Study Finds Delinquent Behavior Among Boys Is "Contagious"

According to a new study, if everyone else was committing a crime, you would too, at least if you are a boy. The 20-year study showed what every grandmother could tell you; children from poor families, with inadequate supervision and bad friends were more likely to end up in juvenile court. What was more surprising is that exposure to the juvenile justice system seemed to increase the chance that the boy would engage in criminal activity as a young adult. "For boys who had been through the juvenile justice system, compared to boys with similar histories without judicial involvement, the odds of adult judicial interventions increased almost seven-fold," says study co-author Richard E. Tremblay.

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Re:Doesn't matter if the kids mimic each other or

[vuo]

Look ma, no sources, +5 Insightful! Nice how experimental findings can be negated by "feel-so". The fact is that if a group is split up, the performance of both halves goes down. A case study: The PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) study found that Finland's education produces 15-year-olds that are consistently 1st or 2st in the world in the categories of Mathematics, Reading literacy, Science and Problem solving. Finland's educational policy is explicitly designed to be maximally inclusive up to the ninth grade (15-year-olds). Only the mentally disabled are given special education, and there are no "honor students" or such, let alone "gifted classes". Others in the top 3 of the ranking are Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea and Canada.