By Mike Sutton.
Following an original BestThinking blog from five years ago (Sutton 2010), an idea is really catching on at last.
- DROP
Because Zoe McKnight: (2015) writes in Maclean’s Magazine of Canada about research I conducted with my colleague and friend Professor Mark Griffiths of Nottingham Trent University in England, into the cause of the “Great Crime Drop” in Western industrialised nations over the past two decades.
The real reason crime is falling so fast: How social media obsession, smartphone addiction, and even violent video games are, surprisingly, making us safer
‘…digital preoccupation has been the focus of a multitude of studies, by neurologists, sociologists and psychologists. A few years ago in the U.K., criminologist Mike Sutton and psychologist Mark Griffiths, who studies gaming and addiction, first realized the extent to which their fields overlap. So together, they came up with what they call the crime substitution hypothesis, which suggests that the overwhelming preoccupation with our devices may have contributed to the crime drop.
Like many British ideas, this one turned up at the pub. Griffiths, director of the International Gaming Research Unit at Nottingham Trent University, was having a pint with his friend Sutton, who teaches at the same school. Griffiths had noted the rising obsession with gaming and social media among young people; Sutton had often mentioned the inexplicable drop in crime over roughly the same period. That conversation resulted in a research paper proposing the crime substitution hypothesis.
The theory goes like this: Crime requires an offender with the motivation and ability to act—to go out and “nick” things—as well as a suitable victim, and the absence of someone who can prevent the crime from happening. This means that if substantial numbers of young people are inside and not on the streets, they are less likely to become either offenders or victims. These incremental changes in lifestyle from moment to moment can add up to significant shifts in society.
Though Griffiths admits their theory is “speculative and correlational,” and still requires much research to confirm, it does have what he calls “good faith validity”—it rings true. People his age and his children’s age have an almost pathological need to look at their phones when the devices buzz with an incoming text, Facebook message or email. “The bottom line is, if teenagers are so engaged in social networking or playing their computer games, they can’t physically do two activities at one time,” Griffiths says. “If you’ve got great millions of children in whatever jurisdiction playing online, particularly during their leisure time, this is a time they can’t possibly be engaged in crime, as well.”
If offenders are spending less time on the street then less opportunity for crime will be perceived on the street and the multi-cycles of crime and drug addiction will be reduced.
