Wall Street Journal - November 3, 2006
Sharon Begley, sciencejournal@wsj.com.

Except that they don't.

For 40 years both popular and scholarly wisdom have held that the reason adolescents court risk is twofold: They believe danger bounces off them and they low-ball the chances that it will bring harmful consequences. They have weighed the risk (low), taken stock of their resilience or skill or smarts (excellent) and made the "rational" decision to drag-race down Main Street while inebriated. This explanation implies that when teens do stupid things, it is for rational reasons.

There is a problem with this explanation. "Adolescents don't tend to underestimate the probability of major risks, nor [do they generally have] feelings of invulnerability," argues Keith Stanovich of the University of Toronto in the new issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest.

That is bad news for parents and schools that try to reduce teens' risk-taking with a rational, fact-based approach. You know the strategies: Tell them the facts about the likelihood of getting HIV/AIDS from unprotected sex and reason with them about why it's a bad idea to book a hotel room for prom night, and all will be well.

If kids know the odds, and have no illusions that they are immune from the laws of virology, however, this approach won't make a whit of difference. "Interventions stressing accurate risk perceptions are apt to be ineffective or backfire because young people already feel vulnerable and overestimate their risk," Valerie F. Reyna of Cornell University and Frank Farley of Temple University write in the journal. That these approaches are so popular, they say, shows that prevention programs are "not based on [scientific] evidence."

The evidence they offer, from 300 studies on adolescent risk-taking, strongly undercuts the conventional wisdom. National surveys show that adolescents typically overestimate risks of contracting HIV and lung cancer, of dying in a hurricane or earthquake, and every other risk they were asked to assess. Their guesstimate of the odds that they will die from crime, illness or accident in the next year or by age 20 is much higher than reality. In short, they don't see themselves as invulnerable, but "as more vulnerable than adults do," says Prof. Reyna.

Here's the rub: Teens tend to underestimate the bad consequences of risky behavior. They think, yeah, smoking will give me cancer (only 18% of teen smokers deny that most lifelong smokers die of a smoking-related disease), or unprotected sex will give me a sexually transmitted disease. But how bad can that be -- especially compared with the benefits of smoking or sex?

Social acceptance and the allure of rebellion right now outweigh the costs later. (Even adults, not to mention financiers, prefer immediate benefits to future ones.) Teaching teens to assess risks accurately won't decrease stupid behavior -- they're already pretty accurate at gauging the consequences. They just aren't much bothered by them. No wonder three million new cases of STDs are diagnosed in U.S. adolescents each year.

Young people are especially bad at resisting risk when they're with peers and when they make decisions on the spur of the moment. In these cases, the emotional brain hijacks the logical one, so knowing the numerical risk of driving drunk won't stop them. That information is suppressed.

What, then, might keep teens from doing dumb things?

Mature adults manage to avoid risky behavior not because they're better at conscious deliberation, the scientists say, but because they intuitively grasp dangers. They go with their gut. "As a result of knowledge, experience and insight, they grasp the essence, the gist, of a situation," says Prof. Reyna. "They don't stop and deliberate on the costs and benefits of risky behaviors."

Getting young people to do the same thing arguably holds more promise than improving their powers of deliberation. For one thing, that is limited by the fact that, until your mid-20s, the brain's frontal lobes are still maturing. Regions responsible for curbing impulsivity, thinking ahead and making sound decisions aren't necessarily up to the job. But grasping the gist is something even 18-year-olds can manage.

"Deliberately weighing costs and benefits often encourages risky behavior," says Prof. Reyna. "You have a better chance if you get teens to pick up, unconsciously, that a behavior is dangerous and intuitively avoid it."

She and colleagues are doing that in a continuing study of 800 teens. Through emotion-packed films and novels, they drum into kids' heads positive images of healthy behaviors and negative images of risky behavior (a benign version of how the doctors in "A Clockwork Orange" pair violent images with nausea). The idea is to make the thought of risky behavior reflexively trigger a no-go decision. All the evidence, as opposed to folk wisdom, says this is more likely to work than current tactics.

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