芝加哥暴力干预研究：威胁性解读如何被重新学习

The day before we spoke, King¹, 26, had learned that his friend Lamont had been killed. He was at home when his cousin called to break the news and asked him to come over. ‘I’m on my way,’ King replied immediately, knowing what was being asked of him. He ran up to his room to retrieve his Glock, opened his box of bullets and, one by one, filled the clip.

Lamont was dead, though King couldn’t fully wrap his mind around the fact. He’d seen him only hours earlier, when Lamont and King’s cousin stopped by his house. They’d been shot at by their rivals the day before, and King had warned them to be careful: ‘Y’all need to keep y’alls’ heads up.’ Now the car Lamont died in sat empty on a nearby street, shot up and stained with his blood. King watched a video posted on Facebook of paramedics draping the body with a sheet and carrying it into an ambulance.

King knew what came next. He and his cousin would go out with their guns and ride through the neighbourhood until they found the men responsible. ‘I just wanted my get-back,’ he said. He wanted the people who killed Lamont to feel what he was feeling. And if he couldn’t find them, he’d find someone else he had beef with. King reasoned: ‘It could be a person who I don’t like or who I’m already into it with. I’m going to slide on them too and whoever else. That’s how I grew up with my feelings. That’s how I let off my rage.’

To King, retaliation felt less like a choice than an inevitability. ‘Whether I do it or not, somebody going to do it,’ he said. ‘If it ain’t me, I got other homies who feel the same way I feel. I got cousins, family members, they mommas. That’s how it be, and that’s how it’s going to always be. It’s a repeated cycle.’

His clip was full. Then King decided to do something that a year earlier he would not have done.

For King, and for many Americans like him, gun violence is not an exceptional event but a fact of life. In some parts of the United States, lethal violence has reached a scale exceeding recent wars and military occupations. Between 2020 and 2021, a young man in Chicago’s Garfield Park neighbourhood, where King is from, faced a higher risk of being killed than a US soldier deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq. By age 40, around half of the city’s Black and Hispanic residents will have witnessed someone being shot.

Violent crime has fallen steeply across the US since 2021, though not everywhere. According to Chicago’s crime dashboard, fatal shootings in Chicago were up 7 per cent this year as of late September. But even in cities where the decline has held, a citywide figure is a poor description of how violence is experienced. In US cities, most shootings concentrate in a few dozen blocks and among a few hundred people who account for less than 1 per cent of a city’s population. Thus, citywide numbers cannot capture what it is like to live inside that zone, where violence is not a discrete event but an experience that leaves stubborn traces on many lives.

In 2022, I was part of a research team that interviewed 99 men from Chicago’s highest-violence neighbourhoods. All were former or current participants in the Rapid Employment and Development Initiative, or READI Chicago, a community violence intervention run by a partnership of Heartland Alliance, the University of Chicago and seven nonprofit organisations on the city’s south and west sides. READI served adult men at greatest risk of shooting someone or being shot. By the time they entered the programme, 98 per cent had been arrested, averaging more than 17 times each, and 35 per cent had been shot. For 18 months, participants were paid to work and attend group cognitive behavioural intervention (CBI) sessions. Outreach workers helped them navigate housing, legal, safety and substance-use crises that might otherwise have made steady participation difficult.

The men had learned to anticipate danger in ordinary moments and to meet it by fighting back

We asked each person we spoke with to tell us the story of his life, then to reconstruct minor confrontations, conflicts averted, and those that escalated into violence. We asked what they had been thinking and feeling as these events unfolded, returning to a single question: ‘What was going through your mind when that happened?’ Our aim was to access a layer of cognition beneath the behaviour, and to understand how the men made sense of their own actions and those of others.

Our conversations revealed something important about what violence teaches the mind. Lives spent amid violence meant the men had learned to anticipate danger in ordinary moments and to meet it by fighting back. The premise of READI’s work, and our research, is that because this way of seeing was learned, it could also be unlearned.

The danger these men read into the world is real; recall that more than a third of them had been shot. The difficulty is that a mind shaped by real danger does not confine its lessons to dangerous situations. It brings them into ambiguous ones, where the reading is wrong often enough to produce the very danger it anticipates. The outer world and the inner one are not separate. A world of violence sustains itself not only through guns, poverty and other social ills, but also through the ways of seeing it produces. Our research asks where these patterns of seeing and responding come from, why they persist, and how they can change.

Again and again, three patterns surfaced that could make future violence more likely.

The first was misreading situations. A great deal of violence, the men told us, stems from misconstruing some aspect of an interpersonal interaction, such as the nature of the situation or the other person’s intent. Past experiences of violence had created threat-oriented frames that quickly registered ambiguous cues as dangerous. Nuke, 24, told us that even a stranger looking at him for too long could escalate into a confrontation: ‘Sometimes I’ll react. Like: “Man, what the fuck is you looking at?”’

Tim, now 30, traced this reactive impulse to being shot and nearly killed at 17. ‘I was young in the streets, so I was always an impulsive person,’ he recalled. ‘But it got really bad after [I was shot]. I felt like the world was against me … If you approach me a certain type of way and if you wasn’t a person I was with on a daily basis, I felt like you was my enemy.’ Even casual remarks became charged: ‘Before that incident, I’ll be like: “Man, whatever.” But now it’s like: “Man, what you mean by that?… You saying that you going to shoot me?”’ Like many others we spoke with, Tim had lost loved ones to gun violence and had been shot at himself. But a mind tuned to danger could also misread ordinary situations, reproducing the violence that had trained it.

The second pattern was a narrowing of perceived response options. When violence seemed possible, those we spoke with often saw only a narrow set of things they could do. Kobe, 24, described the months after his release from prison: ‘I was walking around like a ticking time bomb. Soon as somebody did anything, I’m whooping them like I’m they daddy.’ Similarly, when King learned that Lamont was dead, his thoughts narrowed to one response: revenge.

Such narrowing can be adaptive in dangerous situations, where hesitation can be costly. But when it is applied more generally, it can lead to serious problems. In these moments, people tend to bypass deliberate reflection and may feel that certain responses are inevitable, as King told us: ‘That’s how it be, and that’s how it’s going to always be. It’s a repeated cycle.’

Third, our interviews revealed that participants often read violent behaviour as proof of who someone was, rather than how that person had responded to a situation. Psychologists call this the fundamental attribution error, or our tendency to explain behaviour through features of a person’s character rather than circumstance. But the men turned this error most mercilessly on themselves.

Accepting violence as part of who they were made their future involvement in violence more likely

Take William, who had lost 11 close friends to gun violence by the age of 29. He came to see revenge not as something he did but as something he was. ‘I ain’t been a civilian since I was like eight…,’ he told us. ‘To sleep at night [with what I’ve done] you got to be a different type of monster.’ After his best friend was killed, he said: ‘I bought guns, a lot of them … I wasn’t going to feel safe until somebody was dead.’ Over time, the identity hardened: ‘To put that bet on somebody else, you got to be a cold-hearted motherfucker. Melatonin can’t even help you sleep after that.’

Terrel, 29, had endured a childhood of compounding losses. His mother was incarcerated, his little sister killed in a house fire, and he was shot – all before finishing the eighth grade. ‘I was an angry-ass little kid,’ he recalled. ‘I was angry because my momma was gone … My little sister dead … Everything I got is gone, so I’m angry.’ Terrel came to read his anger and the violent behaviour it spawned as a verdict on himself. Beneath the easy smile others saw, he felt he was ‘just covering up [what’s inside] with that smile’: ‘I been fucking up the community for years. How the fuck am I good?’

In sum, many we spoke to had come to see themselves not simply as people who had done bad things, but as bad people. By their own accounts, accepting violence as part of who they were made their future involvement in violence more likely.

Violence alters how people experience the world and read everyday encounters. These patterns are neither irrational nor pathological. They are adaptations to real danger, where quick responses can save a life. But carried into the wrong situation, the same shortcuts can be overgeneralised in ways that cause grave harm.

While the stakes of these cognitive patterns are exceptional, the mental machinery underpinning them is not. Say you’re driving and another car cuts you off. Before you’ve even thought about it, your mind has supplied a reason: This driver is reckless and has no regard for anyone else on the road. The interpretation arrives in a split second, built more out of your irritation than anything you know about the driver. Maybe she’s racing to a hospital for an emergency. The writer David Foster Wallace described such a scene in his commencement speech, ‘This Is Water’ (2005). His point was hopeful: we are free to choose how we read such a moment. The automatic, egocentric perspective is never the only one available.

Nuke’s mind did the same when a stranger held his gaze too long. The look may have meant nothing, yet he imagined a motive and a threat, drawn from his life, as most of us do, rather than anything the stranger had done. Nuke is working with the same machinery as the rest of us. What that machinery was trained on is different, and so is the price of getting it wrong. For the driver, a misreading ends in a muttered curse or a blown horn; for Nuke, it could end a life. As Nuke admitted: ‘I know what comes with it. It’s either death or jail.’

We tend to imagine that we take in the world and then respond to what we find. In fact, the mind guides what we see, filling gaps with expectations built from experience. The journalist Walter Lippmann in 1922 called these expectations ‘the pictures in our heads’ and explained that it is the pictures we respond to, not some objective environmental stimuli. Psychologists and sociologists call these shortcuts frames and scripts. Frames answer, in a fraction of a second, the question under every social encounter: What is going on here? Scripts suggest what to do next. Together they help us move through our days without deliberating over each interaction. Frames and scripts are tools that make daily life possible.

The vigilance that keeps someone alive at one point can generate danger at another

Among the men we spoke with, these shortcuts took their shape from a world that taught a brutal lesson early: people are dangerous, and hesitation can get you hurt. The lesson came from somewhere. The sociologist Elijah Anderson in 1994 called it the ‘code of the streets’. Where safety is not a given, a reputation for violence becomes the protection people can supply themselves. The frame comes first: this is a threat. The script that follows, I have to fight back, is learned from experience and reinforced by others.

But a shortcut is only as good as it is accurate. Threat-oriented frames and scripts may be adaptive in the specific situations that produced them, but the same reading carried into an uncertain moment can be destructive and self-defeating. The vigilance that keeps someone alive at one point can generate danger at another, converting an ambiguous situation into a hostile one and producing the very conflict it anticipated. The mind continues to guard against a world that is, in part, no longer there.

Of course, the milieu that trained these frames and scripts has not entirely disappeared for most. Recall that young men in these neighbourhoods faced a greater risk of being killed than a soldier deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. A soldier, though, eventually returns home; these men have no such separation. What they must learn is more complex: how to hold on to vigilance without letting it dictate their reactions in the wrong place or at the wrong moment. The problem is not the impulse to fight back itself, but being unable to distinguish situations that call for it from those that don’t.

The idea that changing how we see can change how we respond is ancient. In the 2nd century, Epictetus said: ‘Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of them.’ What is unusual is its application. Offering the opportunity to reframe a situation, as a serious answer to lethal violence, to a 26-year-old sitting in his room with a loaded clip is a novel proposition. It begins from an assumption too rarely extended to men like King with a history of violence: that despite what he has been through, his inner life is not fixed.

READI offered men a chance to discipline their inner worlds. The 18-month intervention paired a part-time job with cognitive behavioural sessions, held three to five mornings a week, that participants called ‘CAD’ (Control-Alt-Delete, the keystroke that reboots a computer). The lessons taught participants how to slow down to reconsider an automatic reaction and widen the range of responses in a tense moment. They learned that they did not have to be ruled by their first feeling or thought. In doing so, they began to loosen the identity that violence had formed

A randomised controlled trial of READI estimated that participants were arrested for shootings and homicides 65 per cent less often than comparable men who were not offered the programme. Findings from a related programme point in the same direction. Becoming a Man, a school-based programme run in Chicago by the nonprofit organisation Youth Guidance, cut violent-crime arrests among high-school-age participants by nearly half. Our interviews complement these trials by showing what the changes these programmes brought felt like from the inside.

What seemed to be a threat from the man across the street might be coming from somewhere much older

The first thing the men learned was to question their reading of a situation. In one CAD session, the group was given a scenario: somebody walks past and calls you a name. What do you do? For TY, 20, who had spent his adolescence surviving, the old answer would have arrived without thought. Instead, he worked through it. ‘I ain’t got no right to cause hurt to another person [if] this person ain’t do nothing to me,’ he said. ‘He probably having a bad day. He probably just got into it with his wife. You don’t know what’s wrong.’ Such exercises helped participants practise reframing a situation more charitably.

Questioning a reading also meant learning that a feeling of threat was not always about what was happening in the present; sometimes, it was a reaction to events in the past. The men practised noticing what fear was doing in their bodies, such as a racing pulse, tightened fists, pressure in the chest, and learning to treat those sensations as signals to investigate rather than signs of objective threats. Larry, 31, described it as learning to check in with his body: ‘Far as articulating the things that’s going on inside of my body and how I’m feeling, that’s what I’m really learning.’ What seemed to be a threat from the man across the street might, at times, be coming from somewhere much older.

Second, they learned to see more than one possible response to feeling threatened. Kobe described his old reflex as follows: ‘If you said something, I was going to touch you or tap you or get on your ass.’ Now, Kobe said: ‘I think before I act.’ Recalling a role-play in which he was bumped outside a store, he laid out what he could now see: ‘I could whoop one of they ass and one of them could shoot me… or I could just walk away. Or I could ask him, did he mean to do it?’ Three options emerged where there had previously been one.

To help them remember they had options in the moment, the men developed mantras simple enough to recall under pressure. Keith, 24, learned to: ‘Take 10 deep breaths, pace back and forth, and you might see things differently.’ Tune, 30, used: ‘It only takes three seconds to ruin your life.’ Larry, in a fight with his son’s mother, told himself: ‘It’s just words.’

Finally, participants learned to distinguish what they had done from who they were. Jaysean, 22, had taken the bad things he had done as proof that he was a bad person. Abandoned by kin while still a boy, he had sought out older robbers to teach him how to survive. He said: ‘A lot of things that I did bad, I did it for survival. Cause I didn’t really know no other way to get no money.’ Jaysean explained: ‘I was looking for the wrong help. I didn’t know no better. You a product of your environment to a certain extent.’ The reframing allowed him to imagine a self no longer defined by his past: ‘I’m a good person within… I’m still falling down but I’m picking myself back up.’ What Jaysean had once believed was a sign of his character, he could now see as a result of surviving tough circumstances.

Terrel reached the same realisation by naming the trauma he had long carried. ‘I never got through my first trauma,’ he said of his sister’s death; in the years since, he had lost a brother, a cousin, a nephew and friend after friend. ‘That shit just fucked me up to this day. I’m suffering with PTSD bad.’ Understanding his behaviour as a response to those losses, rather than as proof of who he was, made change imaginable. As Terrel said: ‘If you don’t deal with it… you can bring that baggage into your adult life.’ Naming the ways in which his past spilled into the present through his PTSD allowed Terrel to challenge his own narrative about himself and begin to heal.

These are ancient skills. READI’s contribution was not inventing them but building a place where men could practise them. These changes required certain conditions. READI’s wages gave the men enough stability to keep returning, and staff created a space safe enough for them to lower their guard, even around those participants they previously considered rivals. The pay check may have been what initially brought them in, but it was not how they ultimately understood the programme. In fact, 70 per cent described READI primarily as an opportunity for personal growth rather than just a job, and they spoke at length about how it reshaped their closest relationships, their daily habits, even their sense of who they were.

Which brings us back to King, in his room, with the clip full. Despite his initial instincts, he did not join his cousin to retaliate. He put the gun down and stayed put. ‘So I got high and I sat right there and just calmed myself down,’ he told us. ‘I shed a couple of tears for my boy and said: “Everything going to be all right.”’ It was the very mantra he had been practising in READI. King’s grief had not abated. What had changed was that revenge no longer felt inevitable. ‘Why I go try to waste my life for nothing?’ he asked. ‘That’s not me no more.’ In the space between feeling and action, King could see another response.

King did not arrive at that response alone. For months, he had practised slowing down and questioning his first reaction with other men. READI did not make the danger around him less real, nor did it ask him to abandon the vigilance that had sometimes kept him alive. Rather, it helped him more clearly discern the moments it threatened to reproduce the very violence he feared.

This is where I part with Wallace. He was right that we can choose how to read a situation, but he underestimated what such a choice requires. For the men we interviewed, seeing differently was not just a private act of will performed alone in traffic. It was something they practised repeatedly with others, under conditions of safety, enough time and skilled support.

‘I didn’t know that if you yelled at me, I was gonna break down. But now I [see]: it’s not you, it’s a past trigger’

I have seen the same skills taught in a classroom, on a corner by an outreach worker, and in a boxing gym in the Chicago neighbourhood of North Lawndale, where the former gang member Derek Brown* has been running a programme called Boxing Out Negativity since 2009. He teaches boys to box and, alongside it, to sit still and breathe, to notice what their bodies are doing before a fight and after one, to name what they are feeling and to wait. The boys come to Derek’s gym to learn how to fight. They are also learning how to handle the moments before a fight starts, which is the harder lesson and the one they need more often in life.

These skills are also useful to people who meet others in moments of crises. LaToya Baines* manages victim advocates on Chicago’s West Side who spend their days supporting people through the worst moments of their lives, and who bring their own histories to that work. She learned the same techniques through training and now teaches them to her staff. ‘Once you learn, you’re able to identify those triggers. I didn’t know that if you yelled at me, I was gonna break down. But now I’m able to [see]: it’s not you, it’s a past trigger. I just stepped back into the past, for something else that happened to me that has nothing to do with you.’ Chicago police officers are being taught to do the same thing, through a programme called Situational Decision-Making. Officers who went through it used less force and made fewer discretionary arrests.

None of this is particular to places where violence is the problem. When my husband and I started having conversations about merging our finances, I would respond by shutting down and becoming frustrated. He studies financial decision-making for a living, and talking about money was second-nature to him. For me it was physically painful. My chest would tighten, and I would go quiet, get anxious or find a reason to end the conversation.

It took me a long time to understand why. In the family in which I grew up, we didn’t talk about money. When we had it, nobody mentioned it. Then we lost our house, my parents divorced, and money was a more frequently discussed issue. It wasn’t until years later, while having conversations about finances with my husband that stirred negative responses in me, that I recognised how I automatically logged a conversation about money as the beginning of something going wrong. With help from a cognitive behavioural therapist and my very patient husband, I learned what the men in READI learned: to notice a reactive feeling in my body, to have compassion for myself about where it came from, and to recognise when it no longer served me.

Violence teaches the mind what to expect and how to answer. Because these are learned habits, they can be remade. A mind formed amid violence is not fixed by it. But few people revise their habits of mind on their own, sitting in traffic and deciding to see things differently. With proper training, people can learn to question their first reading of a situation, to see more than one response available to them, and to stop taking what they have done as proof of who they are. They learn, in other words, that their pasts need not define their present. The capacity is ordinary. What is not is the safety and ongoing support it takes to use it.

¹ Names of READI Chicago participants have been changed to protect individuals’ privacy.

* Indicates real name used with permission.