Is adolescence believed to be a period of greater risk taking than adulthood?

ABSTRACT

Little is known about adolescents’ own beliefs regarding their level of risk taking or regarding peer influence on the latter. This is an important matter given that beliefs influence judgements and decisions. With the present study, we aimed to study adolescents’ and adults’ beliefs about adolescents’ risk taking compared to adults’ risk taking, and beliefs about peer influence on risk taking. To this end, an experimental design was used. A cross-sectional study included 56 adolescents and 43 adults, who completed a questionnaire asking about adolescents’ and adults’ risk-taking propensity and a syllogistic reasoning task designed to indirectly study these beliefs. Both direct and indirect measures indicated that adolescents perceived adolescence as a period of higher risk taking compared to adulthood, and believed peer presence to promote this effect. Adults perceived this detrimental effect of peers to be present irrespective of age. We discuss the implications of these results in terms of social representation.

KEYWORDS:

• Adolescence
• risk taking
• beliefs
• peer influence
• adulthood
• belief bias

Acknowledgments

We thank the participants of the study and the teaching team of the René Cassin Middle School (Noisy-le-Sec, France) for their active involvement in the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Author contribution

MH conceived of the study, participated in its design and coordination, performed the measurement and the statistical analysis and drafted the manuscript; AO participated in the design of the study and interpretation of the data and helped to draft the manuscript; J-LT participated in interpretation of the data and helped to draft the manuscript; MC participated in the design of the study and the interpretation of the data and helped to draft the manuscript; SC SC conceived of the study, participated in its design and coordination and helped to draft the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Data availability statement

The authors confirm that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article or its supplementary materials.

Ethical approval

The research was pre-approved by the protection data officer of the institution.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/02673843.2023.2242469

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This study was exclusively funded by our affiliated institution (Paris 8 University). The author did not receive any funding from another source for this research.

Notes on contributors

Marianne Habib

Marianne Habib Lecturer in developmental psychology at the Laboratoire DysCo, University Paris 8, her research focuses on the influence of emotions and socio-emotional context on cognitive processes, such as decision-making. She is particularly interested in the factors modulating risk-taking in adolescence (notably the influence of socio-emotional skills, peers or stereotypes), compared with other ages of life.

Anaïs Osmont

Anais Osmont Lecturer in developmental psychology at Aix Marseille University, her research falls within the field of adolescent cognitive, emotional and social development psychology, and aims more specifically to determine the specificities of adolescent decision-making in the face of the increased probability of engaging in risky behavior during this period. To this end, her work has three objectives: to determine the influence of specific social contexts on risk-taking during development; to clarify the role of positive and negative emotional feelings in sensitivity to social context; to consider the weight of inter-individual differences in different personality traits.

Jean-Louis Tavani

Jean-Louis Tavani Professor of social psychology at Paris 8 University, his work focuses on the psychosocial aspects of memory (e.g., collective memory) and, more broadly, on questions of temporality (e.g., sense of collective continuity, projection into the future, and collective time travel). He articulates this work in two theoretical fields of social psychology, namely the theory of social representations and the theory of social identity.

Mathieu Cassotti

Mathieu Cassotti Professor of developmental psychology at the Institute of Psychology, University Paris Cité, he conducts his research at the LaPsyDÉ (UMR CNRS 8240) on the ability of adolescents to make decisions in the face of uncertainty and to generate original ideas to solve problems in the unknown. He has coordinated several projects on stimulating creativity at school and developing critical thinking skills to combat fake-news and conspiracism in middle and high school, in collaboration with numerous teachers.

Serge Caparos

Serge Caparos Lecturer in cognitive psychology, at the Laboratoire DysCo, University Paris 8, his research program takes a “cognition and society” perspective, and focuses on the effects of environments and life experiences on the cognitive trajectory of individuals. It is particularly concerned with documenting and explaining the links between culture and cognition, and the links between potentially traumatic experiences and cognitive health.