Transcription
There are very strong stereotypes of adolescents, often quite negative stereotypes. You see them in the media now. You also see them back in, in, in Shakespeare and even in Plato and Aristotle. These stereotypes that adolescents being badly behaved, making silly decisions, taking lots of risks, lazy, irresponsible, antisocial, rude, disrespectful, high-maintenance.
Those stereotypes are based partly in some reality. There is some evidence that adolescents take more risks than other age groups. One of the kind of nuances that the stereotype misses out is the context that risk-taking tends to take place in. So if you think about adolescent typical risk-taking ones like smoking and drinking alcohol and experimenting with drugs, dangerous driving, those kinds of risks don't tend to take place when their young person is on their own. It's normally when they're with their friends. And there's a lot of evidence from many different labs around the world that adolescents are particularly influenced by their peers.
I don't think I particularly take risks, although I have done small things like drunk a lot of ketchup before. I didn't know how much to take, so I didn't want like always taking too little, too much, so I just took, oh, if I wasn't my own, I wouldn't also be no need to. I don't like ketchup.
So, for example, sticking with the example of driving risks, a classic experiment which has now been replicated several times by Larry Steinberg and his colleagues has shown that if you bring people into the lab, you get them to play a driving video game. We have to get around a circuit as quickly as possible. You find that actually, interestingly, the number of risks that different age groups take is around the same number when they're on their own. But if the participant has a couple of friends standing behind them, that significantly increases the number of driving risks adolescents take and young adults take under the age of twenty-five, but it has no effect on the number of risks that adults over the age of twenty-five take.
In terms of the experiments we've done in my lab, we often look at things like social influence. And one of, one of the experiments we did looked at social influence on risk perception. So here were, here we were asking participants to rate how risky they think different everyday situations are. So things like driving without a seatbelt, or crossing a street on a red light, or cycling without a helmet. The critical finding in this experiment was that young adolescents aged 12 to 14 are more influenced by people their own age, by other teenagers. And that wasn't true for any other age groups. Her children and older adolescents and adults are more likely to be influenced by adults than by teenagers.
My friends are very important to me because they, they're like, I see them almost every single day and like they just, they make me feel safe as well. If I don't have my friends, sometimes I look a little bit lost.
One of the things that matters in adolescents is to be accepted by your peer group and not to be excluded by your peers. So we know from work by Kat Sebastian and other people that adolescents are hypersensitive to social exclusion. People aren't being accepted for who they are and they're being forced to change in like big things like social media affecting this. Like you don't have social media, people are going to exclude you. Who you are, even though they shouldn't. So people change who they are to fit in. What it means is that they're going to pay more attention to their own peers than they are to adults.
So if you're, if you're organizing say a health campaign aimed at young people, what seems to matter most is changing social norms and educating young people themselves to run campaigns, anti-smoking or anti-bullying campaigns. That has a much bigger impact on young people's attitudes towards things like smoking and bullying than adults running the same kind of campaigns. That absolutely fits with the new neuroscience showing that social influence has the biggest effect on adolescent making a mistaken bigger than other other influences.
I think one thing I would have really appreciated knowing about during my teenage years was how the brain develops during adolescence and how this is a period of life where everything is quite unstable, both in terms of your social world and your biology, or your hormones and your and your brain. And that's a very natural, adaptive developmental period where things are changing and where you'll come out the other end of it, independent adult.
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