Transcript Predictive Validity IV, Teen Smoking, and from Explanation to Hypothesis to Test

Predictive Validity IV,
Teen Smoking, and from
Explanation to Hypothesis to Test
Suicide Tipping Points
Rural Mo. Area Grapples With Teen Suicides
CARUTHERSVILLE, Mo.
Saturday December 16, 2006 4:38 pm
“In a Land Torn by Violence,
Too Many Troubling Deaths”
New York Times
Marvilia Marmolejo lost two of her children to suicide,
Ketty Salazar, 15, and Yuber Salazar, 18. "This had
never happened around here before," she said.
Other Teen “Tipping Points”
contagious behavior/imitation: Gladwell (p. 223) “getting permission to act from someone else”
Jonesboro, Arkansas
Heath, Kentucky
Red Lake High School, MN
Jeff Weiss
“Too Close for Comfort”
New York Times
Teen Smoking
(CNN) -- Smoking rates among American teen-agers rose dramatically between
1988 and 1996, according to the CDC.
The teen smoking epidemic illustrates both the Law of the Few (contagiousness) and Stickiness:
Of all the teenagers who experiment with cigarettes, only about a third ever go on to smoke
regularly. Hence, nicotine may be highly addictive, BUT it is only addictive in some people,
some of the time.
Even among the population of “smokers,” a fifth of them don’t smoke every day.
There are millions of Americans who manage to smoke regularly and not be hooked—people for
whom smoking is contagious but not sticky.
They are known as “chippers” (avg. no more than 5 cigarettes a day but who smoke at least 4
days/per week; equivalent of “social drinkers”)
Teen Smoking
What distinguishes “chippers” from “hard-core” smokers? Partially genetic factors
e.g., rat experiments at Univ. of Colorado (pp. 236-237)
Three Categories:
1.) People who tried smoking once, didn’t get a buzz, and found the whole experience
so awful that they never smoked again are probably similar to those rates whose
bodies treated nicotine like a poison.
2.) Chippers may be people who, like other rats, have the genes to derive pleasure from
nicotine, but not the genes to handle it in large doses.
3.) Heavy smokers, meanwhile, may be people with the genes to do both.
Yet genes don’t provide a total explanation for how many people smoke and how much
they smoke. Environmental factors still play a role.
What this and other research shows is that what makes smoking sticky is very different
from the kinds of things that make it contagious.
Teen Smoking
Contagiousness: e.g., the Colorado Adoption Project and the “nurture myth”
- If nurture matters so much, then why did the adopted kids not resemble their
adoptive parents at all? (Gladwell, p. 240)
- The Colorado study isn’t saying that genes explain everything and that
environment doesn’t matter. On the contrary, all of the results strongly suggest
that our environment plays as big—if not a bigger—role as heredity/genes in
shaping personality and intelligence.
- What it is saying is that whatever the environmental influence is, it doesn’t have
a lot to do with parents. It’s something else, Judith Harris argues: peers (p. 241).
SO, public health campaigns threatening and scaring teenagers with grisly photos
about the risks of smoking are useless. They’re adult propaganda. It’s because
adults don’t approve of smoking that many teenagers want to do it.
** In short, it’s hard to make smoking less contagious. **
Hence, trying to reduce smoking by “thwarting the efforts of Salesmen” and making
it less contagious doesn’t seem like a particularly effective strategy.
So how about trying to make it less “sticky”?
Teen Smoking
Stickiness: Two Possibilities
1.) recently discovered link between smoking and depression
- research has shown that smokers suffer disproportionately from chemical imbalances in
their brains (serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine)
Hence, if you can treat smokers for depression, you may be able to make their
habit an awful lot easier to break (pp. 246-247)
e.g., Glaxo Wellcome and bupropion/Zyban
2.) Nicotine addiction isn’t a linear phenomenon; no instant addiction (takes on average 3
years; most “smokers” start in the mid-teens, so you have time to prevent addiction)
- smoking research (p. 249) shows that there is something of an addiction “tipping point”;
chippers simply never smoke enough to hit that addiction threshold/tipping point
chippers smoke up to, but no more than, 5 cigarettes a day (=4-6 milligrams of nicotine)
- so require tobacco companies to lower the level of nicotine so that even the heaviest
smokers—those smoking, say, 30 cigarettes a day—could not get anything more than 5
milligrams of nicotine within a 24-hour period (New England Journal of Medicine)
Teen Smoking
Anti-smoking efforts:
- have focused on trying to make smoking less acceptable, more stigmatized
- have involved raising cigarette prices, curtailing advertising, running public
health messages, limiting access to minors and schoolchildren, encouraging
absolutely no experimentation (in short, trying to change attitudes/making
smoking less contagious) . . . Not very successful.
Instead . . .
- treat some smokers for depression,
- and reduce nicotine levels below the addiction threshold
The habit would be significantly less “sticky.” Cigarette smoking would be
more like the common cold: easily caught but easily defeated.
Nassim Taleb, “Fat Tails,” “Black Swans,” & Blowing Up
Taleb
options trading & luck vs. skill
“Physical events, whether death rates or
poker games, are the predictable function
of a limited and stable set of factors, and
tend to follow what statisticians call a
‘normal distribution’—a bell curve.”
“But to Taleb, in the markets—unlike in the
physical universe—the rules of the game
can be changed. Central banks, like
Russia’s, can decide to default on
government-backed securities... Extremists
can crash planes into buildings.”
People are rational most of the time, but not
ALL of the time; and bizarre things happen.
e.g., serendipity, resumes, and “hindsight bias”
or “hindsight distortion”
Niederhoffer
From Explanation to Hypothesis
A hypothesis is a testable statement about the empirical relationship between an
independent variable (e.g., gender, age, race, region of the country) and a
dependent variable (e.g., family size, gun control opinions, voting choice).
A variable can function as either type, independent or dependent (e.g., family income,
classroom size).
Examples:
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Individuals with high incomes (ind. variable) are more likely to vote Republican (dep.
variable) than individuals with low incomes.
-
Individuals with a college+ level of education are less likely to experience
unemployment than individuals with only high school or less level of education.
-
Boys are more likely to score a perfect 800 on the SAT math test than girls.
-
NASCAR enthusiasts are more likely to own a gun than non-NASCAR enthusiasts.
-
Boys are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than girls.
-
Girls are more likely to be diagnosed with an eating disorder than boys.
-
Take-home tests are more prevalent at colleges/universities that have an honor system
than at colleges/universities that do not have an honor system.