Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Award, Decision-Making, Social Networks, and Society Section, American Sociological Association, 2025

Sociologists have long examined urban violence but have paid far less attention to how guns shape the lives of those who carry them. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews with teenagers and young men in Chicago, this study examines how youth acquire a reputation as a shooter and the obstacles they face in shedding this label. The erosion of gang control over the underground gun market, coupled with the status attached to being a shooter, heightens pressures to arm oneself and cultivate a reputation for violence. An individual moves from acquiring a gun to becoming a shooter through a series of rituals and public displays, transforming the behavior of gun carrying into a social identity. Unlike other forms of deviance, gun violence generates durable reputations, fueling cycles of retaliation and constraining exit options. The dilemma of unilateral disarmament magnifies the risks of exit and reinforces continued involvement in illegal gun carrying. Guns are not just tools of violence or protection; they are social forces that play a key role in the formation and persistence of deviant identities by socializing young people into violence and marking them with a label that is hard to shed.

Co-authored with Kathryn Edin, Jens Ludwig, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Timothy Nelson

Urban violence is concentrated in communities marked by poverty, segregation, and institutional neglect. Yet even within these environments, individuals differ significantly in their involvement with violence. Why? We draw on data from 99 in-depth interviews with young men in Chicago to develop a hypothesis: People respond differently to the same social environment because they default to different social cognitions, and those social cognitions are in turn shaped by past social environments and experiences. We hypothesize that people’s social cognitions – and hence behavior – is not “memoryless,” but rather exhibits some path dependence. We identify three core social cognitions that may help explain within-neighborhood and within-person variation in violence: misconstruing ambiguous cues as threats, defaulting to a narrow set of behavioral responses, and attributing violent actions to identity and intent rather than situations. These social cognitions appear to be path-dependent but not immutable; new experiences (including targeted intervention) can shift them in ways that change violence.  

Forthcoming in Criminology, November 2025 [working paper]

This study draws on 95 interviews and observations with gang-affiliated individuals in Chicago to examine how gang structures shape disengagement and desistance from crime. Over the last two decades, the city’s gangs have experienced a decline in group closure, or their capacity to regulate membership and member behavior, and a blurring of boundaries between those active in a gang from all others. In the past, Chicago’s gangs maintained closure and bright boundaries that made gang affiliations, norms, and territories clearly defined. Leaving these gangs required costly exit rituals that signaled an unambiguous departure while facilitating desistance. Today, with weaker gang structures and blurry boundaries, leaving a gang is no longer a distinct event. However, the ease of gang disengagement makes desistance harder, as inactive members struggle to knife off past ties and access turning points. In this uncertain landscape, desistance tactics can backfire, sending blurred signals—behaviors intended to create distance from former affiliates and rivals but appear as wavering commitment to supporters—that trap individuals in a liminal space between social worlds. Contrary to leading desistance theories that emphasize individual readiness, opportunity, and pro-social bonds, this study underscores how group structures critically shape pathways out of crime.

Co-authored with Kathryn Edin, Jens Ludwig, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Timothy Nelson. Under Review

Most Americans believe that poverty is caused by individual failure. Americans, more so than Europeans, think that how someone’s life turns out is a function of their own attitudes and behaviors. In this study we re-examine this perspective drawing on interviews with 99 current and past participants of Chicago’s Rapid Employment and Development Initiative (READI), a behaviorally informed violence prevention program, and six months of observation at READI sites. These data illustrate the impact on subjects of what appears to be a key barrier to their economic self-sufficiency – trauma – as well as the long shadow trauma plays in shaping every aspect of daily life. The results suggest the hypothesis that common interpretations of poverty as a downstream consequence of poor life choices ignore the role of trauma. Ending poverty in America may not be possible without researchers and policymakers paying greater attention to this underappreciated source of disadvantage.