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

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.

“In a Land Torn by Violence, Too Many Troubling Deaths”

New York Times

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 SmokingWhat 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 SmokingContagiousness: 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 SmokingStickiness: 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 SmokingAnti-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 UpTaleb options trading & luck vs. skill

“Physical events, whether death rates orpoker games, are the predictable functionof a limited and stable set of factors, andtend to follow what statisticians call a‘normal distribution’—a bell curve.”

“But to Taleb, in the markets—unlike in thephysical universe—the rules of the game can be changed. Central banks, like Russia’s, can decide to default on government-backed securities... Extremistscan 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 HypothesisA 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:

- 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.