For example, the fast-thinking part of our minds has a tendency towards what psychologists call “egocentric construal,” or personalization—to think everything is about ourselves. That can be helpful in lots of day-to-day situations. When our significant other comes into the kitchen in the morning with a furious look on their face, there is often a reasonable chance that has something to do with what we’ve done. But that normally useful tendency can also sometimes lead us to misread someone else’s mind. When a stranger is walking down the sidewalk and passes us with a furious look on their face, the tendency of our fast-thinking selves to think that has something to do with us can lead to unnecessary conflict that can, sometimes, even escalate to violence. The ECHO curriculum is built on CBI principles and teaches participants to recognize these situations, then pause to switch over to slow, effortful decision-making. 

Evidence from Real-World Programs

Our first CBI study measured the impact of Becoming a Man, a program developed by the Chicago non-profit Youth Guidance. The first experiment we carried out with a few thousand middle- and high-school age male students in the Chicago Public Schools showed that the program increased high school graduation rates by 20% and led to a drop in violent-crime arrests of nearly 50%.[i] A few years later we did another experiment and again saw nearly 50% reductions in violent crime arrests. 

Importantly, the evidence for CBI doesn’t come just from BAM. For example, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) partnered with Children’s Home + Aid (now Brightpoint) and Youth Advocate Programs on a CBI program, Choose 2 Change (C2C), that combines BAM-like programming with a mentor to serve teens who are only lightly connected to school and so at higher risk than those in BAM. In the six months following the program, we find violent-crime arrests declined by about 50%, and some effects appear to persist through 36 months. The Heartland Alliance READI program focused on adult men at extremely high risk for gun violence involvement, and combined a subsidized job with CBI. While the data are a bit noisier than we’d like, the estimated impact on shooting arrests suggests a 64% reduction. 

How ECHO Translates Evidence into Practice

Given the broad evidence base for these tools, why aren’t they more universally available and delivered?  

One challenge is that while some youth-serving organizations do offer mental health services, many may not have a clinician on staff who can deliver such services and may be otherwise limited in resources to adopt resource-intensive programming.  Consequently, they are less likely to adopt and scale these evidence-based but resource-intensive interventions, despite their potential.  But what if instead of adopting a whole new program, service providers were able to take their existing programming and human capital infrastructure and just deliver the kind of skill building that really matters for promoting long-term well-being?  

ECHO was developed to fill this gap. Rather than requiring organizations to implement an entirely new program, ECHO provides a free, flexible, evidence-informed decision-making curriculum that integrates these proven CBI skills into existing youth programming.