Have you ever been caught speeding? If so, why? Did you make a conscious decision to drive faster than the speed limit? Did you disagree with the speed limit, believing it to be too slow? Or maybe it wasn’t a conscious decision. Maybe you were late for an appointment, or perhaps you drifted away for a moment, mulling over an issue at work as the needle drifted up the dial?
The fundamental attribution error suggests that other people will tend to view your bad behaviour as a reflection of your conscious decisions, whereas the likelihood is that it has been affected a great deal by circumstance.
In his 2011 bestseller, Daniel Kahneman posited the existence of two mental systems for decision making – a fast, intuitive ‘System 1’ and a slow, deliberative ‘System 2’. In deploying System 1, we perhaps engage schemas from long-term memory without bringing them fully into working memory. For System 2, we are deliberative and conscious, a process involving more processing in working memory. The well known limitations of working memory therefore slow down System 2.
Whichever way you look at it, there appears to be two quite different routes by which we make decisions. Given that we can conceive of a student’s poor behaviour as being the result of a poor decision, this suggests that here are two routes via which poor behaviour arises.
What is poor behaviour? We know it when we see it, but this may reflect our own biases so let’s have an attempt at defining it: Behaviour that harms others, damages the learning environment or that would come with social, legal or even criminal costs in the outside world. There’s plenty to argue about there, particularly on the last point – whose social norms are we upholding? However, I think we would all generally accept that schools are places of learning where students should be safe.
Any disagreement seems to be more about how to achieve this. Some teachers prioritise System 2. They wish to engage students who have misbehaved in a learning process so that they make better conscious choices in future. This is the spur to the use of ‘restorative practices’ in schools. However, I would be worried about asking students to work out right and wrong for themselves in some kind of constructivist teaching process. As a community, a school must hold a common set of values and must be loud and clear about these, otherwise it will treat its students unfairly and capriciously. Even if these principles are not perfect, the gains of a common approach outweigh any relativist squeamishness.
Nevertheless, no matter how effective these attempts may be at changing underlying attitudes, they can only solve part of the problem. I can be thoroughly, morally convinced that speeding is wrong, I can record this attitude in an survey or interview, and yet I can still find myself speeding because I do so as a result of System 1 thinking related to the circumstance I am presently in.
So what can we do about poor System 1 decisions? If these are a response to circumstance then we can manipulate those circumstances. Between 8.00 am and 9.30 am in the morning and 2.30 pm and 4.00 pm in the afternoon, the speed limit outside my school dips from 60 km/h to 40 km/h. Given that it is easy to forget this change in speed limit, VicRoads have chosen to deploy big flashing signs. If that doesn’t work then the fine speeding drivers receive might sharpen attention in the future. Over the years, I have become accustomed to looking for such signs on the occasions that I find myself driving around a strange town at these times of day. I suppose I have become conditioned.
Such conditioning approaches are also effective in schools. We can manipulate the environment. We can choose where students sit, how equipment is arranged, how and when we give certain instructions. We can have graduated systems of rewards and sanctions.
A good school clearly needs to have a strategy that works on both levels or decision making. It is naive and, well, negligent to believe that it is possible to simply talk students into behaving well. That may be part of the solution, but it’s not enough.
Filling the pail 
It’s not often that I fundamentally disagree with your posts, but what you’ve written reflects all that is wrong about the ‘behaviour management’ mindset. I’d go so far as to suggest that ‘restorative justice’ is counter-productive. We’ve totally lost sight of the causes of poor behaviour.
First: chlildren who are in classes where they learn nothing are both bored beyond all endurance and–especially if they are in mixed-ability classes–humiliated. A report by the North London Truancy Unit in 1994 found that post-registration truancy almost invariably resulted from the desire to avoid a class or a teacher that the pupil hated. The comprehensive ideal that all children should study the same curriculum and minimally-guided intruction are a toxic combination–‘differentiation’ becomes a pathetic joke that fools no one (except maybe SLT) long before kids get to secondary school.
Of course, even bright and successful pupils can misbehave–no amount of training in B4L will help teachers who question their right to be in charge of a class and feel that they have to ‘negotiate’ a settlement with their pupils. This moral failure is endemic in Western culture and helps explain why so many white European kids have been attracted to Islamist propaganda. I’ve talked to quite a few pupils who attended ‘zero-tolerance’ secondary schools and they vastly preferred them to the ‘caring’ primary schools where children who misbehaved were perceived as getting more attention. Above all, they felt personally safe when grown-ups acted like grown-ups. Ironically, there is a certain truth to the saying that bad behaviour results from a pupil’s ‘unmet needs’–the need for an orderly enviroment where adults are in charge.
Tom I thought Greg was arguing for the primacy of “nudge” techniques over restorative practice.
Reread. The emphasis on conditioning was simply to counterbalance a perceived focus on restorative practice. (Which does match my experiences in my workplace were RP is emphasised but school culture/expectations is not)
My experience is overwhelmingly that poor discipline is a result of senior management taking a technocratic approach to behaviour and ignoring the moral dimension. Kids sure as hell know the difference between a teacher who has no qualms about exercising their authority and one who’s into B4L. Let’s face it–SLT believe, rightly or wrongly, that they’re facing career death if they are seen to be ‘judgmental’. Look at the school shamings we’ve had. However, this might start to change if Ofsted hold their nerve.
It’s a bit tangential Tom. Greg was just arguing for a strong school culture that encourages good behaviour. Not an argument about bad management but he has talked about that in the past. Bit confused where you are going with this.
Reblogged this on The Echo Chamber.