Teaching Youth To Think ‘Slow’ May Help Reduce Crime

In an activity known as the “Fist Exercise,” students are paired up, one is given a small ball and his partner is given 30 seconds to try to get it from him. The exercise often ends with threats of violence; but in the debriefing afterward, the students are taught to just ask for the ball, as most partners say they are willing to give it up.

The BAM curriculum is not aimed at telling boys how to act, but at improving their meta-cognition — at teaching them to act less automatically. It focuses on learning impulse control and “positive anger expression,” said Jannie Kirby, Youth Guidance’s director of marketing and communications. “Students learn coping skills in anger management so they won’t have violent reactions.” Last year, BAM reached 1,935 boys in 38 schools across the Chicago Public Schools system.

Being in a bad school in a rough neighborhood and from a poor family is not the ideal environment for developing self-control, but programs that focus on behavior and cognition, like this one, might help. New research concludes that participation in the weekly BAM sessions lowered boys’ chances of being arrested for a crime, though it’s unclear if it improved school attendance, as a past study of the program had shown.

These findings are detailed in a recently released working paper, “Thinking, Fast and Slow? Some Field Experiments to Reduce Crime and Dropout in Chicago,” put out by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The title of the paper alludes to the book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman, which documents the differing psychology of “fast,” or instinctive, thinking and “slow,” deliberate thinking.

On edit -- I remember "hot heads" very well and them especially would often react by punching someone in the face before they figured out what is going on.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/teaching-youth-to-think-slow-may-help-reduce-crime/

This is very interesting as I'm a very non-violent person that some people misinterpret that I'm a push over and growing up once in awhile someone would call me "slow" which bothered me because the implication seemed I wasn't smart or something like that but was always interested that someone could tell what is going on in someone else's head as I 'got' most things right away and those I didn't, I figured out eventually but I think it was based on the timing to give an opinion or make a decision. Pretty much fighting as an option was often dismissed as not a problem solver because it won't get my money back or whatever the case plus it could hurt as well or the risks outweighed the benefits.