It is widely recognized that adolescents exhibit poor decision-making. With regard to driving, drugs, and crime, adolescents are more likely than adults to make choices that place themselves and others in harm's way. Efforts to explain this phenomenon in terms of deficits in risk judgment have largely failed. In study after study, adolescents appear to be as capable as adults of both estimating risk and acknowledging their vulnerability to it. But, if adolescents are as capable as adults of recognizing risk, why then do they engage in more risky behavior than adults? In this Doctoral Dissertation Improvement proposal the co-PI outlines research to test an alternative hypothesis involving unconscious aspects of decision-making. Specifically, the co-PI outlines experiments designed to test the hypotheses that (a) adolescents' unconscious decisional processes are more sensitive to reward and less sensitive to cost than those of older and younger individuals; and (b) that these age differences in sensitivity to reward and cost are amplified when rewards are social in nature. Three computerized decision-making tasks will be administered to 400 individuals ranging in age from 10 to 30 years old. The tasks use time pressure, complex information, and interference with conscious cognition to assess unconscious risk evaluation. By comparing the responses of preadolescent, adolescent and adult individuals, the study will be able to identify deficits and biases in adolescents' unconscious risk judgments that may influence their behavior.
The proposed study has the potential to challenge current developmental theory and to inform policy-makers about the mechanisms driving risky behavior in adolescence. In addition, the findings may be used to inform current discourse about rights and responsibilities for adolescents that hinge on their decision-making capacities, such as criminal culpability, medical decisions, informed consent, and the right to vote.
The rates of various indicators of risky behavior—drug experimentation, arrest, unwanted pregnancy, driving accidents, other accidents, etc.—peak in adolescence. It was once believed that this pattern was due to adolescents’ inability to recognize risk. However, when explicitly questioned about the hazards inherent in various activities, adolescents (by about age 15) provide answers similar to those of adults (Reyna & Farley, 2006). However, decision-making elicited under typical laboratory conditions may be qualitatively different from that which precedes risky behavior in "real life." Adolescent risk-taking tends to occur under conditions that favor unconscious decision-making (e.g., time pressure, high emotions, peer presence). In such cases, risk evaluation may happen instantaneously and without deliberate effort. But how does one observe unconscious risk judgment? The present dissertation project tackled this problem in two ways. First, it employed a novel, rapid risk judgment task. Participants (N=282, ages 10-30; 58% female) were asked to respond quickly and with their "gut reactions" to the question, "How good or bad an idea is it to…?" The stimuli depicted risky (e.g., running across the highway, lying to police, having sex without protection) and non-risky (e.g., eating a sandwich, studying for a test) activities. Participants clicked (within 2.5 seconds) on a continuous scale ranging from "Bad Idea" to "Good Idea" to record their appraisal. As a check on whether participants were relying on unconscious decision mechanisms, half were randomly assigned to complete the task under cognitive load (while holding a number string in memory). Neither ratings nor response times differed between the conditions, suggesting that participants were not using conscious, deliberative processes—which compete for resources with working memory—to render their risk appraisals. What emerged was a curvilinear age pattern (increasing then decreasing with age) in the tendency to rate risky activities as more of a "good idea." Intriguingly, the curve peaked in the early 20s rather than in the teenage years, consistent with a more protracted than expected developmental trajectory. Thus, it appears that adolescents and young adults may, at a subconscious or intuitive level, perceive less potential threat and/or greater potential benefit in risky activities than either younger or older individuals. Current theoretical efforts to explain adolescent risk-taking point to the distinct timetables of development in two largely distinct neural systems: the socioemotional and cognitive control systems. The socioemotional system, believed to motivate (sometimes risky) reward- and novelty- seeking, is activated early in adolescence. In contrast, the cognitive control system, thought to regulate behavioral impulses and detect threats, develops gradually across adolescence. Propensity for risk-taking is thought to peak during adolescence due to the greater functional maturity of the socioemotional system relative to the cognitive control system. Based on this theory, I had predicted that risk favorable intuitions would be most common in early to middle adolescence, when the discrepancy between socioemotional and cognitive control maturation is theorized to be greatest. The later observed peak in the intuitive appeal of risky behaviors therefore merits further investigation, particularly into factors that may prolong adolescent-typical responses to risk. In a second effort to examine age differences in unconscious interpretation of risk-relevant information, an unconscious thought paradigm (Dijksterhuis, 2004) was administered to the same sample. Unconscious Thought Theory posits that unconscious cognitive processes yield better decisions than conscious thought under conditions of high information load, but low time pressure. In other words, for decisions (e.g., what kind of cell phone to purchase) that involve the integration of a large quantity of relevant information (e.g., screen size, battery life, storage, durability, etc.), permitting unconscious processes to converge on a judgment will yield a more accurate appraisal than will conscious deliberation. The present study aimed to (1) replicate the unconscious thought effect (superiority of unconscious to conscious thought) in adults and determine whether it would obtain in adolescents; and (2) test a variation of this paradigm in which participants receive information relevant to gauging risk, rather than preference. The main finding was that the unconscious thought effect was not replicated. For both adults and adolescents, judgments of preference and risk were virtually identical across condition. Consequently, it was not clear whether participant responses in this task were the product of conscious or unconscious thought processes. Furthermore, all age groups were able to distinguish between better and worse options and between riskier and safer scenarios. The results therefore suggest that, consonant with earlier studies of adolescent risk judgment, for judgments made slowly and under low-arousal conditions, decision-making is quite competent by early adolescence. Taken together with the results from the rapid risk judgment task, the findings highlight the probability that adolescents’ judgment of risk is more dependent than adults’ on context. When the situation favors reliance on unconscious thought processes, adolescents may be especially prone to risky decision-making.
