Adolescent Risk Taking: They May Be More Rational Than We First Thought

A truism in the field of alcohol, other drug, and violence prevention, at least historically, has been that adolescent risk taking is the result of impulsive choices driven by an under developed capacity to think rationally. This belief has driven the work of AODV prevention professionals for years...up to and including the present. But recent research coming out of Temple and Cornell Universities is suggesting that this staple of conceptualizing prevention programming for high school and college adolescents may need to be revisited...if not rethought.

" Decision research shows that adolescents make the risky judgments they do because they are actually, in some ways, more rational than adults. Grownups tend to quickly and intuitively grasp that certain risks (e.g., drunk driving, unprotected sex, and most anything involving sharks) are just too great to be worth thinking about, so they don't proceed down the "slippery slope" of actually calculating the odds. Adolescents, on the other hand, actually take the time to weigh risks and benefits — possibly deciding that the latter outweigh the former. (It is during adolescence, in fact, that the parts of the frontal lobe that govern risk/reward calculations undergo significant maturation.)" This is a quote from a piece published in the Association of Psychological Science's Observer - see http://bit.ly/aJBUr3 for the full piece.

This is a very intriguing piece of information. If this is true--and the science appears to exist to suggest that it is--this may mean that we involved in the prevention of "high-risk" drinking and other drug use by high school and college students may need to rethink our approach to prevention, not to mention the term used to refer to the type of drinking these students do. Most of us involved in the prevention of "high-risk" collegiate drinking are aware of the controversy that has existed in the field regarding how to refer to collegiate drinking since the Harvard School of Public Health coined the term "binge drinking" in 1994 to refer to the consumption of 4+ drinks for women and 5+ drinks for men during an outing. The field has been divided as to the utility of this term when discussing the phenomenon of collegiate drinking ever since - see my essay on the subject -- http://bit.ly/aT3UgS

In that 2003 essay I suggested referring to this type of collegiate drinking as being "high-risk," but it would appear that this too may be no better a moniker for this type of collegiate imbibing than is "binge drinking." If, as I suspect, Drs. Reyna at Cornell and Farley at Temple are correct, we in the prevention field need to not only rethink how we approach adolescents with our prevention messages, but revisit the language we use when doing so as well. If there is a "Type-T" personality (Thrill-seeking) as these researches proffer, this type of student may actually be titillated by our messages designed to reduce "high-risk" consumption. Perhaps Linda Lederman's suggestion to refer to this type of collegiate drinking as dangerous is the more appropriate way to proceed.

What do you think?

Robert