Kevin M. Beaver and others write,
The role of parenting in the development of criminal behavior has been the source of a vast amount of research, with the majority of studies detecting statistically significant associations between dimensions of parenting and measures of criminal involvement. An emerging group of scholars, however, has drawn attention to the methodological limitations—mainly genetic confounding—of the parental socialization literature. The current study addressed this limitation by analyzing a sample of adoptees to assess the association between 8 parenting measures and 4 criminal justice outcome measures. The results revealed very little evidence of parental socialization effects on criminal behavior before controlling for genetic confounding and no evidence of parental socialization effects on criminal involvement after controlling for genetic confounding.
Pointer from Jason Collins. A caveat is that this is an example of the statisical fallacy of using absence of evidence to imply evidence of absence.
I wonder how they randomized.
On the other hand the overall society does seem to have significant effects. 2 countries with similar populations (say all descended from x country) can have widely varying crime rates. I think and hope that the growing presence of video is and will continue to reduce crime. Also in my experience some people who have committed crimes are not such bad people maybe they are too impulsive or too proud to let others get away with something.
In some ways I think the USA legal system is far too harsh and other ways too lenient with criminals. More and better policing might help.
“Absence of evidence is evidence of absence” is not a statistical fallacy, it’s a correct mathematical theorem.
The magnitude of the evidence on each side of the equation may be grossly unequal, but if observing a piece of evidence would increase your credence in a hypothesis, then taking an opportunity to observe that evidence and not finding it should (at least slightly) decrease your credence.
I agree you are technically correct, but that doesn’t change the fact that people routinely grossly misinterpret findings of “no statistically significant difference.”
Skeptical these metrics can be effectively measured absent some sort of unethically undetectable surveillance.
That said, seems obvious that institutional factors must dominate, just glancing at regions that are genetically similar but have very different governments/institutions. Incentives matter.