Crime, smoking, drug use, alcoholism, reckless driving, and many other unhealthy patterns of behavior that play out over a lifetime often debut during adolescence. Avoiding risks or buying time can set a different lifetime pattern. Changing unhealthy behaviors in adolescence would have a broad impact on society, reducing the burdens of disease, injury, human suffering, and associated economic costs. Any program designed to prevent or change such risky behaviors should be founded on a clear idea of what is normative (what behaviors, ideally, should the program foster?), descriptive (how are adolescents making decisions in the absence of the program?), and prescriptive (which practices can realistically move adolescent decisions closer to the normative ideal?). Normatively, decision processes should be evaluated for coherence (is the thinking process nonsensical, illogical, or self-contradictory?) and correspondence (are the outcomes of the decisions positive?). Behaviors that promote positive physical and mental health outcomes in modern society can be at odds with those selected for by evolution (e.g., early procreation). Healthy behaviors may also conflict with a decision maker's goals. Adolescents' goals are more likely to maximize immediate pleasure, and strict decision analysis implies that many kinds of unhealthy behavior, such as drinking and drug use, could be deemed rational. However, based on data showing developmental changes in goals, it is important for policy to promote positive long-term outcomes rather than adolescents' short-term goals. Developmental data also suggest that greater risk aversion is generally adaptive, and that decision processes that support this aversion are more advanced than those that support risk taking. A key question is whether adolescents are developmentally competent to make decisions about risks. In principle, barring temptations with high rewards and individual differences that reduce self-control (i.e., under ideal conditions), adolescents are capable of rational decision making to achieve their goals. In practice, much depends on the particular situation in which a decision is made. In the heat of passion, in the presence of peers, on the spur of the moment, in unfamiliar situations, when trading off risks and benefits favors bad long-term outcomes, and when behavioral inhibition is required for good outcomes, adolescents are likely to reason more poorly than adults do. Brain maturation in adolescence is incomplete. Impulsivity, sensation seeking, thrill seeking, depression, and other individual differences also contribute to risk taking that resists standard risk-reduction interventions, although some conditions such as depression can be effectively treated with other approaches. Major explanatory models of risky decision making can be roughly divided into (a) those, including health-belief models and the theory of planned behavior, that adhere to a "rational" behavioral decision-making framework that stresses deliberate, quantitative trading off of risks and benefits; and (b) those that emphasize nondeliberative reaction to the perceived gists or prototypes in the immediate decision environment. (A gist is a fuzzy mental representation of the general meaning of information or experience; a prototype is a mental representation of a standard or typical example of a category.) Although perceived risks and especially benefits predict behavioral intentions and risk-taking behavior, behavioral willingness is an even better predictor of susceptibility to risk taking-and has unique explanatory power-because adolescents are willing to do riskier things than they either intend or expect to do. Dual-process models, such as the prototype/willingness model and fuzzy-trace theory, identify two divergent paths to risk taking: a reasoned and a reactive route. Such models explain apparent contradictions in the literature, including different causes of risk taking for different individuals. Interventions to reduce risk taking must take into account the different causes of such behavior if they are to be effective. Longitudinal and experimental research are needed to disentangle opposing causal processes-particularly, those that produce positive versus negative relations between risk perceptions and behaviors. Counterintuitive findings that must be accommodated by any adequate theory of risk taking include the following: (a) Despite conventional wisdom, adolescents do not perceive themselves to be invulnerable, and perceived vulnerability declines with increasing age; (b) although the object of many interventions is to enhance the accuracy of risk perceptions, adolescents typically overestimate important risks, such as HIV and lung cancer; (c) despite increasing competence in reasoning, some biases in judgment and decision making grow with age, producing more "irrational" violations of coherence among adults than among adolescents and younger children. The latter occurs because of a known developmental increase in gist processing with age. One implication of these findings is that traditional interventions stressing accurate risk perceptions are apt to be ineffective or backfire because young people already feel vulnerable and overestimate their risk. In addition, research shows that experience is not a good teacher for children and younger adolescents, because they tend to learn little from negative outcomes (favoring the use of effective deterrents, such as monitoring and supervision), although learning from experience improves considerably with age. Experience in the absence of negative consequences may increase feelings of invulnerability and thus explain the decrease in risk perceptions from early to late adolescence, as exploration increases. Finally, novel interventions that discourage deliberate weighing of risks and benefits by adolescents may ultimately prove more effective and enduring. Mature adults apparently resist taking risks not out of any conscious deliberation or choice, but because they intuitively grasp the gists of risky situations, retrieve appropriate risk-avoidant values, and never proceed down the slippery slope of actually contemplating tradeoffs between risks and benefits.

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Risk and Rationality in Adolescent Decision Making: Implications for Theory, Practice, and Public Policy

Active School Transport, Physical Activity Levels and Body Weight of Children and Youth: A Systematic Review

Behavioral decision research has demonstrated that judgments and decisions of ordinary people and experts are subject to numerous biases. Decision and risk analysis were designed to improve judgments and decisions and to overcome many of these biases. However, when eliciting model components and parameters from decisionmakers or experts, analysts often face the very biases they are trying to help overcome. When these inputs are biased they can seriously reduce the quality of the model and resulting analysis. Some of these biases are due to faulty cognitive processes; some are due to motivations for preferred analysis outcomes. This article identifies the cognitive and motivational biases that are relevant for decision and risk analysis because they can distort analysis inputs and are difficult to correct. We also review and provide guidance about the existing debiasing techniques to overcome these biases. In addition, we describe some biases that are less relevant because they can be corrected by using logic or decomposing the elicitation task. We conclude the article with an agenda for future research.

Cognitive and Motivational Biases in Decision and Risk Analysis.

This paper reviews research on the third-person effect--the perception that communications exert a stronger effect on others than on oneself It is concluded that the third-person effect is a reliable and persistent phenomenon that emerges across variations in question order, format, and wording. The effect is also more situationally specific than originally believed, as illustrated by evidence of first-person effects in response to socially desirable messages. Self-enhancement biases, although not the only processes that underlie the effect, provide a parsimonious explanation of message-desirability recruits. Other delimiting conditions such as social distance are critically reviewed, evidence for behavioral effects is discussed, and methodological shortcomings are noted. Six directions for research are articulated.

The Third Person Effect: A Critical Review and Synthesis

The mass media are an important context for adolescents' sexual behavior.

Recent third-person perception articles suggest that optimistic bias is the mechanism underlying the perceptual bias but fail to empirically test the assumption. A small inverse relationship between third-person perception and optimistic bias was found among the youth surveyed: 51% of the students exhibited third-person perceptions, believing they were less influenced by televised safer-sex messages than were their peers. These students were less optimistic about their chances of becoming HIV infected than their peers; 34% exhibited first-person perceptions, believing they were more influenced by the messages than were peers, and were more optimistic than were their peers concerning HIV infection. Most students (89%) exhibited some degree of optimistic bias regarding their chances of avoiding HIV infection in the future. The findings effectively link the two literatures within a sample neglected by previous studies: urban, minority, at-risk youth. The study advances knowledge of third-person perceptions b...

Third-Person Perception and Optimistic Bias Among Urban Minority At-Risk Youth:

Media critics point to adolescents' exposure to "sexy" television and popular music. Developmental transitions lead to increased information seeking, and developmental tasks force adolescents to find information sources other than their parents, implying a link between sexy media and adolescent development. Media research informed by knowledge of adolescent development may be able to clarify this connection, and model development is discussed here.

Adolescent sex and mass media: a developmental approach.

Discovering why adolescents take sexual risks, despite knowing the consequences, is a vital first step in combating the problem. Optimistic bias, the misperception that one is less likely than others to experience negative consequences from health behaviors, offers a promising explanation for adolescents' sexual risk taking. Unfortunately, optimistic bias research has neglected adolescents and minorities, relying heavily on European American college students as study subjects. Results from a small-scale survey of "at-risk" youth indicate that African American adolescents exhibit optimistic bias, believing they are less likely than peers to become pregnant (or cause a pregnancy). Findings indicate that optimistic bias is linked to sexual risk taking in youth, sexual intentions, and attitudes toward sexual activity. Although the current study is one of the first to include minority youth and one of the first to confirm a relationship between optimistic bias and risk behaviors, the findings suggest a promisi...

It Won't Happen to Me: The Role of Optimistic Bias in African American Teens' Risky Sexual Practices

Fifteen years ago, Davison (1983) introduced the third-person effect hypothesis that individuals believe they are less influenced than others by media messages. Although third-person effect is a perceptual bias, Davison believed that individuals act on such misperceptions. Few studies have tested the behavioral aspect of the third-person effect. In addition, previous studies reporting differences in third-person effect due to message type (i.e. Public Service Announcements [PSAs] vs. advertisements) lacked controls to isolate the effects of message type from content and context. In this study, I sought to (a) document third-person effect among minority "at-risk" youth within the context of safer sex messages, (b) determine the differences in third-person effects (if any) between PSAs and advertisements with similar content, and (c) determine the link (if any) between third-person effect and risky sexual behaviors among youth. Findings indicate that third-person effect is an appropriate framework for under...

Third-Person Perception and Sexual Risk Taking Among Minority `At-Risk' Youth

A survey of adolescents (N?=?1,488) documented Facebook use and experience with cyber bullying. The study found that 84 % of adolescents (middle school through college undergraduates) use Facebook, and that most users log on daily. While 30 % of the sample reported being cyber bullied, only 12.5 % quit using the site, and only 18 % told a parent or school official about the abuse. Up to 75 % of middle school Facebook users have experienced cyber bullying. The current study was the first to apply the Precaution Adoption Process Model (PAPM) to cyber bullying or to test the model with children and adolescents. Results suggest that most adolescents are aware of cyber bullying and acknowledge it as a problem in their school. About half of the adolescents did not progress beyond Stage 2 of the PAPM (aware of the problem, but haven't really thought about it). Adolescents also exhibited optimistic bias, believing they were less likely than peers to become cyber bullied. Implications for prevention education are discussed.

John R. Chapin

Papers

Third-Person Perception and Optimistic Bias Among Urban Minority At-Risk Youth:

Adolescent sex and mass media: a developmental approach.

It Won't Happen to Me: The Role of Optimistic Bias in African American Teens' Risky Sexual Practices

Third-Person Perception and Sexual Risk Taking Among Minority `At-Risk' Youth

Adolescents and Cyber Bullying: The Precaution Adoption Process Model