Abstract
In this paper we relate a particular type of decision making, thoughtfully reflective decision making (TRDM) in adolescence, to successful and unsuccessful life outcomes in young adulthood. Those who are thoughtfully reflective in their decision making are more likely to consider possible alternative routes to goal attainment, weigh the costs and benefits of those alternatives, and critically revisit the decision once made to examine what went well and what went wrong. We also argue that what mediates the effect of TRDM on later life outcomes is the accumulation of capital. Those who use better decision making practices are more likely to recognize the resources provided by and make the necessary investments to accumulate human, social and cultural capital. These notions are theoretically linked to conceptions of criminal offenders as both rational planners and decision makers and as fully human agents. Using data from the Add Health data set, our hypotheses are largely confirmed. Those who are higher in TRDM as adolescents were more likely to have enrolled in or graduated from college, to be in better physical health, are more involved in civic and community affairs, less likely to commit criminal acts, use illegal drugs and be involved in heavy drinking as adults. TRDM is also positively related to the accumulation of human, social and cultural capital. Finally, a substantial part of the effect of TRDM on young adult outcomes was mediated by capital accumulation. The implications of these findings for future theory and research are discussed.
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Notes
Keren and de Bruin (2003: 348) describe it in the following terms: “The underlying assumption is that, in the long run, good decision processes are more likely to generate good outcomes”.
We would like to be perfectly clear here that by a “quality” decision we are referring to the process by which a decision is made and not the outcome (Edwards 1984). A quality decision is made by considering most of the possible alternatives, by collecting information and making assessments about the probability of each, by revisiting decisions made to learn from successes and failures. For example, a person could have a preference for excitement and risk. Making a competent decision about how to accomplish this goal would entail considering the different ways that one could experience excitement and risk—bungee jumping, riding a motorcycle, investing in the currency market, using drugs, breaking into a store at night. Making a competent or rational decision would consist of thinking about the short and long-term gains and benefits from each line of action and on that basis make a decision. We think that when good procedures are practiced good outcomes are more likely to follow.
There are individual characteristics that make TRDM more or less likely. For example, persons with a high discount rate would on average overweight present consumption relative to delayed consumption and would, therefore, lack the foresight required of better decision making. Youth, who have immature cognitive capacities would, on average, be less likely than those older to have the ability to anticipate long-term consequences (Yurgelun-Todd 2007). However, we would expect to find variation within all ages in persons’ ability to make thoughtful and rational decisions (de Bruin et al. 2007; Fischhoff 2008).
Our understanding of thoughtfully reflective decision making does not deny that some decisions are or should be made by other means, nor it does not deny that emotions may be a part of rational decision making (see Vohs et al. 2007). The relationship between emotions and rational decision making is complex and way beyond the scope of this paper, but we do need to make clear that our notion of thoughtfully reflective decision making is not hostile to the role of emotions nor does it say that emotions are the antonym of rationality. Emotions are strong emotional states that play an important, but currently unappreciated, role in rational decision making. Emotions may facilitate rational decision making by providing motivation and salience for particular types of information, it may, however, also make rationality more complex to understand since what people think they would do in an emotionally “cool” state (say they will use a condom) might not be at all what they really would do in an emotionally “hot” state (throes of passion) (Airely and Loewenstein 2006; Loewenstein 1996; more generally Vohs et al. 2007). The general point we wish to make is that emotions are not hostile to rational thinking and the relationship, both theoretical and empirical, between rational decision making and emotion is one of the most undeveloped but important areas for future work in criminology.
Rescher (2003:9) makes this point most succinctly:
“Why be rational?”
“It’s the intelligent thing to do”.
“But why proceed intelligently?”
“Come now; surely you jest!”.
This third criterion excluded 12 additional respondents who were either 11, 20, or 21 years old at wave 1 because these respondents were clearly not age-normative for grades 7–12.
One was added to each response so that the distribution began at one rather than zero and all values had a defined natural log.
All respondents in the core sample were at least 18 years old, voting age, on that date.
This criterion was used because at wave 3 many respondents were pursuing a college degree but were not old enough to have graduated. If this variable is recoded to identify only individuals who successfully graduated from college and the sample is restricted to those who were at least 22 years old at wave 3, the results are unchanged.
Although these are very good proxies for TRDM indicators, we would have preferred some more direct measures of respondents’ decision making processes such as whether they made sure they had considered all of the reasonable alternative courses of action and if they thought they generally collected sufficient information about each alternative. This is to admit that we do not think we have a perfect measure of TRDM.
For both of these measures, respondents who were expelled or had dropped out of school were assigned the lowest possible value.
One reviewer remarked that perhaps the outcomes were different enough from one another as to each warrant a unique set of control variables. Because our focus is on the predictive capacity of TRDM for a range of outcomes, we wanted to and did employ an identical set of control variables across models (with the exception of the lagged outcomes). This said, in unreported analyses we followed the reviewer’s suggestion to test the robustness of our findings. For example, when modeling poor health, we included measures of diet and exercise. These supplementary analyses left the ensuing findings unchanged.
Other functional forms were tried for models (1)–(4) and the results were fundamentally the same.
There are no measures of civic and community participation from wave 1—and in any case these are adult rather than child activities. As well, college graduation has no conceptual counterpart to lag at wave 1.
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Paternoster, R., Pogarsky, G. & Zimmerman, G. Thoughtfully Reflective Decision Making and the Accumulation of Capital: Bringing Choice Back In. J Quant Criminol 27, 1–26 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-010-9095-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-010-9095-5