The Influences of Information Acquisition and Heightened Arousal on Adolescent Risk Taking

Abstract

Adolescents are known to take more risks than adults, which can be harmful to their health and well-being. Interventions aimed at reducing risk taking typically provide descriptions of the negative outcomes that may result from a risky choice, and have shown little evidence of actually preventing risk taking. This lack of efficacy may be due in part to differences between how adolescents process information about risk when it is described (e.g., in a classroom intervention) versus when it is experienced (e.g., when a teenager experiences the outcome of a risky choice). In the present work, I first summarize the Description-Experience (D-E) gap literature from the adult Judgment and Decision Making field, which makes the crucial distinction between choice behavior when information is acquired to descriptions relative to experience. Next, I relate work on the D-E gap to laboratory research on risk taking between adolescents and adults. A review of the developmental literature demonstrates that experience-based experimental paradigms are more likely to show heightened risk taking in adolescents relative to adults (Rosenbaum et al., Resubmitted), and is consistent with an affect-based explanation of risk taking. In Experiment 1, I present a novel within-subjects D-E gap paradigm, which I test in a sample of young adults, and show individual differences in the degree of bias when participants make choices from description verses experience. Subsequently, in Experiment 2, I test cohorts of adolescents and adults in the within-subjects D-E gap paradigm. In this developmental experiment, I additionally measure eye tracking to better understand decision processing and changes in heart rate variability by task (description, experience) and age group. Results show that adolescents and adults take similar risks in DFD and DFE, but unlike adults, adolescents’ choices in DFD do not adhere to prospect theory predictions. Further, in DFD, adolescents spend more time looking at probabilities than values, while adults show the opposite pattern. Conversely, in DFE, adolescents make choices consistent with underweighting rare outcomes, similar to adults. There is some evidence that adolescents show enhanced rare-outcome underweighting relative to adults, even after controlling for sampling bias. Concurrently, adolescents show a higher change in LFHRV from baseline relative to adults during DFE, but not in DFD. In sum, results are consistent with the idea that adolescents have trouble utilizing descriptive information, but are able to adapt choices readily based on information acquired through experience. Teens, relative to adults, may show enhanced biases toward risk taking when a rare outcome is unfavorable, a process that may be supported by higher affective arousal.