Examine the impact of one’s local environment on behavior. Considering what is presented in the readings, answer the following questions:
What impact does an individual’s environment and/or genetics have on the individual’s ability to make a free choice not to commit criminal acts? Support your response with research.
What five environmental stressors most impact crime in a community and those who inhabit it? Why?
How can local leaders address the stressors you identified?
What environmental factor do you think has the greatest impact on the differences in behavior among youth sharing the same social group, age, and neighborhood?
The impact of one`s local environment on behavior
Criminal behavior has always been a focus for psychologists due to the age old debate between nature and nurture. Is it the responsibility of an individual`s genetic makeup that makes them a criminal or is it the environment in which they are raised that determines their outcomes? It is widely accepted that the model for the development of human behavior is extremely fluid and effected by several factors, not just genes or environmental factors alone but in fact an interaction between the two (Christiansen, 1977; Mednick, Gabrielli, and Hutchings, 1984). It is more often an interaction between genes and the environment that predicts criminal behavior.
vestment in R&D to ensure firms retain first-mover advantage over competitors and investment in training of staff to ensure their equipped with the necessary skills to supersede expectations of their current role.
Investing prudently in an IT system allows work to be done by employees with less troubleshooting and less time away seeking solutions to errors, more specifically reducing the amount of incorrect inputs within the workplace on a day-to-day basis and to resource allocation of investing into more smart technology. O’Mahony and Vecchi (2005) use a dataset of UK non-agricultural market industries to estimate the impact of ICT capital on output growth and estimates show a positive and significant return of ICT capital on output growth placing emphasis on why deregulated markets and investment in IT increases productivity and performance. Total Factor Productivity measures improvement in resources reallocation due to significant IT investment where the contrary views decreases in productivity due to low total factor productivity.
R&D refers to knowledge, expertise and research, supporting labour, capital services refined into new processes. Investing in R&D gains the competitive and first mover advantage for firms which keeps them ahead of their competitors. The objective of R&D investment is for firms to cut their costs and increase their productivity through attaining economies of scale (increasing the volume, for an averagely cheaper price per unit) helps in terms of resource allocation to other parts of the firm which will need it more so. For example, Bartlett and Ghoshal (1989) describe the idea of the “global strategy” as that of standardised products with high integration and low responsiveness, whereby it’s the maximisation of efficiencies in order reducing overall costs, being a model that Phyzer the pharmaceutical company follows extensively. For local responsiveness, customers expect products to be adapted to meet requirements & for global integration, standardisation’s overall objective in terms of efficiency in attaining economies of scale.