Often this simply amounted to requiring that their
kids do chores and schoolwork before watching TV or playing video
games.
Dishion and his colleagues evaluated the program in a randomized
trial in three Oregon middle schools and demonstrated its efficacy for a
large and ethnically diverse sample of sixth-�grade children (Dishion,
Nelson, and Bullock 2004). The program significantly increased parents’
monitoring and reduced family conflict. When these young people were
eighteen, the program—Â�which was delivered only in middle school—Â�
helped prevent them from using alcohol, tobacco, or marijuana and made
it much less likely they had been arrested (Connell et al. 2007). Another
study (Connell and Dishion 2006) found that the program prevented
depression in a subgroup of high-�risk middle-�schoolers. Finally, a study of
a subsample of children whose parents were not monitoring their chil-
dren’s activities at the beginning of the study found that the Family
Check-Â�Up significantly improved parents’ monitoring and that those
improvements helped prevent their children from using substances
(Dishion, Nelson, and Kavanagh 2003).
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Nurturing Families
Two of the best programs for families with troubled adolescents are
Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care, which was developed by Patti
Chamberlain at Oregon Social Learning Center (Chamberlain 2003;
Fisher and Chamberlain 2000), and Multisystemic Therapy (MST;
Henggeler et al. 2009), developed by Scott Henggeler at the Family
Services Research Center at the Medical University of South Carolina.
Both programs have been evaluated in randomized controlled trials, which
showed that they significantly reduce further delinquent behavior and do
so at considerable savings to taxpayers and crime victims. Indeed for every
dollar spent on Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care, more than five
dollars is saved in taxpayer, victim, and health care costs (Aos et al. 2011).
For Multisystemic Therapy, the benefit is about four dollars for every dollar
spent on the program (Aos et al. 2011).
One of the most skilled, passionate, and caring practitioners of
Multisystemic Therapy is Philippe Cunningham. I met Philippe when I
organized a symposium on family interventions at a meeting of the
Association for Behavior Analysis. I’d learned about Multisystemic
Therapy a year earlier when I attended a presentation by Scott Henggeler,
the developer of the program. Scott couldn’t be on my symposium but said
Philippe would be great. Scott had emphasized how hard their family ther-
apists worked to establish trust and rapport with families. He told me a
story about one of their therapists paying a first visit to a very poor back-
woods family whose son had been repeatedly arrested. When the therapist
went into the home, the house reeked with an almost unbearable odor.
The therapist’s first act was to get under the house, where he discovered a
dead and rotting possum, which he removed and buried. I told that same
story when I introduced Philippe at the symposium. He then told us that
he was that therapist.
The work of Philippe and his colleagues illustrates an important
general principle: In order to help threatened, angry people, you have to
care for them. This is such a contrast to how society in general tends to
blame and punish people for their misdeeds and the misdeeds of their
children. A public official faced with the horrendous acts of Russell
Henderson and Aaron McKinney would think twice about expressing any
sympathy for their families. Yet as a practical matter, the most effective
way to help such families change is to find ways to befriend them.
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Nurturing Families
she had put her child to bed. This might not strike you as the ideal situa-
tion, but it was an arrangement that improved the child’s well-Â�being while
also prompting the mother’s first step toward becoming more nurturing.
Action Implications
We still have things to learn about how to help families be more nurturing.
We need to reduce children’s exposure to biological toxins, especially lead
(Binns, Campbell, and Brown 2006), and to reduce their consumption of
processed foods (Nestle 2002) and foods high in omega-�6 fatty acids, which
promote obesity, aggression, and depression (Hibbeln et al. 2006). We also
need to do more to incorporate principles of psychological flexibility into
work with families (Jones, Whittingham, and Coyne, forthcoming).
But we do know enough that if we can make existing programs widely
available, we can help millions of families throughout the world. The
result will be fewer families breaking up, less child abuse, fewer children
who fail in school, and less crime and drug abuse. Many more children will
become caring, creative, and productive members of society. Here are spe-
cific things that parents, policy makers, and citizens can do to translate all
that we have learned into nurturing environments for more young people.
For Parents
• Carolyn Webster-Â�Stratton’s book The Incredible Years (1992) pro-
vides a great deal of helpful guidance about parenting.
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The Nurture Effect
• Structure, monitor, and set limits. You can prevent much problem
behavior by proactively arranging for and richly reinforcing alter-
native positive behaviors:
• Give choices wherever possible. It is so much more effective to
say, “Would you like to walk to the car or have me carry you
to the car?” than “I want you to get in the car.”
• Keep track of what your children are doing and guide them
away from risky situations and activities.
• Use consistent, mild negative consequences when all else
fails. Learn how to give simple, brief time-�outs rather than
getting angry, criticizing, or scolding. You needn’t lecture your
children about what they did wrong or what they should do
next time.
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Nurturing Families
For Citizens
• Advocate for evidence-Â�based programs. A large constituency isn’t
yet lobbying for prevention. If you want to see your city have much
less crime, drug abuse, teen pregnancy, and academic failure, you
can advocate that policy makers learn about the evidence-�based
family programs that can be made available to those who need
them.
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CH A PTER 3
Nurturing Schools
I still remember the day I took my son Michael to his first day of first
grade. I had a feeling of helplessness. If kids picked on him or his teacher
disliked him, what could I do? Would I even know about it?
Imagine that you have done a great job in the first years of your child’s
life and have a healthy, socially skilled, and highly verbal child. But then
you must send her to school. Her fate is no longer in your hands alone. If
her school is highly punitive, if it allows children to bully one another, or
if its teachers are incompetent, this could scar your child for life.
Fortunately, schools are getting better. That might come as a surprise,
given repeated reports about children in the United States lagging behind
children in other countries in math and science, and considering the
amount of bullying and violence we hear about in US schools. But I am
convinced that educational researchers’ progress in understanding how
schools can become more nurturing and how to teach effectively is begin-
ning to spread into schools throughout the country. In this chapter, I will
tell you about research-�based methods for teaching positive social behav-
ior and academic skills that schools across the country are adopting.
Minimizing Coercion
When behaviorists began to observe how students and teachers inter-
act in classrooms, they discovered that teachers paid more attention to
problem students than to others. It is natural for a teacher to tell a student
who gets out of his seat to sit down. The student often complies, so the
teacher is reinforced when the student stops his disruptive behavior.
Unfortunately, what also happens is that the teacher’s attention rein-
forces the student’s unwanted behavior. As a result, the student gets out of
his seat more often. As his misbehavior increases, the teacher gets increas-
ingly frustrated and angry—Â�and so does the student. This is the same
kind of coercive process that Jerry Patterson discovered in families
(Patterson 1982), as discussed in chapter 2.
Skilled teachers have learned to reinforce desired behavior more than
disruptive behavior. They do it by praising, paying attention to, and
rewarding cooperative and on-�task behavior and ignoring minor disrup-
tions. In the absence of this kind of skilled teaching, high levels of conflict
can develop. Humans are quick to learn to punish each other because, as
Patterson showed, when you do something aversive to someone who is
annoying you, the other person often stops. That immediately reinforces
whatever you did to get the person to stop, but in the long run it isn’t effec-
tive in reducing unwanted behavior. Rather, it evolves into an increasingly
punitive environment.
Left unmanaged, schools can become like prisons, where everyone is
on guard and angry. An example is the Birmingham, Alabama, school
district, which authorized police to use pepper spray in schools. By some
reports, more than one hundred students have been pepper-�sprayed. In
one incident, a girl who was four months pregnant was arguing with a boy
who was harassing her. As they were beginning to go their own ways, a
police officer handcuffed her and told her to calm down. When she said
she was calm, he pepper-�sprayed her, causing her to throw up.
Escalating punishment is usually counterproductive. Roy Mayer, a
school psychologist at California State University, provided dramatic
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Nurturing Schools
evidence of this (Mayer 1995). He showed that schools with lots of rules
and punishment have higher levels of misbehavior and vandalism. As is
the case for so many other problems in society, our natural penchant for
punishing each other is neither effective nor consistent with humane
values.
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The Nurture Effect
Since the invention of the Good Behavior Game, more than fifty
studies around the world have evaluated it (for example, Ialongo et al.
1999; Leflot et al. 2013). These studies showed that, in all kinds of class-
room settings, the game motivated children to work together coopera-
tively and reduced student behaviors that disrupted learning and distressed
teachers. But could such a simple game have any lasting benefit?
Shep Kellam, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University, thought it
could. He was looking for a way to improve children’s social competence
and thought it was possible to prevent even fairly serious problems by
simply making sure that children develop the ability to cooperate with
teachers and get along with their peers. When one of his behavior analyst
colleagues brought the Good Behavior Game to his attention, he thought
it might be just what he needed. Twenty years later, it is clear that it suc-
ceeded beyond his wildest dreams.
Shep Kellam is one of the more interesting characters I’ve met in my
journeys and one of the few psychiatrists in the prevention science com-
munity. Thanks to that and the fact that he has been prominent for a long
time, he has played a major role in getting prevention science the research
support required to show its value. Like Skinnerian behaviorism, the field
of prevention science has succeeded because a small number of people
were inspired by a vision of what the field could do, long before there was
any evidence to confirm that vision.
Kellam’s first major contribution was the Woodlawn Study (C. H.
Brown, Adams, and Kellam 1981; Kellam et al. 1983), which focused on
the Woodlawn neighborhood just south of the University of Chicago. In
1966, he began studying a group of African-�American children to see if he
could figure out what influenced some children to develop psychological
and behavioral problems, such as depression, drug abuse, and criminal
activities, and what protected others from the same fate. Studies like this
are commonplace now and have revealed an enormous amount about
what leads young people to develop these problems. But when the
Woodlawn Study began, there was virtually no precedent for the idea that
you can learn what influences problem development through a longitudinal
study—Â�research that assesses people multiple times over the course of
years. Kellam and his team of researchers recruited 1,242 African-�
American families of first-�grade students. The families agreed to let them
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Nurturing Schools
assess these children repeatedly, and Shep Kellam and his wife, Peg
Ensminger, ultimately followed these young people to age thirty-�two. They
found that aggressive children were more likely to use drugs by adulthood,
and that low family socioeconomic status and loss of interest in school
were associated with substance abuse (Fothergill et al. 2008).
By the time Kellam moved to Johns Hopkins in 1982, he was already
famous (well, as famous goes among behavioral scientists). Perhaps for this
reason, and because of what he had learned from working with the famed
community organizer Saul Alinsky, he was able to get an incredible level
of cooperation from the Baltimore school system for testing the impact of
the Good Behavior Game on the development of elementary school stu-
dents. He wanted to see if it could prevent kids from developing academic,
social, and behavioral problems; and to do that, he needed to conduct a
randomized controlled trial.
Kellam convinced the school district to randomly assign first-�and
second-�grade teachers to classrooms, and then randomly assign classrooms
to one of three conditions: using the Good Behavior Game, following a
curriculum called mastery learning (an evidence-based teaching strategy),
or not receiving a special intervention. This randomization meant that
kids who got the Good Behavior Game were pretty much the same as the
kids who didn’t. Because of randomization, any differences between the
groups—Â�whether one, five, or even fifteen years later—Â�was very likely to
be due to the Good Behavior Game.
What Kellam and his colleagues found was extraordinary. During the
year of the intervention, he had observers go into classrooms and code
what they saw. In the Good Behavior Game classrooms, students were on
task and cooperative. In the control classrooms (both mastery learning
and no special intervention), some skilled teachers had classes that were
on task and working well. But most classrooms in the control condition
were scenes of chaos. Children were wandering around the room and not
paying much attention to the teacher. Very little learning was taking
place.
Kellam and his crew followed the kids into sixth grade to see if there
were any lasting effects of the game. He found that those who had played
the Good Behavior Game in first or second grade were much less likely to
face arrest or become smokers (Kellam et al. 1998).
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The Nurture Effect
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Nurturing Schools
have typically gotten her sent to the office, allowing her to escape from
the task. If the student doesn’t have the skills to do the work, it will do
little good to increase rewards for doing it. Thus, one of the key ways to
prevent the development of behavior problems in schools is make sure
instruction is effective.
If attention from teachers or other students seems to reinforce a stu-
dent’s misbehavior, the remedy is to reduce attention for misbehavior and
increase attention for desired behavior. That might involve increased
attention and praise when the student works appropriately. It could also
include a system for providing daily reports to parents about their child’s
successes so that both parents and teachers can reward these efforts.
Horner and Sugai found that their programs usually worked in the
short run. However, it was difficult to maintain the benefits. Moreover,
concentrating efforts on the kids who were most out of control didn’t
prevent other kids, who were getting less attention, from developing prob-
lems. They realized they needed a school-�wide system.
Influenced by Roy Mayer’s (1995) finding that slow escalation of rules
and punishment for violations as a response to student misbehavior only
further motivated student rebellion, they sought to help schools reduce the
number of rules and increase positive reinforcement for following rules. To
this end, a team of PBIS teachers developed a small set of simple rules for
the school, such as “Be respectful,” “Be safe,” and “Be responsible.” Staff
members then taught what these rules meant in every venue in the school.
For example, being respectful in a classroom meant listening to what the
teacher was saying and treating other students courteously.
The resulting PBIS systems have been evaluated in randomized trials
in which some schools engage in PBIS, while others didn’t. In Maryland,
where PBIS is in the process of being implemented in every school, a study
by Catherine Bradshaw and her colleagues (2009) found that elementary
schools that had already introduced PBIS had fewer suspensions and dis-
cipline referrals than those that hadn’t. In Illinois, another randomized
trial showed that students in elementary schools that implemented PBIS
had better academic performance than students in other schools (Horner
et al. 2009).
PBIS is an effective system for reducing harassment and bullying. One
report (Sugai, Horner, and Algozzine 2011) describes how the system helps
create an environment that promotes positive social behavior among
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The Nurture Effect
students and provides extra positive behavioral support for students who
engage in bullying or harassment. In an early evaluation of this system
that I was involved in (Metzler et al. 2001), we found that implementing
PBIS in a middle school significantly reduced male students’ discipline
referrals for harassment and increased the proportion of students who said
they felt safe in school.
Positive Action
The proliferation of randomized controlled trials of interventions in
schools has proved threatening to people who have unevaluated programs.
I often hear comments like “I know our program works. We don’t have the
money to do the research on it, but I’m sure it works.” Many researchers,
including me, have been skeptical. After all, we are committed to the
proposition that science is essential to improving human well-�being. The
feeling among many researchers is that much of what is being done in the
way of school or family interventions hasn’t been evaluated, and that some
of what has been evaluated has turned out to be useless or even harmful.
Meanwhile, over the last thirty years or so researchers have been conduct-
ing randomized controlled trials that have identified more effective inter-
ventions. Researchers have often seethed at practitioners’ resistance to
adopting evidence-Â�based interventions, and frequently haven’t been very
sympathetic or polite toward those who aren’t researchers but are sincerely
trying to make a difference in people’s lives.
One prevention program specialist I know found a unique solution to
this problem: she married a researcher. Carol Allred developed a school-�
wide program called Positive Action in the 1980s and 1990s. She devel-
oped curricula for classrooms, materials for parents, a counselor program,
and a community program, all designed to help schools and communities
replace punitive practices with a culture that promotes positive actions on
the part of children and the adults around them. Then, in 1998, she
attended the Society for Prevention Research meeting in Park City, Utah,
where she met Brian Flay, one of the most prominent methodologists in
the behavioral sciences. They fell in love with each other, and Brian fell in
love with Carol’s program. He was convinced that it was a great program,
although it lacked studies to prove it. So he did what any good methodolo-
gist would do: he evaluated it.
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Nurturing Schools
Monitoring Behavior
It is easy to see the value of replacing coercive interactions with
systems that teach and reinforce prosocial behavior. What may be less
obvious is that effective programs include systems for monitoring their
impact on students’ behavior. For example, in the Good Behavior Game
teachers count the number of disruptions and use this information to tell
if the game is having its expected effect. Likewise, Positive Behavioral
Intervention and Support utilizes a web-�based system for recording disci-
pline problems in every venue of the school. This helps staff identify places
where extra attention is needed. In order to be sure programs are nurtur-
ing desired behavior, they must include a means of measuring their
effectiveness.
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The Nurture Effect
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Conflicting Visions
Although I have done only one study evaluating a curricular interven-
tion (Gunn et al. 2000), I have followed developments in education closely.
To me, the progress in education research is another facet of the behav-
ioral revolution that began with Skinner’s insistence that human behavior
is a function of the environment and that by creating the right kind of
environments we can build a better society. However, progress in the
improvement of teaching has been slow, owing to the just-�mentioned lack
of commitment to experimental evaluations and to the dominance of the
philosophy of discovery learning.
Discovery Learning
The main idea of discovery learning is highly plausible: children learn
best when we let them determine their own pace of learning, deciding
when they want to learn new things. Educators who favor this approach
argue that children who are systematically taken through a structured cur-
riculum that organizes what is to be learned in the most efficient sequence
are being regimented, and that such regimentation will kill their love of
learning.
This vision fits with some of the experience that most of us had in
school. Weren’t there many times when you were bored to tears in school?
Wouldn’t it have been great if most of your learning had involved the
excited pursuit of new knowledge, without being told what to study or
when? Indeed, schools such as Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts
allow students to determine what they want to learn and when they want
to learn it, and a study of these schools (Gray 2013) documented the con-
siderable success of their (mostly middle-�class) students.
But there have also been some significant disasters, such as the whole-�
language movement. According to the whole-�language philosophy, phonics
instruction, in which children learn how to sound out words, is unneces-
sary. Instead, whole-�language proponents believe children can learn to
read by figuring out the meaning of words from their context. Given that
you have gotten this far in my book, you are already a competent reader.
But see if you can infer the missing words in the following sentence:
“The╇ ╅╅╅╅╅╅╇ came running up to the door,╇ ╅╅╅╅╅╅╇all
the way.”
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Nurturing Schools
Direct Instruction
Unfortunately, as mentioned, many educators are not yet convinced
that they should pay attention to empirical research. Therefore, discovery
learning advocates have been able to convince them that structured,
direct teaching of skills and concepts undermines children’s ability to
think and that children hate it. That was certainly not our experience
when both of our sons learned to read and developed terrific math skills
thanks to direct instruction. I would love to take all the credit for this—Â�
that it was all the encouragement we provided, or perhaps our “superior
genes.” But the main reason for their success was the system of direct
instruction that my wife, Georgia, had become skilled in.
By the time Michael was four, Georgia had taught him to count and
do simple arithmetic. Georgia had received training in direct instruction
(DI), a systematic method of developing and delivering curricula. She had
a workbook for DI arithmetic at home and introduced Michael to it, and
the next thing we knew, he was working through it by himself. We would
get up in the morning and find him at the kitchen table doing arithmetic.
He loved it!
We were extremely fortunate that the best first-�grade teacher in the
district, Pat Holland, taught at Parker Elementary School, just down the
hill from our house. During teacher introductions at our first parent
meeting, a loud whoop went up when Pat was introduced. When Michael
started first grade, Pat quickly realized how advanced he was in math and
got him into third-�grade math. The head start he got in math carried him
a long way. He was the mental math champion of Lane County in third
grade and the city champion in fifth grade. By the time he finished high
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The Nurture Effect
school, he had completed two years of college math. He then went to the
University of Chicago, where he majored in economics and carried a 3.9
average in this math-�heavy field. (Our son Sean showed similar gifts in
math and finished a couple of years of college math while still in high
school.)
Direct instruction is the brainchild of Siegfried Engelmann, Wesley
Becker, and Doug Carnine, initially at the University of Illinois around
the time I was a graduate student in psychology there. I can remember
seeing Engelmann on the TV news fervently insisting that directly teach-
ing poor preschool children what they needed to know could erase their
academic disadvantages.
Engelmann developed his teaching methods by constantly testing
everything he did to see if children were learning what was being taught.
He discovered that children learned and remembered material best if they
had frequent opportunities to give correct answers. A well-�designed lesson
can be highly reinforcing, not because students are getting rewards, but
simply because they are frequently able to demonstrate their knowledge.
DI often involves children learning in small groups where the group
responds more than ten times per minute. This ensures that the teacher
knows whether students are mastering the material so they can go back
and work on things the children haven’t learned well.
Direct instruction lessons are scripted, giving teachers little leeway in
what they teach. This is one reason many teachers have resisted DI, com-
plaining that it is too regimented and that children will be bored or stifled.
But that is not the case. When DI is done properly, children enjoy lessons
because they experience so much success in learning. And DI is very suc-
cessful, especially in aiding the success of children who would otherwise fail.
What many teachers don’t understand is that the scripting is done to
ensure that concepts are taught as efficiently and effectively as possible,
not as a way to constrain teachers. If you already understand a concept,
you might not see how easily a child who doesn’t understand it can be
confused by a poorly constructed teaching sequence.
Take the word “under.” You can try to teach a child who doesn’t
understand “under” by showing him a pencil under a table and saying,
“The pencil is under the table.” But without any negative examples—Â�
examples of what is not “under”—Â�a child can be quite confused. Maybe
“under” means pencils are in some way connected with tables; if you were
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Nurturing Schools
to put the pencil above the table, the child may say that the pencil is under
the table.
A DI sequence includes both negative examples and positive exam-
ples. Holding the pencil above the table, you would say, “The pencil is not
under the table.” And to be sure that the child doesn’t infer that “under”
is about pencils below tables, these irrelevant features of the concept are
eliminated in other examples: “The ball is under the blanket.” “The shoe
is not under the bed.” By carefully sequencing positive and negative exam-
ples of concepts, DI ensures efficient instruction.
Research clearly indicates that DI methods are more effective than
most other teaching techniques (Adams and Engelmann 1996). Beginning
in the 1970s, DI methods were compared to numerous other methods of
teaching, and DI outperformed all other approaches—Â�including a discov-
ery learning approach where students selected the tasks they wanted to
engage in (Stebbins et al. 1977). DI even improved self-�esteem more than
a strategy that directly focused on increasing self-�esteem. It turns out that
children have higher self-�esteem when they are experiencing the intrinsic
reinforcement of learning new things, whereas trying to raise their self-�
esteem artificially in the absence of genuine success is useless.
As you might imagine, there have been plenty of examples of the
power of evidence-�based approaches to instruction. For example, Wesley
Elementary School in Houston, Texas, consists almost entirely of poor
minority students. Yet by implementing direct instruction, the school has
virtually every child reading and doing math at grade level (Carter 2000).
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The Nurture Effect
children are interested in and following their lead. Too often, behavioral
approaches to teaching have focused so much on teaching a skill that they
ignore the fact that the child has lost interest in the learning task.
Fortunately, it seems that people from each of these two camps are becom-
ing a little less strident and finding ways to work together to improve the
effectiveness of teaching methods.
What is emerging is an approach to education that is clear about the
core knowledge and skills that children need to learn, that is accountable
for achieving good outcomes for all children, and that intensely engages
children while allowing them a sense of authenticity. The battles are
receding between those who have labeled any highly structured effort to
teach children as “drill and kill” and those who have been dismissive of
children’s need for choice and autonomy. Increasingly, teaching practices
have their basis in empirical evidence showing that carefully designed
instructional sequences can help at-�risk children learn at a level they never
could have achieved by waiting until they discovered what they needed to
know. That said, there is also a wealth of evidence that children learn best
when they have considerable choice and autonomy.
Research in middle schools also demonstrates the importance of
engaging students in meaningful learning in contexts that richly reinforce
their efforts. When schools are highly competitive, it undermines learning
for its own sake. There is considerable evidence that early adolescents
need a caring and noncompetitive learning environment that emphasizes
mastery of school tasks over academic competition and where they feel
highly regarded by teachers. In schools that emphasize competition as
opposed to self-�development, students are more likely to be depressed and
angry, have lower self-�esteem, value education less, and have lower grades
(Roeser and Eccles 1998).
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The Nurture Effect
Action Implications
I have briefly outlined key research-�based teaching strategies that have
proven benefit in helping children learn efficiently and develop self-�
regulation, social skills, and cooperativeness. Science shows that schools
can be much more effective at helping our children achieve the social and
academic skills they need. The next step is for these beneficial practices to
be more widely adopted.
For Parents
• If you have a child who is four or five and interested in learning to
read, I recommend using Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy
Lessons (Engelmann, Haddox, and Bruner 1983). Georgia and I
taught both of our sons to read with this book and our son Mike
did the same with his daughter, Ashlyn.
• If your child isn’t at grade level in any subject, ask the school how
it plans to remedy the situation.
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The Nurture Effect
For Educators
• Make schools more nurturing by adopting one of the many
evidence-�based programs that have shown their benefit in enhanc-
ing self-�regulation, cooperation, and prosociality.
For Citizens
• Ask educators and policy makers whether they are monitoring the
use of punishment and the incidence of bullying in schools.
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Nurturing Schools
89
CH A PTER 4
Deviancy Training
“So what would you do if your girlfriend got pregnant?
Shoot her?”
“No, punch her in the stomach, real hard.”
talked quite freely about committing crimes, getting drunk, taking drugs,
and victimizing girls. Even more surprising was the fact that the amount
of this kind of talk predicted whether individuals engaged in delinquent
behavior well into adulthood (Dishion et al. 1996).
You might think this occurred simply because adolescents who are
already involved in problem behavior tend to talk more often about devi-
ance. Maybe this topic was a by-�product of their delinquent lifestyle and
didn’t influence their delinquent behavior. But that was not the case. It is
true that young people’s levels of problem behavior predict their future
problem behavior. However, even when Dishion’s team controlled statisti-
cally for the influence of prior deviant behavior, the level of deviancy talk
in these thirty-�minute videotaped discussions predicted adult antisocial
behavior two years later (Dishion et al. 1996). The conversations escalated
their deviant behavior.
Why would deviant talk lead to deviant behavior? And why did some
kids talk about deviance while others didn’t? The answer Dishion reached
is the most interesting thing about his research, and it lines up with the
information I’ve outlined about social interactions in families and schools:
if you want to understand why people do things, look for the reinforcers.
Dishion and his colleagues (1996) coded not only the deviant talk of these
kids, but also the reactions of their friends. He simply coded deviant and
nondeviant talk and two possible reactions to each statement: pause or
laugh. They found that the more laughs a boy got for what he said, the
more he talked about that topic. In pairs where most of the laughs followed
deviant talk, there was a great increase in the deviant talk. In statistical
terms, 84 percent of the variance in deviant talk related to the rate of
laughter for deviant talk. That is huge.
Even more interesting was the fact that the rate of reinforcement for
deviant talk strongly predicted later delinquency (Dishion et al. 1996).
Boys whose friends approved of their talk of delinquent and violent acts
were more likely to engage in these acts. Dishion called interactions like
this “deviancy training.” In subsequent research he showed that simply
letting at-�
risk kids get together raised the level of their misbehavior
(Dishion and Andrews 1995). Those findings led to a series of conferences
that alerted policy makers to the harmful effects of bringing at-�risk youth
together in schools and in the juvenile justice system (Dodge, Dishion,
and Lansford 2006).
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Think back to what I’ve said about the lives of aggressive and defiant
children. Jerry Patterson’s research in families showed that these kids get
little reinforcement for cooperative, prosocial behavior (Patterson, Reid,
and Dishion 1992). Their families use mostly aversive behavior to control
each other. Each family member’s aggressive behavior is honed by its effect
in getting others to back off, to stop being aversive. These kids don’t get
much love and approval and don’t have much fun.
They don’t get much love in school either. Teachers give them atten-
tion for their aggressive and uncooperative behavior, but it is mostly nega-
tive attention (“Sit down!”). Because these kids haven’t developed skills
for playing cooperatively with peers, their peers often reject them
(Patterson, Reid, and Dishion 1992). And thanks to their inability to do
what teachers want, they don’t learn as much and eventually fall behind
(DeBaryshe, Patterson, and Capaldi 1993).
By sixth or seventh grade, these kids feel isolated and rejected. They
are often depressed. They also become increasingly resentful of constant
efforts to get them to do the “right” thing. Then they meet other kids with
the same background. It’s magic! As Dishion’s work shows, they finally
find friends after enduring years of rejection by other, less aggressive kids.
At last they have someone who approves of all the deviant things they
want to talk about.
A colleague of Dishion’s, Deborah Capaldi, studies violence between
men and women. She wondered if the deviancy training that Dishion dis-
covered influenced how boys treat girls. When the boys in Dishion’s study
were seventeen or eighteen years old, the researchers invited them back to
have another conversation with a friend. One thing they asked them to
talk about was what they liked and disliked about girls they knew. They
coded these conversations in terms of how often they talked in hostile
ways about girls. (The example at the beginning of this chapter comes
from one of those conversations.) When the young men were twenty to
twenty-�three years old, Capaldi got data from them and their girlfriends or
wives about how often the men were physically violent. Sure enough, those
who had talked approvingly about violence toward women years earlier
were, in fact, more aggressive toward their partners (Capaldi et al. 2001).
A further analysis of the interactions of these boys when they were
sixteen or seventeen (Van Ryzin and Dishion 2013) revealed that the men
who were most violent at twenty-�two or twenty-�three were the ones who
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The Nurture Effect
not only had received reinforcement for talk of deviant behavior, but also
had a friend or friends with whom they had coercive interactions. In addi-
tion to assessing the deviancy training I described above, this study coded
how much the two friends were coercive toward each other. In this case,
coercion was defined as engaging in dominant or dismissive behavior,
using profanity, and being abusive to the other person. Even when the
researchers controlled statistically for the teens’ antisocial behavior as
children and the quality of parental discipline, those who talked about
deviance the most and were coercive toward their friend were most likely
to engage in violence as adults.
This study makes me realize that although it remains very difficult to
predict whether a given individual is going to be violent, the violence of
many young men is hardly unique or unpredictable. It emerges from highly
coercive environments that put young men on a trajectory toward vio-
lence in later life. Although we can’t predict and prevent every act of vio-
lence in society, we can use what we know to make sure that many fewer
young men become violent.
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Peers and Problems
where parents weren’t supportive and didn’t set limits on their involvement
with deviant peers.
The dry statistics of Dishion’s analysis of deviant peer development
tell a precise and compelling story of why youth grow up to cause trouble
for themselves and those around them. The 998 children in this study
lived in Portland, Oregon. Dishion first met them when they were in sixth
grade, mostly age eleven. His study showed that many of them came from
families that were stressed due to poverty. That meant they often didn’t
have enough to eat, wore shabbier clothing than other children, had vehi-
cles that broke down, had to move due to evictions, or lived in cars or
homeless shelters. Their poverty was one reason that other kids rejected
them. Kids, especially in middle school, are very sensitive to status and
readily tease and bully others in an effort to establish that they have higher
status (Rusby et al. 2005). Dishion’s study tells us that, in 1998, sixth-Â�and
seventh-�graders in Portland were getting teased and bullied. Some chil-
dren woke up every morning dreading going to school.
Due to the stresses they experience, poor families are less likely to be
warm and loving and more likely to have conflict and coercion. Thus,
many of the poor children who were living through the hell of peer harass-
ment at school probably didn’t have help from their family in coping with
it. This is understandable when you consider the standpoint of these
parents. People who are trying to cope with the threat of unemployment,
homelessness, or discrimination may find it hard to support their children
in many ways. Learning that their child is being harassed may simply
further threaten and stress them. They may feel powerless to do anything
about it. Their reaction may be to blame the child, which simply adds
family difficulties to the stress the child is experiencing at school. So it’s
likely that, in 1998, many of the children in Dishion’s study experienced
threats and slights at school and anger, criticism, and abuse at home.
By 2001, a group of fourteen-Â�year-Â�olds in Dishion’s sample who were
angry, hurt, frightened, and rejected began to cluster together, or self-�
organize. The social influence process that Dishion documented in his
earlier study began. Kids whose parents paid little attention to what they
were doing or whom they were hanging out with got together to talk about
and do the things that we call “delinquent acts” and they call “fun!”
Virtually all delinquent acts are committed by two or more young people
acting together, with the kids richly reinforcing each other’s behavior.
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The Nurture Effect
By the time these kids were sixteen and seventeen, many were using
drugs, stealing, getting into fights, and having sex. In 2001, Portland had
more than three thousand violent crimes and more than twenty-�eight
thousand property crimes. The kids in Dishion’s study committed some of
those crimes.
Between 2009 and 2011, Dishion and his colleagues assessed these
young people at ages twenty-�two through twenty-�four. They found that
young people who had highly stressful and uncaring lives at ages eleven or
twelve were much more likely to have had children by their early twenties.
This line of research shows a clear path from stress during early adoles-
cence to friendships with other rejected kids at age fourteen to sexual
promiscuity at age sixteen or seventeen to early reproduction.
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Peers and Problems
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The Nurture Effect
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Peers and Problems
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The Nurture Effect
2003) encourage parents to talk with their teens each day about what they
have been doing and to make and enforce rules about the time teens need
to be home, where they can go when they are out, and whom they can be
with. In this way, a program like the Family Check-�Up can prevent teen
delinquency, drug use, and declining grades for as long as five years after
families participate in the program.
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Peers and Problems
Action Implications
Research clearly shows that we need to cultivate prosocial peer relation-
ships among youth to prevent deviant behavior and nurture their develop-
ment. If left to their own devices, young people who are at risk for problems
typically reinforce each other’s deviant tendencies. Thus, families and
schools need to be sensitive to the importance of peer relationships in
young people’s development. And while peer influences are especially
important in adolescence, ensuring that adolescents have friends who
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The Nurture Effect
For Parents
• Monitor your children’s activities by talking to them about what
they are doing in school and with friends. If you establish routine
conversations with them when they’re young, they will continue
to tell you what is going on in their lives. This also creates numer-
ous opportunities for you to show your appreciation and approval
of the good things they do, and to guide them away from risky
activities and toward prosocial choices.
For Schools
• Reduce or eliminate the practice of putting students into tracks
based on their academic performance because this congregates
and stigmatizes at-�
risk students and contributes to problem
development.
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Peers and Problems
103
CH A PTER 5
My Own Journey
I began my career as a social psychologist. However, by the time I got my
doctorate in 1971, I was disillusioned. Social psychology had become
boring to me. A new generation of social psychologists that craved the
prestige of “real sciences” like physics had banished the practical and
socially relevant aspects of social psychology from the field. Doing research
that smacked of anything applied had become verboten. Prestige went to
those who conducted obscure and clever studies of “nonobvious” phenom-
ena. If something was obvious, such as prejudice or conflict, it was regarded
as too trivial. This didn’t appeal to me. Whenever I tried to read the latest
“hot” study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, I fell asleep.
Meanwhile, because of the Vietnam War, the sizzling sixties had
turned into the radical seventies, with talk of free love and socialist revolu-
tion. I was living in Seattle and still studying social psychology at the
University of Washington, a hotbed of radical activity. I was more com-
mitted than ever to changing the world, but social psychology and its
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The Behavioral Revolution in Clinical Psychology
fascination with fame and prestige no longer seemed a good vehicle for
accomplishing that task.
I decided to get retreaded as a clinical psychologist. It was the time of
the counterculture movement, with its emphasis on personal growth,
mind expansion, and consciousness raising. I was a child of the times. I
began to embrace the personal growth movement, along with free love
and revolution. I found it exhilarating to get inside people’s heads, advise
them, and guide them on their journeys.
Ned Wagner, the head of the clinical psychology program at “U Dub,”
agreed to give me a year of postdoctoral training in clinical psychology if I
would teach a course on social psychology. He gave me an office across from
Bob Kohlenberg, and eventually Bob introduced me to B. F. Skinner’s work
in behaviorism. By the time I finished my clinical training and got an
internship at the University of Wisconsin Psychiatry Department, I was
engrossed in the developing field of behavior therapy. By the end of my
Wisconsin internship, I’d read virtually all of the extant works on behavior-
ism, behavior therapy, and the philosophy of science that underpins them.
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The Behavioral Revolution in Clinical Psychology
things they wished to achieve in life at three different times: their whole
lives, the next five years, and if they had only six months to live. I then had
them pick the most important ones from each period and ultimately boil
them down to five or so things they most wanted to focus on.
Lakein argued that the day-�to-�day demands we all encounter typically
crowd out attention to important things that might take hundreds or even
thousands of little steps to achieve. This insight was one of the most
important things I ever learned. I made a list of my major goals using
Lakein’s approach, then reviewed and revised it annually. At the begin-
ning of each week, I chose some concrete things I could do that week to
move forward on important goals, and then I made a task list for each day.
People who are struggling with anxiety and depression—Â�and in truth,
I was one of them—Â�can get so focused on how they are feeling that they
become stuck. They make not feeling bad the central theme of their lives,
thinking they can’t move on with their lives until their emotional prob-
lems end. Lakein’s approach of setting goals and breaking them down into
small steps did a great deal to help people begin to move out of their
depression or anxiety.
It certainly worked for me. I have used variations on this approach to
organize my work throughout my career. It not only guided me to get proj-
ects done but also helped me calm down. I eventually got to the point
where, if I woke up on a Monday morning sky-�high with anxiety and worry
about all the things I needed to do, I could simply make my list for the
week and the day and calm down. I didn’t need to worry about all the
things I had to do: I only needed to do the things on that day’s list. In fact,
I often told my clients, “Rather than having to worry about what you need
to do, you can have your list worry for you.”
This system worked quite well for most of our clients at the Behavior
Change Center. They learned to relax in common stressful situations and
began to accomplish things that moved them out of the miasma of depres-
sion and anxiety. In six to ten sessions, most clients began to feel better
and do the things that moved them toward a more satisfying life.
However, some clients didn’t improve. With them, it seemed that
everything I suggested only amplified their feelings of anxiety, worry, and
depression. Typically, they were people who had already been through a lot
of therapy. While I was increasingly confident that the behavioral approach
was helping many people, it was clear that there was still much to learn.
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The Nurture Effect
private thoughts, were a form of verbal behavior. After all, when I encour-
aged clients to identify what they most wanted to accomplish in life and
make to-�do lists to help achieve their long-�term goals, I was helping them
make choices and influence their subsequent behavior. And Skinner had
convinced me that the functional influence our plans have on subsequent
behavior is due to a long history of getting reinforcement for doing what
we say we will do and getting punishment when we fail to do so.
Furthermore, I could see the consequences at play in my clinical work.
As a therapist, my social support, encouragement, and attention were con-
sequences that helped people establish their ability to make a plan and
carry it out. If that was successful, my clients would continue to engage in
sequences of planning and doing because of positive consequences in their
lives. Meanwhile, ample empirical justification for this view was emerging.
Research with children included the “say-Â�do” literature, which showed
that children learned to do what they said they would do thanks to rein-
forcement for doing so (Ballard 1983).
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The Behavioral Revolution in Clinical Psychology
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The Nurture Effect
things I do. I make a plan, and then I follow it. I remember something I said
I would do, and then I do it. But what about all the times my thoughts don’t
result in action? For example, among procrastinators, simply saying they are
going to do something may almost guarantee that they don’t do it. We can’t
simply assume that thoughts cause other actions. We need to understand
why they sometimes influence other actions and sometimes don’t.
The answer is to look to the environmental context that influences
not only what we think and what we do, but also the relationship between
our thoughts and our actions. In my work with clients at the Behavior
Change Center, I helped people strengthen the relationship between their
plans and their actions by supportively reinforcing this consistency—for
example, by discussing how they had done on following through with the
plans we made in the previous session. The same process is involved when
a parent praises a child for doing what she said she would do or admon-
ishes her for not doing so.
The problem with traditional cognitive behavioral therapy is that it
doesn’t consider how the context affects the relationship between thoughts
and other actions. It just tries to help people get rid of thoughts that seem
to cause problematic actions or obstruct effective action. In Hayes’s
approach, on the other hand, the goal is to change the context that main-
tains the power of words over action. Rather than help people get rid of
problematic thoughts, his approach focuses on loosening the relationships
between thought and actions that cause people trouble. People don’t need
to get rid of these thoughts; they need to get to a point where they can be
less influenced by them so they can consciously choose a course of action
and follow through.
As I got to know Steve and studied his improvements to Skinner’s
behaviorism, I realized that his contextual approach was not just generat-
ing powerful new methods to help people with their psychological prob-
lems, but also providing a general account of how the environment shapes
all aspects of human behavior. This includes not simply people’s thoughts
and feelings, but the relationships between their thoughts and feelings and
the rest of their behavior. His approach has since been developed and
elaborated on by a large and growing number of behavioral scientists
around the world, and it is proving to have profound implications for what
it means to be human and how we can build a more caring and effective
society that nurtures everyone’s well-Â�being.
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The Behavioral Revolution in Clinical Psychology
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The Nurture Effect
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The Behavioral Revolution in Clinical Psychology
Imagine that one day you have a hallucination. You are quite frightened,
both by what you hallucinated and by the fact that you had a hallucina-
tion. You know this is very bad. Perhaps you tell a loved one, who also
becomes frightened. You don’t want this, and neither does your loved one.
You consult a psychiatrist, who joins you in trying to make sure that these
things don’t happen. Your psychiatrist puts you on medication. Now your
life has become about not having any more hallucinations. That is the
absolute imperative, so you’re constantly alert to the possibility that you
might be having one.
Delusions are a bit different; unlike a hallucination, the individual
experiencing a delusion is not aware that the delusion isn’t real. Emma’s
life became focused on dealing with the “murder,” and because there had
been no murder, everyone tried to get her to give up her delusion. But that
just made her even more dedicated to getting people to understand and
take action. For Emma, the defining issue in her life was this “murder,”
and little else was going to happen in her life until it was dealt with.
Bach focused on helping Emma take a different tack: beginning to
move forward in other areas of her life anyway. Rather than trying to talk
Emma out of her delusion, Bach guided Emma in exploring her values.
What was important to her? What did she want her life to be about? She
said she wanted a job and wanted to work with developmentally delayed
children. She even named specific agencies she wanted to work for. As a
result, she focused on how to get a job.
Emma never gave up her delusion, even after she was back on her
medications. But in their work on values, Bach and Emma clarified that,
for Emma, justice was an important value. Emma was able to come to the
resolution that she had done her part to try to see that justice was served.
The cost for her had been high, and it was time for her to move on. So she
stopped talking about her landlady and began to focus on other things.
Emma was in the hospital for four months. Toward the end of that
time she got day passes to apply for jobs. Bach and her colleagues helped
Emma practice for job interviews and other social interactions. She got a
job in a health care setting as a janitor. Bach’s team arranged for Emma to
live in a residential facility, and Emma developed a plan to get her own
apartment eventually. The last time Bach saw Emma, she was moving
forward in her life.
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The Nurture Effect
If you don’t know much about schizophrenia, this may seem like a sad
story. Compared to how Emma was doing before she began to have delu-
sions, working as a janitor and living in a residential facility may not seem
like much of a life. But compared to the way many people with schizo-
phrenia live—Â�with a constant focus on delusions or hallucinations, in
and out of hospitals, and living on the street—Â�it is actually quite a bit.
Emma had begun to focus on things that she valued and worked toward
making her life about those things. As a result, her delusions were no
longer torturing her.
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The Behavioral Revolution in Clinical Psychology
needing to do anything about them. ACT therapists call this process defu-
sion, in a reference to not being fused with thoughts. From a defused
stance, you don’t see the world through your thoughts; you see that you are
having thoughts.
In the second session, Bach worked on helping patients accept their
symptoms even if they didn’t like them. She did this using another classic
ACT intervention, the polygraph metaphor (Hayes, Strosahl, and Wilson
1999). It is typically presented along these lines:
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The Nurture Effect
left the hospital, 40 percent of those who received treatment as usual had
been rehospitalized, as opposed to only 20 percent of the patients who
received the additional ACT intervention.
In addition, those who received ACT and were rehospitalized stayed
out significantly longer than those in the other group. You might think
this occurred because those who received ACT had fewer symptoms.
However, one of the most surprising things about the study is that the
people who received ACT reported more symptoms. But ACT had helped
many of them develop a new relationship to those symptoms. Instead of
fighting to control symptoms, they had become more accepting of them.
Those who received ACT and were rehospitalized tended to be people
who continued to deny their symptoms. Apparently, they had not bene-
fited from ACT in the sense that they were continuing to struggle to
control their symptoms.
Perhaps most significantly, all of this was achieved with less than four
hours of treatment. Most of the people in this study had already under-
gone countless hours of other forms of treatment without the same benefi-
cial effects. These results are not a fluke. A second study, done by different
people, produced similar results (Gaudiano and Herbert 2006).
A Universal Approach
Bach’s success is an especially striking example of the strides that
behavioral scientists have made in helping people change their behavior.
But there are many other success stories. ACT practitioners have shown
the value of this approach for a surprisingly diverse number of problems.
Tobias Lundgren and JoAnne Dahl applied these principles to treating
people with severe epilepsy (Lundgren et al. 2008). They helped patients
practically eliminate their seizures—Â�not by trying to stop the seizures, but
by helping patients accept what they didn’t seem able to change and start
living in the service of their values.
Several ACT researchers have achieved dramatic improvements in
helping people quit smoking (for example, Bricker et al. 2010). Instead of
supporting smokers’ beliefs that they could stop smoking only if they didn’t
have cravings, they helped them accept their cravings while choosing to
act in the service of their value of living longer. Barbara Kohlenberg is a
clinical psychologist who has done some of the research on smoking cessa-
tion using an ACT approach. She told me that many of these ex-�smokers
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The Behavioral Revolution in Clinical Psychology
reported that they also started using ACT principles to change many
other aspects of their lives.
Other studies have shown the value of ACT for treating depression,
anxiety, drug addiction, chronic pain, and obesity. It is also useful in
helping diabetics keep their disease under control. In addition, it is proving
helpful in reducing prejudicial thinking, preventing burnout in work set-
tings, and decreasing stigmatizing attitudes that health care providers
sometimes have toward patients. (For a thorough, searchable listing of
empirical studies into the effectiveness of ACT, visit http://www.context
ualscience.org/publications.)
ACT has changed my life and the lives of many others. It has helped
me to become more patient, empathetic, and caring. It has made me less
materialistic. It has helped me cope more effectively with the stresses I
now realize are simply a part of life.
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The Nurture Effect
only after work with simpler problems has provided tools to help us tackle
more intractable ones. In part 2 of this book, I hope I’ve shown you how
much we have learned about human behavior and how much we can use
this science to help people live more productive and caring lives.
Yet to enhance human well-�being on a broad scale, we must use what
we know about individual behavior to build the more nurturing larger
social system we need. These problems have seemed insurmountable.
However, in part 3 of the book, I will explore how we can apply what we
have learned in studying the behavior of individuals to large organizations
and cultural practices. By employing the same contextualist principles of
prediction and influence to society on a broader scale, we can achieve
transformations unlike any previously seen in human history.
Action Implications
The progress made in clinical psychology has important implications for
how all of us can live our lives more effectively. It also has implications for
public policy.
For Everyone
• Cultivate psychological flexibility, perhaps using one or more of
the many recent ACT books for the general public:
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The Behavioral Revolution in Clinical Psychology
123
PA R T 3
I hope I’ve convinced you that advances in behavioral science make it pos-
sible to help families and schools become more nurturing. However, this
still needs to be translated into approaches that can benefit entire popula-
tions. Evolving a society in which virtually every family and school is nur-
turing is partly a matter of making effective programs available to all
families and schools that need them. But it also requires that we change
the larger social system within which families and schools exist.
Families and schools exist within communities. Mass media and the
state of the economy affect those communities; public policies may either
support or stress them. Families and schools also exist within a network of
for-�profit, nonprofit, and government organizations that can have a huge
influence on their functioning and the well-�being of individuals. To realize
the vision of a society that nurtures the well-�being of every member,
behavioral science needs to understand these larger social systems and
their effect on families, schools, and individuals. It must provide principles
to guide the evolution of larger social systems so their practices benefit
everyone.
In this part of the book, I’ll explore how the public health framework
can guide such efforts, describing the major, society-�wide factors that
undermine well-�being and showing how we can understand most of these
factors in terms of the influence of recent developments in the evolution
of corporate capitalism. Then, in part 4, I’ll describe a strategy for evolving
a system, based on the public health framework, that restrains capitalism’s
worst excesses while maintaining its many benefits.
CH A PTER 6
128
From People to Populations
Epidemiology
Epidemiology is the study of the patterns and causes of diseases in popula-
tions. Once reducing the incidence and prevalence of a disease is estab-
lished as a public health goal, epidemiologists try to figure out what is
causing the disease.
A classic example of this process was the discovery that contaminated
water causes cholera. In The Ghost Map (2006), Stephen Johnson tells the
story of John Snow, a London surgeon who developed the theory that
contaminated water, not bad air, caused cholera. On four occasions
between 1831 and 1854, there were outbreaks of cholera in London. On
August 31, 1854, an outbreak began in the Soho area. By September 10, it
had killed five hundred people. In an exhausting process, Snow and a local
pastor interviewed the surviving victims of this outbreak and found that
most lived in proximity to a pump at the corner of Broad and Cambridge
Streets. Those living closer to another pump in the neighborhood had a
much lower incidence of the disease. Snow convinced the Board of
Guardians of St. James Parish, which controlled the pump, to remove the
pump handle. When they did, the outbreak of cholera ended. (One build-
ing in the neighborhood—Â�a brewery—Â�had no cholera deaths. Guess what
they were drinking.)
The episode stands as the first clear victory for the fundamental ele-
ments of public health. Careful observation led to a hypothesis about a risk
factor for disease. Removal of that risk factor—Â�the water—Â�ended the
epidemic.
Once a risk factor for a disease is identified, it becomes a target of
public health efforts. Once we learned that cigarette smoking caused lung
cancer, it became imperative to reduce the prevalence of smoking. That in
turn led to identifying and targeting the prevalence of major influences on
smoking behavior, such as the marketing of cigarettes to young people.
This way of thinking can be extended to any problem that confronts
humans. Consider how it applies to nurturing environments. There is
clear evidence that diverse psychological, behavioral, and health problems
result from family and school environments that fail to nurture prosocial
development (Biglan et al. 2012). This is ample justification for establish-
ing a society-�wide goal of increasing the prevalence of nurturing families
and schools.
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The Nurture Effect
Embracing such a goal could help organize and integrate the disparate
efforts of health care providers, educators, researchers, and policy makers,
who are often working on individual problems, such as crime, drug abuse,
or academic failure, but are not taking into account the fact that all of
these problems stem from the same nonnurturing environments.
Once you embrace the goal of increasing the prevalence of nurturing
families and schools, the natural next question is which factors can help
effect these outcomes. In the following chapters, I describe how poverty
and many corporate practices directly affect the development of youth and
the quality of family life and school environments. In chapter 7, I describe
corporate marketing practices that have a deleterious effect on well-�being
and suggest ways that these harmful influences can be reduced. In chapter
8, I describe how poverty and economic inequality in the United States
increase the stress that families experience. I also describe the public poli-
cies that have contributed to the huge economic disparities that have
arisen over the past forty years. In chapter 9, I trace these policies to the
recent evolution of capitalism, wherein advocacy for such policies has
emerged from their benefits to the economic well-�being of the wealthiest
among us. This analysis has direct implications for how we might reverse
these harmful trends.
Good Surveillance
Public health practitioners refer to monitoring a disease as surveillance.
People unfamiliar with that use of the term sometimes comment that it
has a creepy connotation of spying on people. But this is good surveil-
lance. It helps us know if we are reaching our goals for improving health
and well-�being.
You cannot know whether you are making progress in combating a
disease or problem behavior unless you carefully measure its incidence and
prevalence in the population. The practice of counting the number of
people who contract a disease dates back to the monitoring of plague epi-
demics in the sixteenth century, when each summer the plague descended
upon the cities of Italy. These days, all infectious diseases are routinely
monitored.
Now the practice is slowly being extended to monitoring psychological
and behavioral problems. The National Institute on Drug Abuse funds
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From People to Populations
Monitoring the Future, a system for assessing drug use and related behav-
iors in a representative sample of students throughout the country annu-
ally. It provides invaluable information about rates of alcohol consumption,
adolescent smoking, and illicit drug use. In the 1990s, when data showed
that adolescent cigarette smoking was increasing, Monitoring the Future
triggered successful efforts to combat the rise (Johnston et al. 2013).
The tobacco control movement has been shaped and guided by evi-
dence about how its actions and policies affect smoking prevalence. When
policy initiatives such as ensuring clean indoor air proved helpful in moti-
vating people to quit smoking, advocacy for such policies accelerated.
Similar monitoring of psychological problems has lagged behind. For
example, we still have no system to monitor rates of depression and anxiety
among adults.
Ultimately, a surveillance system suited to creating a culture of nur-
turance would extend beyond monitoring problems. As almost all psycho-
logical, behavioral, and health problems are influenced by environments
that either do or do not nurture healthy, prosocial development, we should
be monitoring the quality of our environments. I would start with families
and schools, and eventually move to tracking the quality of workplaces
and public spaces.
A system for monitoring the prevalence of nurturing families and
schools can be built on existing systems that monitor youth and adult well-�
being, such as Monitoring the Future and the Center for Disease Control’s
Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (Eaton et al. 2012). We could
begin by monitoring nurturance in families through adolescent surveys.
The Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (Li et al. 2011), which
assesses a wide range of health conditions and behaviors, obtains data on
health and well-� being from representative adult samples. However,
although conflict-�filled stressful environments are a major contributor to
most psychological, behavioral, and health problems, the Behavioral Risk
Factor Surveillance System obtains no data on conflict in homes.
Most surveillance systems provide good estimates of the rates of prob-
lems at the state level but do not have large enough samples to provide
estimates at the community level. However, some communities are begin-
ning to get data at this level (Mrazek, Biglan, and Hawkins 2005).
Ultimately, every community should have accurate and timely data on the
proportion of families and schools that are nurturing.
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The Nurture Effect
Programs
I’ve already described many family and school programs that can
improve these two environments and promote prosocial development.
The family programs were developed mostly for delivery to individual fam-
ilies or small groups of families. However, as we adopt the goal of increas-
ing the prevalence of nurturing families, we need to find more efficient
methods to ensure that we reach every family that would benefit.
132
From People to Populations
One of the first people to embrace the goal of affecting an entire pop-
ulation of families was Matt Sanders, a New Zealander who is now at the
University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Like me, Sanders has a
background in behavior analysis. He began developing behavioral inter-
ventions for families in the late 1970s and has an especially pragmatic
approach. Early on, he realized that intensive home-�based coaching of
parents could be effective but wouldn’t reach many parents. Then he
visited the Stanford Heart Disease Prevention Program and was impressed
by their effort to reach the entire population in several California com-
munities. This inspired him to spend the next ten years developing the
interventions that now comprise his multilevel program, the Triple P–
Positive Parenting Program. It makes use of mass media, offers ninety-�
minute seminars for parents, and provides parents with tip sheets for
specific problems, such as getting a young child to go to sleep at night. It
also provides more intensive support for families that need it.
Sanders also teamed up with Ron Prinz, from the Psychology
Department at the University of South Carolina, to see if they could affect
the prevalence of behavioral problems among children in an entire popu-
lation. They randomly assigned eighteen South Carolina counties to either
offer or not offer Triple P. In the nine counties that offered the program,
they trained about six hundred people who were likely to be in contact
with parents of young children and therefore in a position to give parents
advice about common behavioral problems, if the parents wanted advice.
They trained preschool staff, child care providers, health care workers,
and providers of mental health and social services.
At the time of the study, child maltreatment had been increasing
throughout South Carolina. However, in the counties with the Triple P
program, rates of child maltreatment did not rise, and further, they were
significantly lower than in the control counties (Prinz et al. 2009). The
intervention also significantly reduced foster care placements, which often
result after abuse is detected. The Washington State Institute for Public
Policy independently determined that the intervention produced a $6.06
return on each investment dollar (Lee et al. 2012).
The era of developing and evaluating family interventions seems to be
winding down, having resulted in a substantial number of family interven-
tions that have proven benefit. Research and practice are now turning to
the question of how to reach families with brief, efficient, and effective
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The Nurture Effect
Policies
In this book, I use the term policies to refer to laws and regulations
that affect health or behavior, or conditions that affect either one
(Wagenaar and Burris 2013). Examples include taxation of harmful prod-
ucts, prohibitions on marketing harmful products, and requirements to
provide incentives for desirable behavior.
At the outset of the tobacco control movement, many of us hoped we
could develop effective cessation and prevention programs that would
reduce the prevalence of smoking. But despite all the work I’ve done on
smoking prevention (for example, Biglan et al. 2000), I have to confess
that policies, public advocacy, and education have been far more impor-
tant than programs in reducing smoking.
Researchers with a public health orientation often argue that policies
are the most efficient way of affecting entire populations. For example,
Harold Holder, who worked at the Center for Advanced Study in the
Behavioral Sciences as I did, often said something along the lines of “You
wouldn’t have to reach every parent with a program if you had policies that
directly affected adolescent drinking.” He pointed out that simply raising
the price of alcohol has helped to reduce youth use, alcohol-�related car
crashes, and the development of alcoholism (Biglan et al. 2004).
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From People to Populations
135
The Nurture Effect
Practices
In addition to developing programs and policies, behaviorists and
other interventionists have come up with a large number of simple tech-
niques for influencing behavior. These are valuable resources for anyone
engaged in efforts to help people develop their skills. In earlier chapters,
I’ve mentioned Dennis Embry and his work in developing the Good
Behavior Game. A voracious reader, he has been tracking the develop-
ment of simple behavior-�influencing techniques for many years and has
identified more than fifty techniques proven to affect one or more behav-
iors of children, youth, or adults. He calls the individual techniques kernels
(Embry and Biglan 2008).
Many kernels involve providing reinforcement for behavior you want
to increase. Examples include praise notes, which teachers can write to
students and students can write to each other, and “the mystery motiva-
tor” or “prize bowl,” where people draw prizes of varying values for behav-
iors as diverse as completing homework or having drug-�free urinalysis
results.
Kernels exert their effects in different ways. Examples of kernels that
reduce reinforcement for a problem behavior or increase the cost of such
behavior include time-�outs and higher taxes on cigarettes or alcohol.
Other kernels affect behavior through antecedent stimulation, meaning
establishing a signal that elicits a desired behavior. For example, you can
establish nonverbal transition cues that guide students from one activity
to another. Many teachers establish a cue such as flipping the lights on
and off or raising a hand to signal that it is time for the class to pay atten-
tion to the teacher. This might seem trivial, but studies have shown that
orderly transitions from one classroom activity to another can free up a
week or more of instructional time across a school year.
Some kernels affect behavior by changing the way people think about
things. For example, when people make a public commitment, it is more
likely they will do what they said they would do. This is because we all
have a history of reinforcement for doing what we said we would do, along
with a history of social disapproval when we failed to follow through.
Finally, some kernels affect well-�being by affecting physiology. For example,
considerable recent evidence indicates that supplementing diets with
omega-�3 fatty acids can reduce aggression, violence, depression, bipolar
136
From People to Populations
Advocacy
Returning to the tobacco control movement: As evidence about the harm
of smoking grew, it mobilized people who had been harmed by smoking to
create advocacy organizations that supported further investigation of the
health consequences of smoking and the factors that influence smoking.
In what I like to call a virtuous cycle, researchers learned more and more
about the harm of smoking, advocates spread the word about these detri-
mental effects, and this generated further support for research and advo-
cacy about the harm of smoking and ways to reduce smoking.
Surgeon General reports, National Cancer Institute monographs,
and Institute of Medicine reports systematically marshaled evidence
about specific aspects of the smoking problem to generate support for
antismoking policies. For example, a series of Surgeon General reports
documented how cigarettes cause heart disease, strokes, aneurysms,
chronic obstructive lung disease, asthma, low birth weights of babies, pre-
mature births, sudden infant death syndrome, and most kinds of cancer
(US Department of Health and Human Services 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983,
1984, 1988, 1989). A Surgeon General report on the effects of second-
hand smoke showed that as many as fifty thousand people a year die due
to exposure to other people’s cigarettes (US Department of Health and
Human Services 1986). That enlisted support among nonsmokers for
restricting smoking and getting smokers to quit. Another report showed
that tobacco is an addictive product, which undermined tobacco industry
arguments that smoking was simply a lifestyle choice (US Department of
Health and Human Services 1988).
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The Nurture Effect
Action Implications
I envision—Â� and hope you can envision—Â� a society-Â�
wide movement
working to increase the prevalence of nurturing environments. I think we
should start with a focus on families and schools because they are the most
important environments for youth, and because most psychological,
health, and behavioral problems begin in childhood or adolescence.
138
From People to Populations
well-�
being. Describe the policies, programs, and practices
now available to reduce the prevalence of dysfunctional fami-
lies, thereby contributing to preventing an entire range of psy-
chological, behavioral, and health problems. This would
provide an agenda for future research and policy making.
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The Nurture Effect
For Educators
• Identify and implement one or more of the evidence-Â�based pro-
grams that have proven benefit in reducing conflict and punitive-
ness and promoting prosocial behavior.
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From People to Populations
141
CH A PTER 7
Harmful Corporate
Marketing Practices
Imagine, if you will, that you raise your children carefully, using all of the
love, patience, and skills described in part 2 of this book. Would you be
satisfied if your kids got a good education, got married, had kids, had a
good job, and then died of a smoking-�related illness at age forty-�five? Of
course not.
Successful nurturance includes protecting our children from every-
thing that could damage their health and well-�being throughout life. One
of the influences that is most important yet also most difficult to control
is the marketing of harmful products. If you’ve ever been in a supermarket
with a young child, you’ve probably had the experience of your child
demanding candy at the checkout counter and getting upset when it
wasn’t forthcoming. Of course, stores put candy there because they know
how little kids work—Â�and because they know how hesitant most parents
are to refuse and risk a tantrum.
Even the most competent and motivated parents are challenged to
protect their children from the risks modern marketing poses to healthy
child development. For example, John Pierce and his colleagues at the
University of California, San Diego, studied a group of 894 early adoles-
cents whose parents used effective parenting practices: they were warm,
they monitored their kids’ activities, and they did a good job of setting
limits. Yet even among these well-�parented teens, those who were inter-
ested in and liked cigarette ads were more likely to start smoking over the
next three years (Pierce et al. 2002).
In this chapter, I describe some of the most harmful marketing prac-
tices, along with the behavioral principles that underlie successful
The Nurture Effect
Marketing
Products are marketed by associating the product or brand with things the
consumer desires. Through advertising, promotions, store displays, distri-
bution of branded paraphernalia, and placement of products in the media,
marketers try to get potential consumers to feel that the product will give
them something they’d rather have than their money. It might be some-
thing tangible, like the ability to cut grass; or it could be emotional, like
the feeling you get when you wear new clothes and someone compliments
you on them. This is not to say that marketing is inherently evil. It actually
has many benefits, including telling us about things that genuinely improve
our lives. But sometimes it can cause great harm.
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Harmful Corporate Marketing Practices
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The Nurture Effect
and associating them with the product to be sold. Through brand identi-
ties, logos, and repeated messages, consumers come to associate valued
outcomes with the product. If a company can get the consumer to relate
the brand to valued outcomes, they can make having that product highly
reinforcing.
Consider the red chevron on Marlboro packs of cigarettes. What
kinds of things do young people value that the company could get them to
relate to the Marlboro brand? The most basic and important thing for
most adolescents is social acceptance. Therefore, it isn’t surprising that
adolescents who are having trouble academically or experiencing social
rejection are particularly likely to be susceptible to advertising that sug-
gests they will be accepted by their peers if they smoke a particular brand
of cigarette (Forrester et al. 2007; National Cancer Institute 2008). My
review of hundreds of Marlboro ads showed that they routinely associated
the brand with popularity. They also associated it with things related to
popularity, such as being rugged and physically attractive, being tough,
being an independent adult, or being someone that people admire. Many
young people—Â�especially those most likely to take up smoking—Â�crave
excitement and taking risks. Thus, many Marlboro ads associate the brand
with bronco busting and auto racing (National Cancer Institute 2008).
So why do young people take up smoking despite the evidence that it
is harmful? One thing to consider is that not all young people are suscep-
tible to tobacco advertising. The susceptible kids are those struggling for
social acceptance and excitement. For these kids, the risk of getting a
disease many years later is much less important than getting a chance to
gain social acceptance in the short term. And for many, the risk associated
with smoking may actually make smoking more attractive. This is why, in
my most recent work on smoking prevention programs, we have almost
entirely abandoned associating smoking with health risks. Instead, we
associate not smoking with social acceptance, fun, and excitement
(Gordon, Biglan, and Smolkowski 2008).
In sum, marketers can make it reinforcing to buy and use a harmful
product simply by getting people to relate the brand to things that are
already important reinforcers for them. The brand and logo of the product
can come to have powerful evocative effects, thanks being associated with
multiple images of things the person already values.
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Harmful Corporate Marketing Practices
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The Nurture Effect
282,000 sustained injuries (CDC 2012). About a quarter of the car crashes
are alcohol related, and alcohol marketing plays a significant role in the
problem of youth drinking.
When Judge Kessler ruled the tobacco industry was to blame for
people becoming addicted to cigarettes and remaining addicted, the impli-
cations of this ruling were immediately obvious to the alcohol industry.
Therefore, if you search the bottom of most TV ads for alcoholic beverages
these days, you’ll find a statement like, “Drink Responsibly.” If the tobacco
industry could be held accountable for the death and disease of young
people who were addicted due to cigarette advertising, might the alcohol
industry also be liable if it could be shown that their marketing influences
young people to drink as minors or to drink to excess? The evidence is
mounting that this is the case, although it isn’t yet as solid as it is for
tobacco marketing.
Alcohol use contributes to death in a variety of ways. In the United
States, it accounts for 41 percent of all traffic fatalities—Â�more than seven-
teen thousand deaths annually (National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration 2008). It also contributes to deaths through drowning,
falls, hypothermia, burns, suicides, and homicides (CDC 2013). One anal-
ysis, carried out by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (Greenfeld 1998), esti-
mated that 40 percent of all crime is committed under the influence of
alcohol. Alcohol use, however, is not invariably harmful as tobacco use is.
It is a part of most cultures, contributes to social relations, and, in modera-
tion, may have some health benefits.
On the other hand, binge drinking—Â�defined as having five or more
drinks at a time—Â�is a major problem, especially among young people.
Binge drinkers have more alcohol-�related car crashes and are more likely
to become alcoholics (CDC 2013). The Harvard School of Public Health
College Alcohol Study, which looked at 120 college campuses, found
that 44 percent of students reported binge drinking (Wechsler and
Nelson 2008). Nearly 20 percent reported such episodes more than once
every two weeks. Students on campuses with high rates of binge drink-
ing reported more assaults and unwanted sexual advances. Binge drink-
ing is also a problem among high school students. In Oregon, we found
that 10 percent of eighth-�graders and 25 percent of eleventh-�graders
reported binge drinking in the last thirty days (Boles, Biglan, and
Smolkowski 2006).
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Harmful Corporate Marketing Practices
149
The Nurture Effect
overweight. Figure 3, which comes from the CDC Behavioral Risk Factor
Surveillance System, shows the rate of obesity for US states in 1990, 2000,
and 2010. In most states for which there was data, less than 15 percent of
the adult population was obese in 1990. In 2010, just twenty years later,
over 20 percent of adults were obese in every state; in twelve states, more
than 30 percent were obese (CDC 2014).
1990 2000
2010
In her book Food Politics (2002), Marion Nestle (no relation to the
food company) has described the role of food processing and marketing in
increasing obesity. Food companies spend more than $11 billion annually
on advertising, and the foods most heavily marketed are those that are
most profitable. Unfortunately, many are high in fat or calories and have
little nutritional value.
Television ads for food and beverages on Saturday morning children’s
shows more than tripled between 1987 and 1994, and by the end of that
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Harmful Corporate Marketing Practices
period, about 57 percent of the ads were for foods of little nutritional value,
such as sweetened breakfast cereals and candy. More recently, a study
looked at what percentage of TV food ads in 2003 and 2004 targeted to
children were for foods high in fat, sugar, or sodium (L. M. Powell et al.
2007). Among two-�to eleven-�year-�olds, 97.8 percent of ads were for such
foods, and among twelve-�to seventeen-�year-�olds, 89.4 percent of ads were
for such foods.
TV viewing is associated with obesity in children (Dennison, Erb, and
Jenkins 2002). Although inactivity is certainly one reason for this link,
exposure to ads for fattening foods is another (Borzekowski and Robinson
2001; Dixon et al. 2007). Both broadcasters and the food industry put the
onus for this problem on parents, saying that parents need to guide their
children. This is the same argument that the tobacco companies make. It
may work to prevent unwanted restrictions on broadcasters and advertis-
ers, but as a practical matter, childhood obesity will remain a problem as
long as marketing unhealthful foods to children continues.
In 2006, the Institute of Medicine reviewed 123 empirical studies of
the influence of food and beverage marketing on the diets and health of
children and adolescents (IOM Committee on Food Marketing and the
Diets of Children and Youth 2006). Studies involving children ages two to
eleven led an Institute of Medicine committee to conclude that there is
strong evidence that TV ads influence children’s food and beverage prefer-
ences and moderate evidence that it affects their beliefs about food and
beverages. The committee concluded that food marketing influences chil-
dren to prefer and request unhealthful foods. The evidence regarding the
influence of television marketing on teens was less clear, partly because
there have been fewer studies. The committee concluded that exposure to
television advertising is associated with childhood obesity. However,
despite the fact that the committee reviewed experimental studies showing
the causal effect of advertising on children’s food preferences, it was
unwilling to state conclusively that exposure to food advertising caused
childhood obesity.
Even if we reach every family and school with information about the
things they need to do to encourage healthful eating and exercise patterns
among children, this won’t be enough to address the problem of obesity (or
drinking and smoking) among young people. We have to reduce the
effects of marketing.
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152
Harmful Corporate Marketing Practices
researchers shows that advertising for cigarette brands that are popular
among youth influences many young people to believe that those who
smoke certain brand will be seen as popular, tough, exciting, adventurous,
and so on. My testimony in United States v. Philip Morris et al. cited nine
studies that showed this (Biglan 2004). For example, one study (Pechmann
and Knight 2002) found that when ninth-�graders were exposed to ciga-
rette advertising, they rated smokers more positively on adjectives such as
“fun,” “well liked,” “sexy,” “desirable to date,” “successful,” “smart,” “intel-
ligent,” and “cool.” In other words, the ads influenced these adolescents to
view smokers more favorably. Other studies show that when adolescents
view smokers more favorably, they are more likely to take up smoking.
The tobacco companies’ own research also shows that their advertis-
ing conveys positive images of smokers. For example, one extensive study
of the Marlboro image indicated that the brand evoked the following
images and concepts: all-�American; hardworking and trustworthy; rugged
individualism; and being a man’s man, as defined by being experienced,
sure of oneself, confident, in charge, self-�sufficient, down to earth, and
cool and calm (Biglan 2004). Cigarette advertising convinces vulnerable
adolescents that they can achieve this desired image by smoking a brand
popular among youth. And so they smoke.
So is cigarette advertising truthful? In a sense, it is. Many adoles-
cents come to see the Marlboro smoker as tough and popular. So there
is some truth to their notion that if they smoke Marlboros, they will
appear this way to their peers. Yet this is a Faustian bargain for which
adolescents are ill informed. They get an image that may contribute to
their social acceptance, and the tobacco company gets an addicted
smoker. As one R. J. Reynolds executive put it, “Attract a smoker at the
earliest opportunity and let brand loyalty turn that smoker into a valu-
able asset” (Biglan 2004, 290).
But from another perspective, the advertising is deceptive. It portrays
smoking as an activity that will lead to substantial social benefit and says
nothing about the fact that an adolescent who takes up smoking will have
a difficult and expensive addiction and a one-�in-�three chance of dying of
a smoking-�related illness. The law needs to catch up with the behavioral
sciences and look at not simply what an ad says but how it functions.
Cigarette advertising functions to get young people to take up smoking
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154
Harmful Corporate Marketing Practices
155
The Nurture Effect
Action Implications
Research on the impact of cigarette, alcohol, and food advertising could
better inform policy makers, parents, and citizens in general. By prevent-
ing young people from exposure to harmful advertising, we can signifi-
cantly reduce the risks to their health.
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Harmful Corporate Marketing Practices
For Parents
• Limit your child’s exposure to advertising for tobacco, alcohol,
and unhealthful food—Â�if you can. I wish I could provide tips on
how to inoculate children against the effects of such advertising.
Unfortunately, research has not found media literacy training to
reduce the persuasive influence of such advertising. However, I
strongly recommend that you take advantage of new technologies
that can help reduce children’s exposure to TV ads. For example,
you might record a show your child watches and fast-forward
through the advertisements.
For Citizens
• Support legislation to fund research on the impact of marketing
on the well-�being of young people, and legislation to limit chil-
dren’s exposure to advertising for tobacco, alcoholic beverages,
and unhealthful foods.
157
CH A PTER 8
160
Poverty and Economic Inequality
161
The Nurture Effect
162
Poverty and Economic Inequality
163
The Nurture Effect
164
Poverty and Economic Inequality
Higher death rates are not the only consequence of inequality. Figure
6 shows the relationship between economic inequality and a host of social
and health problems, including mental illness, life expectancy, obesity,
children’s educational performance, teenage births, homicides, imprison-
ment rates, social mobility, and level of trust. As you can see, the United
States has the highest rate of inequality as measured by the ratio of the
income of the top 20 percent of earners to that of the bottom 20 percent.
165
The Nurture Effect
Worse
* USA
Index of health and social problems
Portugal *
UK *
Greece *
* New Zealand
Austria * Ireland *
France * Australia *
Germany * * Canada Italy *
Denmark * *
Belgium * Spain
Finland * *
Netherlands * Switzerland
Norway *
* Sweden
* Japan
Better
Although health is worse and death rates higher for poorer people
than for those who are better off, even wealthier people suffer ill effects
from living in unequal societies. Figure 7 shows the rates of various dis-
eases in England and the United States. For each group of three bars, the
one on the right represents the group with the highest income, while the
one on the left represents those with the lowest income. As expected,
disease rates are higher for poorer people. But notice that rates of disease
are consistently higher in the United States than in England, where there
is less economic inequality—Â�though England is still one of the three coun-
tries with the greatest economic inequality.
166
Poverty and Economic Inequality
Why would this be? Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (2009)
suggest that in societies where social status is important, people measure
status by comparing what they have with what others have. They point
out that countries with greater economic inequality have higher rates of
advertising, which increases people’s desire to have things that others
don’t have. Moreover, countries with greater economic inequality also
have more people with materialistic values (Kasser 2011). In essence,
people are competing to be richer than those around them.
This is a losing battle. Say you make having a nice car a measure of
your worth. You’ll start paying attention to cars. You’ll soon know the
prices of various models and which are deemed better. You can work hard
and get yourself a Lexus—Â�well, not the LX at $82,000, but the GX at
$49,000. In this scenario, you have spent a bunch of money to enhance
your feeling of self-Â�worth, and yet you still don’t have the highest-Â�status
167
The Nurture Effect
168
Poverty and Economic Inequality
169
The Nurture Effect
170
Poverty and Economic Inequality
Figure 8. Poverty rates (by percentage) for various age groups in the
United States. (Reprinted from DeNavas-�Walt, C., B. D. Proctor, and J. C.
Smith. 2010. Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United
States: 2009. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office.)
171
The Nurture Effect
• Failure to adopt health care reforms that could have dealt with
the increasing costs of health care for individuals and companies
172
Poverty and Economic Inequality
Action Implications
If you think the situation is hopeless, you may find the ACT perspective
described in chapter 5 helpful. After all, why do we feel distressed about
these facts and want to turn away from them? It is because facing them
puts us in contact with others’ distress and the threat that we too could
experience these terrible life outcomes. ACT encourages us to accept
these feelings and see that they will not harm us. Indeed, these feelings
reflect our empathy for others. If we take action to try to change this situ-
ation, that is an example of living and affirming our values, regardless of
how much progress we make.
So for anyone who wishes to take action against poverty and eco-
nomic inequality, the first step is to accept difficult feelings about the situ-
ation, rather than struggling with them. The second step is to identify
concrete actions we can take to move our society in directions we value.
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The Nurture Effect
For Citizens
• Campaign for political leaders who will support policies that
reduce poverty and economic inequality. It isn’t enough to vote
for such leaders; we need to work to get them elected in order to
create the society we want.
174
CH A PTER 9
176
The Recent Evolution of Corporate Capitalism
worked, they continued it and then refined it. When a campaign failed,
they abandoned it and tried something else.
Unfortunately, the fundamental role of selection by consequences is
obscured by myriad other ways of thinking about corporations and their
practices. I submit that analyzing and testing the impact of consequences
on corporate practices would give policy makers and citizens the tools they
need to influence the further evolution of corporate practices (Biglan
2009, 2011; Biglan and Cody 2013). Therefore, in this chapter, I provide a
brief history of the evolution of corporate practices relevant to the devel-
opments I described in chapters 7 and 8. I hope to convince you that both
harmful marketing practices and economic policies have evolved as a
function of the completely understandable efforts of corporations and
wealthy individuals to maximize their gains.
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The Nurture Effect
178
The Recent Evolution of Corporate Capitalism
Business must learn the lesson, long ago learned by Labor and
other self-�interest groups. This is the lesson that political power is
necessary; that such power must be assiduously cultivated; and
that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with
determination—Â�without embarrassment and without the reluc-
tance which has been so characteristic of American business.
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The Nurture Effect
Powell simply laid out the avenues that are available in a free society
to promote policies favorable to business. These interests had huge
amounts of money available to them, but the basic principles they employed
are applicable to any group’s efforts to influence public policy making.
The results of these efforts have been remarkable. Compare the politi-
cal landscape of 1964 with that of 2014. In 1964, both the federal govern-
ment and public opinion were decidedly liberal. Lyndon Johnson won the
election with 61 percent of the vote. Democrats picked up two Senate
seats and thirty-�six House seats and had a two-�thirds majority in both
houses of Congress. Indeed, from 1933, at the height of the great depres-
sion, through 1995, a period of sixty-�two years, the Democrats controlled
the House of Representatives for all but two years. For fourteen of the
eighteen years after 1995, the Republicans were in control. In 2014
Republicans controlled the House of Representatives, with 233 Republicans
to 199 Democrats. They also controlled 45 Senate seats. Although the
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The Nurture Effect
policies evolved in this way could help us influence the further evolution
of policy making and politics in directions that will benefit more people.
You might think of capitalism as evolution on steroids. Just as the
behavior of individuals is selected by the consequences of that behavior,
the practices of corporations and other businesses are selected in a process
that is finely tuned by the marketplace. Quarterly profits quickly reveal
whether a company is succeeding. Profitable activities are expanded both
through the influx of funds to the company and as other companies adopt
a successful company’s profitable practices. Variation is assured due to new
people entering the marketplace and the continuous invention of new
products and services.
These factors result in selection of organizations that are increasingly
skilled at discerning what will enhance their profits. The contingencies
select any practice that contributes to profits, regardless of whether it is
beneficial more broadly. Improving products and services is certainly a
critical practice, and it is generally beneficial. However, many other prac-
tices are detrimental. These include the marketing practices I described in
chapter 7, as well as lobbying for favorable government policies or con-
tracts, minimizing costs of labor and materials, and undermining the
success of competitors. Indeed, over the past one hundred years, all of
these practices have been refined by their economic contingencies.
Marketing and lobbying deserve particular attention in relation to our
concern for nurturing human well-�being. Since the early 1900s, marketing
has expanded enormously thanks to its contribution to profits. In the
tobacco industry—Â� a leading innovator in advertising over the last
century—Â�advertising has been critical to the expansion of markets. Few
women smoked before Lucky Strike began its “Reach for a Lucky Instead
of a Sweet” campaign in the mid-Â�1920s.
Lobbying has greatly expanded in the past twenty years, particularly
because it has proven increasingly profitable to invest in getting govern-
ment to change policies and contract with private companies for work the
government traditionally conducted. In 2009, registered lobbyists reported
spending nearly $3.5 billion, a record amount (Hacker and Pierson 2010b).
Just as marketing and lobbying practices of individual corporations
have evolved, a cooperative network of business and advocacy organiza-
tions has evolved over the last forty years. This network has been shaped
and maintained by its economic consequences, including increased profits,
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Increasing Materialism
Substantial changes in the goals and values of Americans have accompa-
nied changes in the political and economic structure of US society. For
the past four decades, the Higher Education Research Institute has been
surveying incoming freshmen at 1,201 colleges and universities (Astin
2002). These surveys show that the percentage of freshmen who said that
being very well-�off financially was essential or very important hovered
around 40 percent in the late 1960s and early 1970s and then rose steadily
to more than 70 percent by the mid-�1980s, remaining at that level ever
since. In the 1960s, more than 80 percent said that developing a meaning-
ful life philosophy was important, and that number declined steadily until
the mid-�1980s, at which point it leveled off in the 40 to 50 percent range
(Astin 2002).
Jean Twenge, a social psychologist at San Diego State University, has
worked with colleagues around the country to analyze changes in the
values and aspirations of high school and college students across the years
(Twenge 2009; Twenge and Campbell 2008). Her analysis of data from
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Is Materialism Beneficial?
Given the unquestionable benefits that capitalism has provided in
improved technology, transportation, health, and wealth, it might seem
good that people are becoming more materialistic. The more people desire
material goods, the harder they will work for them, and the more produc-
tive society will be.
However, research on materialism shows that there is a decidedly dark
side to pursuing this value. Tim Kasser, a social psychologist at Knox
College in Illinois, has been studying materialism for the past twenty years.
He and his colleagues have identified two clusters of goals: one involving
being popular, financially successful, and attractive, and the other center-
ing around having satisfying relationships with others, improving the
world through selfless action, and accepting oneself. In a series of studies
(for example, Kasser 2004; Schmuck, Kasser, and Ryan 2000), Kasser and
his colleagues found that people tend to endorse one or the other cluster,
rather than both. So some people are motivated to have fame and fortune,
while others want to make their lives about self-�development, caring rela-
tionships, and helping their community.
It turns out that people who endorse materialistic goals aren’t very
happy. In fact, they have many problems (Kasser and Ryan 1993, 1996).
College students who endorse materialistic values are more likely to be
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depressed and anxious and less satisfied with their lives. They report more
unpleasant emotions, fewer pleasant emotions, and more physical symp-
toms and drug and alcohol use. Adolescents who aspire to be rich are
more aggressive and uncooperative. Parents with a strong focus on having
money and status are less warm and more controlling toward their chil-
dren. People with materialistic goals are less empathetic, less cooperative,
and more greedy when playing a game that involves the sharing of
resources. Not surprisingly, they are also more likely to live an environ-
mentally damaging lifestyle.
Given all these downsides, why do people embrace materialism? One
answer lies in a study involving three experiments that exposed people to
various kinds of threats; in it, Kasser found that threat increases people’s
materialistic tendencies (Sheldon and Kasser 2008). In the first experi-
ment, half of the subjects were asked to briefly describe their emotions in
response to the thought of their own death and to briefly describe what
they imagine will happen to them after death. The other subjects answered
similar questions about their experience of listening to music. The people
who thought about their death were significantly more likely to endorse
goals about being rich and famous.
In the second experiment, Kasser’s team simply asked people to
imagine that a year later they would be either employed and financially
secure or unemployed and on shaky ground financially. Those who imag-
ined being insecure endorsed materialistic goals more strongly. The third
and final experiment found that people were more likely to endorse mate-
rialistic values when they were asked to think about someone “who clearly
likes you, tends to be very evaluative of you, and seems to accept you only
to the extent that you live up to certain standards of performance”
(Sheldon and Kasser 2008, 42).
If you think about this from an evolutionary perspective, it makes
sense that when people feel threatened, they focus on having the material
and social resources they need to survive. These are the reinforcers they
need and seek. Thinking about your own death or financial insecurity
naturally focuses the mind on having safety and security. This may be one
reason why poorer people are more likely to endorse materialistic values.
Similarly, thinking about people who only like you if you measure up to
their standards makes the possibility of being rejected more salient, which
will probably increase your desire to be accepted.
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You may be entertaining the possibility that, for all its harm to indi-
viduals, maybe this is just a cost we must endure to have a society with
high levels of material well-�being. Yet here too, Kasser has found just the
opposite, using data on the values of people in twenty different countries
(Grouzet et al. 2005; Kasser 2011; Schmuck, Kasser, and Ryan 2000). The
countries differed in how much people endorsed values having to do with
harmony and egalitarianism versus mastery of the environment and hier-
archical relations among people. As it turned out, the more a country’s
population valued harmony and egalitarianism, the greater the well-�being
of the country’s children, as measured by a UNICEF index of forty indica-
tors of well-�being. In addition, the countries that endorsed harmony and
egalitarianism had more generous parental leave policies and lower carbon
dioxide emissions. The strongest relationships, however, had to do with
the amount of advertising to children. Countries that endorsed mastery
and hierarchical relationships had much more advertising targeting chil-
dren. I suspect that this is because advertising increases not only people’s
desire for material goods, but also their concern about whether they have
high social status.
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laws against drunk driving. They were extremely effective. For example, in
1984 the drinking age was raised to twenty-�one in all states. Studies have
shown that this significantly reduced alcohol consumption by young
people and, with it, alcohol-�related car crashes (Wagenaar and Toomey
2002). In essence, MADD created a virtuous cycle in which advocacy
influenced both the adoption of stronger laws against drunk driving and
people’s beliefs about the appropriateness of drunk driving. As the public
heard about the changes in laws and about people being prosecuted for
drunk driving, they became more likely to disapprove of drunk driving
and less likely to do it themselves.
A Comprehensive Strategy
The work of the tobacco-�and alcohol-�control organizations demonstrates
that specific corporate policies can be shifted by changing the conse-
quences of corporate behavior. Unfortunately, the influence of corpora-
tions on public policy, and thereby human well-�being, as described earlier
in this chapter, calls for more comprehensive efforts to reform capitalism.
We need to evolve a network of advocacy organizations that promote poli-
cies, norms, and practices that will enhance well-�being.
We also need an umbrella organization that can lead and coordinate
the efforts of this network of organizations. Most nonprofit organizations
currently working to increase human well-�being focus on a narrow range
of problems, and concentrate on the major influences on those problems;
in doing so they fail to focus on fundamental underlying conditions that
affect most problems of human behavior. For example, Mothers Against
Drunk Driving has done an excellent job of getting policies enacted that
reduce drunk driving. However, to my knowledge they haven’t done any-
thing to address family conflict or poverty, both of which contribute to the
development of alcoholism.
An umbrella organization could support the efforts of all the individ-
ual organizations by coordinating joint action when doing so is likely to be
helpful. Perhaps more importantly, it could advocate for changes that
would affect fundamental conditions in ways that increase nurturance of
and in families, schools, workplaces, and communities, thereby addressing
virtually all of the psychological, behavioral, and health problems that are
so costly to our society.
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Action Implications
The major policies that will affect whether families and schools are nur-
turing include those that target the redistribution of wealth, those with a
focus on providing programs that support nurturing environments in fam-
ilies and schools, and those that restrain corporations from engaging in
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financial and other practices that harm individuals, the entire economy,
or the environment. Both policy makers and individuals can play a role in
enacting such policies.
For Citizens
• Make a list of two or three changes that you would like to see in
your community. Then identify one or two local, state, or national
organizations that you think are making a difference or could do
so. Join those organizations. Support them and advocate that they
take helpful actions.
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PA R T 4
Evolving the
Nurturing Society
Can we translate all that we have learned about human behavior in the
past forty years into truly revolutionary changes in society? I think we can.
In part 2 of this book, I enumerated how much we have learned about
how to help families and schools nurture the successful development of
children and adolescents and the powerful methods that have been created
to help adults with psychological and behavioral problems. In part 3, I
described the changes we need in the larger social system of corporate
capitalism in order to fully realize the well-�being of every member of
society.
Here, in the final part of the book, I pull all of this together to describe
how we can use our accumulated scientific knowledge about human
behavior to produce improvements in human well-�being that go beyond
anything ever achieved in human history. If that seems like hyperbole,
remember how long it took to communicate with someone on the other
side of the world in 1850—Â�before science created telephone networks and
the Internet.
In chapter 10, I discuss how and why achieving caring relationships is
foundational for progress in every facet of society, from families to corpo-
rate boardrooms. Then in chapter 11, I envision the movement we can
create to make nurturing environments a reality throughout society.
C H A P T E R 10
In Caring Relationships
with Others
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• In Matthew 5:38, Jesus says, “You have heard that it was said, ‘An
eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist
an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to
him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take
your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you
to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who asks
you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow
from you.”
I hope you see how this last example resembles the others. In every
instance, the key is that people choose not to retaliate or otherwise
respond with aversive behavior. In doing so, they make it a little more
likely that peaceful behavior will replace aggressive or unpleasant behav-
ior. When they succeed, they build the capacity of others to react to stress-
ful situations calmly and perhaps even warmly.
You might be inclined to respond to this line of thinking by saying,
“Yes, we know all this. It is all in the teachings of people like Gandhi,
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Jesus, Martin Luther King, and many others.” That is quite true. It is no
accident that each of these leaders had an impact on millions of people.
However, I’m also offering something I believe to be new and I hope
helpful: that the behavioral sciences have developed systematic ways to aid
people in controlling threatening or antisocial behavior without acting in
ways that simply provoke further aggression.
Only when we spread these practices throughout society and reduce
the number of people who arrive at adulthood with coercive repertoires
will we achieve the kind of peaceful society that Jesus, Gandhi, and Martin
Luther King envisioned. Spreading warm, supportive, caring interpersonal
relations requires that people have skills for dealing with others’ aversive
behavior without further escalating it.
My admittedly behavioristic shorthand label for the skill we need is
“stepping over the aversives of others.” It might also be called forbearance,
which means “patient self-Â�control,” “restraint,” or “tolerance.” Every one of
the effective parenting programs developed over the past forty years helps
parents get better at stepping over the aversive things that children natu-
rally do: An infant cries and a mother who might otherwise respond abu-
sively or neglectfully receives encouragement from a skilled nurse to step
over this aversive behavior. The nurse teaches her to hold the infant and
rock him, talking soothingly. The nurse makes it clear that the mother’s
frustration and distress are natural and understandable (which is an
example of the nurse stepping over the distressed behavior of the mother).
The nurse commiserates with the mother while also modeling more
patient—Â�and more effective—Â�ways of soothing the child.
In numerous family interventions, parents learn a variety of strategies
for helping children develop the self-�care skills and routines they need to
get through the day. These may include praising and rewarding what the
child does, or simply doing things together. In essence, parents get a lot
better at responding not with anger or impatience but rather with support,
interest, and calm, patient guidance, and they thereby help their children
develop an ever-�expanding set of skills, interests, and, most importantly,
the ability to regulate their own emotions and restrain angry or impulsive
behavior. In short, parents learn to ignore the milder forms of their chil-
dren’s aversive behavior and simply do what it takes to comfort and soothe
their children and guide them in developing new skills.
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The same is true for couples who aren’t getting along. Psychologists
such as Bob Weiss and John Gottman have carefully observed the interac-
tions of couples in conflict, who often escalate aversive behavior because
it may make their spouse stop doing something aversive. Effective couples
therapy helps both partners replace cycles of criticism, blaming, anger, and
cold silence with forbearance, patience, and positive activities. It doesn’t
work in every case, but it does save many marriages.
Stepping over aversives is also useful in helping people who are
depressed. Research I conducted with Hy Hops and Linda Sherman
showed that depressed mothers got some respite from the aversive behav-
ior of their family members by being sad and self-�critical (Biglan 1991).
When mothers acted this way, their husbands and children were just a
little bit less likely to be angry or critical. No one was having fun, but the
mothers occasionally avoided negativity from other family members. Based
on that finding, other researchers tested whether reducing conflict
between depressed women and their spouses would reduce their depres-
sion (Beach, Fincham, and Katz 1998). It did.
So what we need to do is to build people’s repertoires of forbearance,
forgiveness, empathy, and compassion. This will undoubtedly be a boot-
strap affair. But every time we influence someone to replace coercive reac-
tions with behavior that calms and supports others, we have one more
person who is cultivating these same nurturing reactions in those around
them. And a good place to start in this quest is with children.
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asked why he is upset, Carlos says that his mother promised to put a cookie
in his lunch, but there isn’t one. His teacher might commiserate with him,
acknowledging that this would make her sad too and showing, through
her tone of voice and facial expression, that she feels sad about his predica-
ment. In addition to helping Carlos develop the ability to describe what he
is feeling, their interaction helps him understand that feelings result from
things that happen to us. And as he calms down and receives comfort
from a caring adult, he is learning to accept and move through his emo-
tions—Â�a small step in the development of emotion regulation.
But empathy also requires being able to see things from someone else’s
perspective. If I am going to experience caring and concern about how you
are feeling, I first have to know what you are feeling. Research on perspec-
tive taking suggests that young children learn that others see things from
a different perspective—Â�literally. As they become more adept at realizing
that what others see isn’t what they see, they become better able to discern
the emotions that others are feeling.
A good illustration of this process is a test that three-�year-�olds usually
fail but five-�year-�olds easily pass. A three-�year-�old watches a video of an
adult putting a pencil in a green box while a child named Charlie watches.
After Charlie leaves the room, the adult moves the pencil from the green
box to a red box. When a three-�year-�old is asked what box Charlie will
look in to find the pencil, she or he will say the red box. But in the same
situation, a five-�year-�old will correctly say the green box. The three-�year-�
old has not yet learned to see things from Charlie’s perspective.
If children are able to notice and describe their own emotions and can
take the perspective of another child, they may then be able to understand
the emotions another child is feeling. Suppose Ryan notices that Kaitlin is
upset and learns that her mother didn’t put a treat in her lunch as Kaitlin
had expected. Because of his earlier experience, Ryan may then under-
stand and even experience some of the emotion that Kaitlin is feeling.
These experiences form the foundation for empathy—Â�the ability to
perceive and experience what another person is thinking or feeling—as
well as loving-kindness, understood in traditions like Buddhism as the
expression of love through goodwill and kind acts. But by themselves, such
experiences don’t guarantee development of the loving-Â�kindness we need
to build in our society. For example, a child who perceives that another
child is upset about her lunch might use that as an occasion to tease the
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these skills and the inclination to use them. It seems that as people become
more mindful, they also become more empathic and compassionate. For
example, a review of research on the impact of mindfulness training on
health care providers showed that mindfulness helped them create a more
caring environment, increased their capacity for empathy and apprecia-
tion of others, and assisted them in becoming less reactive or defensive in
their relationships (Escuriex and Labbé 2011).
Due to the quality of the studies they reviewed (most were not ran-
domized trials), I am hesitant to make great claims based on their findings.
However, based on the research I’ve reviewed and my own experience in
working with clients from an ACT perspective, I am inclined to believe
that when people become more psychologically flexible, as described in
chapter 5, they also tend to become more empathic and less likely to
respond to angry or aggressive people with their own anger and aggres-
sion. It seems that as people become better able to step back from their
thoughts and feelings in a mindful way and be explicit about the values
they want in their relationships, they aren’t as quick to react negatively
and are better able to act in pragmatic ways that strengthen relationships
with others.
Why would psychological flexibility help people become more patient,
empathic, and compassionate? It probably helps in four ways. First, it
involves a mindful way of being in the world—Â�simply being more attentive
to what is going on around you in the present moment. If you actively
attend to another person, you are more likely to notice how the person
feels and discern what she might be thinking.
Second, psychological flexibility involves the ability to take another’s
perspective. If you become better at noticing what is happening in the
present moment, you can also get good at noticing that you are noticing all
these things. There is a part of us that simply observes but is none of the
things we observe. It is what ACT therapists call the observer self. It is a
safe perspective from which to observe your own thoughts and feelings
and those of other people.
Third, if you get good at noticing that the things you see are not the
you that is seeing, you become better able to experience others’ emotions
without becoming overwhelmed by them (Atkins 2014). From this per-
spective, you can experience others’ distress without needing to avoid it or
to deny that it is important.
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Action Implications
Hopefully I’ve convinced you that cultivating forbearance, forgiveness,
and compassion is fundamental to achieving a nurturing society. Here are
some effective actions that can advance these skills and values, whether
undertaken individually or in organizations. After all, every organization
is a place where people may either experience great conflict or enjoy the
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support and approval of those around them. And given all of the evidence
that positive interpersonal relations benefit both individuals and organiza-
tions by increasing effectiveness and reducing stress and stress-�related
problems, public policies are also essential to promoting nurturing human
relationships.
For Everyone
• See if, a few times each day, you can notice whether those around
you seem comfortable, involved, and thriving, or tense, threat-
ened, and fearful. Then look for ways to support those who seem
troubled. Simply paying attention to people and expressing an
interest can make a difference.
• When dealing with people who often act in angry and aggressive
ways, try to put yourself in their shoes and see why they might feel
threatened. Patient, warm reactions to their irritable behavior
could set the stage for changing your relationship with such
people. Of course, you will have to accept—Â�but not believe or act
on—Â�all the thoughts you will experience about feeling threatened
by them or needing to retaliate.
For Organizations
• Systematically assess the quality of interpersonal relations within
the organization. If conflict is common, initiate a program to help
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C H A P T E R 11
of the first twenty years of the century, partisan warfare subsided when a
new generation of Americans banded together via the Internet to advo-
cate for positive political action and policies. Rather than attacking the
media conglomerates and politicians who were using divisive methods to
keep their constituency angry at the “other side,” this new breed of civic
advocates uses humor and warmth to show that public discourse can be
more civil, respectful, and focused on everyone’s well-Â�being.
It is hard to make contact with dry statistics, but these statistics mean
that a little girl in Louisville, Kentucky, whose mother died in a tragic
accident, has a network of family, friends, and organizations making sure
that she is cared for and gets what she needs to blossom into a successful
young woman. It means that across the nation, fewer children are teased,
abused, or neglected. The heartening statistics President Barrera shares
wouldn’t exist without the many warm and generous people who made the
well-�being of others a higher priority than their own financial success: a
grandfather who chose to build a play structure for his grandchildren
rather than sit at home watching golf on TV, a stranger who intervened in
a thoughtful way to help a single mother find a job when she was laid off,
a high school football star who made it a point to be friends with one of
the school’s most rejected kids, a multimillionaire who lobbied to have his
taxes raised to ensure that teachers wouldn’t be laid off.
Is such a scenario possible? I think something of this sort is not only
possible, but inevitable. I cannot look at the progress made in public health
in the past five hundred years and in behavioral science in the past fifty
years without feeling optimistic that all nations will focus increasingly on
improving the well-�being of their citizens. They will be guided by the
knowledge that the most meaningful measure of well-�being is not wealth,
but life satisfaction. They will use and promote the growing number of
programs, policies, and practices that clearly achieve better outcomes.
But optimism is not a substitute for action. So in this chapter, I’ll
discuss how we might evolve toward the world described above—Â�the world
I want my grandson to live in.
A Compelling Vision
We need a simple, unifying, and emotionally evocative vision of the kind of
world we can create. The best description I’ve been able to come up with for
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habits needed to live healthy, happy, and productive lives in caring rela-
tionships with others” (IOM and NRC 2009, 387). I’ve described how such
a society can be achieved by creating nurturing environments. In advertis-
ing terms, “nurturing environments” is the brand. Its value for target audi-
ence members is built by getting them to associate it with all the things
they already value and with preventing things they fear or dislike.
Thus, we need emotionally evocative messages that associate nurtur-
ing environments with kindness, innovation, academic success, health,
and prosperity, along with messages underscoring that nurturing environ-
ments are the key to preventing crime, academic failure, alcohol abuse and
alcohol-�related problems, tobacco use, drug abuse, teenage pregnancy,
marital discord, child abuse, poverty, depression, anxiety, and schizophre-
nia. We also need to tailor these messages to specific target audiences.
Everyone will benefit from hearing about how promoting nurturing envi-
ronments can help them and those around them, especially when the
details of these messages are targeted to specific groups, such as parents,
youth, policy makers, law enforcement personnel, health care providers,
and educators.
If I had a budget of several million dollars and one year of uninter-
rupted time, I could hire a top-�notch advertising agency to come up with
a better term than “nurturing environments.” I could create media com-
munications that motivate people to really want nurturing environments.
Give me a hundred million dollars, and I could reach millions of people
with effective messages. That isn’t a lot of money, especially in comparison
to statistics indicating that the cigarette industry spent $12.49 billion on
advertising in 2006 (T. T. Clark et al. 2011).
The vision we create must also be compelling to the scientific com-
munity, so it must be empirically sound. I submit that this book presents
the evidence supporting the value of creating nurturing environments,
along with a great deal of information on how to achieve such
environments.
Creative Epidemiology
In chapter 6, I described how creative the tobacco control movement has
been in reducing tobacco use. It dramatically illustrated the magnitude of
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And reducing the hours in which alcohol may be sold leads to reductions
in alcohol consumption and related harm, such as violence (Popova et al.
2009). Clearly, all of these reductions in problematic outcomes would
greatly contribute to our environments becoming more nurturing.
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funding for health research worldwide, during the last three years its
budget has declined. And thanks to sequestration in fiscal year 2013, its
budget decreased by two billion dollars, resulting in a failure to fund 640
projects, many of which involved prevention research. Given the history of
the NIH in funding projects that lead to improved health and well-�being,
this is a tragic development.
Obviously, I am a biased reporter on this; my income for the past
thirty years has come almost entirely from NIH funding. But hopefully I’ve
demonstrated how much our society has gained by spending on behavioral
science research—which, by the way, has been just a tiny fraction of NIH
expenditures.
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suggest we wouldn’t feel anger. The civil rights workers who were willing
to risk their lives and in some cases die for their cause certainly felt fear.
However, they chose to accept their fear and take actions that they
believed would arouse the conscience of the majority of Americans. We
view these acts as heroic precisely because people were willing to have
thoughts and feelings that conflicted with the actions they took.
ACT-�based interventions ask people to think deeply about their most
important values and envision what they want their life to be about.
Sometimes practitioners ask their clients to imagine what might be on
their tombstones if they lived up to their own highest ideals. In ACT
workshops with Oregon teachers (Hinds et al. 2011), no one suggests what
values the teachers should have. Yet all across the state, in both rural and
urban settings, teachers usually list the same values: respect, integrity,
caring, honesty, family, acceptance, forgiveness, tolerance, faith, fun, trust,
kindness, friendship, exercise, and laughter. After teachers have identified
their values, we help them take steps to make these values a bigger part of
their lives. For example, they might set a specific goal for increasing the
respect they get and the respect they give. One teacher decided she would
try to listen more attentively to students when they talked to her. She
decided that at least once a week for each class, she would take time
between periods to talk to the students she had challenging relationships
with, asking them about what was happening in their lives. She found that
these students became softer and less confrontational.
What would happen if values became a much bigger part of our private
lives and our public discourse? Suppose that creative epidemiology could
encourage people to focus on valued living and become more psychologi-
cally flexible. A movement to nurture psychological flexibility could influ-
ence society at every level, including entertainment and the media, the
same way that messages about not smoking helped shrink the culture of
smoking. If this movement joined with religions that teach turning the
other cheek, it might ignite an effort to bring public discussion of our most
important problems back to a pragmatic focus on improving everyone’s
well-Â�being. This kind of social evolution won’t come from attacking the
“other side”; instead, we need to take actions that model a third way: prag-
matic problem solving.
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225
Afterword
228
Acknowledgments
I tell the story of teaming up with Tony, Steve, and Dennis for a
general audience in my book The Neighborhood Project. We outline our
vision for a professional audience in an article titled “Evolving the Future:
Toward a Science of Intentional Change,” which is published with peer
commentaries and our reply in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
Now Tony has outlined the vision in his own words in The Nurture Effect
with great wisdom, experience, and humanity.
I think of what Tony and the rest of us are trying to accomplish in
historic terms. Historians will look back upon the twenty-�first century as
a period of synthesis for human-�related knowledge, similar to the synthesis
of biological knowledge that took place during the twentieth century.
With understanding comes the capacity to improve. There is no doubt
that the synthesis is taking place, but how fast is less certain—Â�and speed
is of the essence, because the need to solve our most pressing problems
won’t wait. The more people who read The Nurture Effect and absorb its
meaning, the faster the world will become a better place.
—David Sloan Wilson
President, Evolution Institute
SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology
Binghamton University
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252
Anthony Biglan, PhD, is a senior scientist at Oregon Research Institute,
and a leading figure in the development of prevention science. His research
over the past thirty years has helped to identify effective family, school,
and community interventions to prevent the most common and costly
problems of childhood and adolescence. He is a leader in efforts to use
prevention science to build more nurturing families, schools, and commu-
nities throughout the world. Biglan lives in Eugene, OR.
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