Behavioral Cascades in a Teenager’s Life
Resource: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/health/research/17teens.html
“A Cascade of Influences Shaping Violent Teens”
This article was published in “The New York Times” and written by Roni Carin Rabin. Rabin describes a long-term study funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse and the National Institute of Mental Health that followed 750 children from pre-school to high school in order to better understand what influences violent behavior, specifically looking into the context of the “nature versus nurture” debate. Rather than being one or the other, nature or nurture, the study’s findings suggested: “an interplay between behavior and environment during childhood create a cascade of influences that shape the teenager’s character.” (Rabin)
This article relates to the concept of behavioral cascades within a network. In this case, the network is a person’s life, specifically a malleable or impressionable young person. This person is something of a central node, and the surrounding nodes are the instances in that person’s life which ultimately lead them to their teenage character. As the researchers found, there was scarcely ever one instance, or in this case one node, that would lead to a cascade. Dr. Dodge, one of the researchers, stated “What we found is that small problems cumulate into more serious problems. There’s not one single factor” (Rabin). This relates to behavioral cascades in that there is scarcely one singular node that ultimately results in an entire network cascade. Rather, there is often a combination of nodes that lead to such a phenomenon. A threshold of nodes leading to a network cascade mimics the results of this research: a threshold of events and experiences leading to a behavioral cascade, ultimately “creating”, to an extent, a violent teenager.