The Behavioral Economics of Violence

: From the viewpoint of teleological behaviorism the first question to ask in attempting to understand any behavior, including violent behavior, is: What are its contingencies of reward and punishment? Or, to put the question in economic terms: What are the short‐term and long‐term costs and benefits that such behavior entails? Let us therefore consider the costs and benefits of youth violence. Among the short‐term costs of violent behavior are the physical effort of the act, the possibility of immediate physical retaliation, immediate social disapproval, and the opportunity cost of other social acts that the violent behavior takes the place of (you can'tbe affectionate and violent at the same time, for instance). Among the immediate benefits of violent behavior are the intrinsic satisfaction of the violent act itself and any extrinsic benefit; if A violently appropriates B's new sneakers then obtaining the sneakers reinforces A's violence. These immediate benefits may well outweigh the costs in many contexts. Among the long‐term costs of violent behavior are delayed retaliation, possible social disapproval and loss of social support, rejection from a social group, job loss, and health risks associated with a violent lifestyle. Among the long‐term benefits are long‐term intimidation of others (your neighbor is less likely to build a fence on your property if you have a reputation for violence), and a possibly exciting lifestyle. These long‐term benefits may well be outweighed by the long‐term costs. Opposition of long‐term net costs to short‐term net benefits, where it exists, creates a personal self‐control trap: Overall satisfaction may decrease monotonically with rate of the target behavior but, regardless of its rate, the immediate satisfaction of doing it is always higher than that of not doing it. In the case of violent behavior, this trap is exacerbated by the fact that as a person's violence increases, net immediate reinforcement also increases (due to membership in violence‐reinforcing subgroups). This contingency fits the “primrose path” addiction model of Prelec and Herrnstein. Violence is thus a paradigm case of behavioral addiction. I consider three ways of controlling such addictive behavior: by punishment, by extinction, and by substitution. The problem with punishment in the case of violence is that physical punishment tends to increase violent behavior while incarceration drives the punished person into the very social subgroup (the prison