Cognitive Development and Adolescent Decisionmaking

by National Institute of Health

(Page 2 of 2)

An almost universal theme whenever adolescent drinking is addressed relates to how adolescents think and make decisions about the world around them. As perhaps a reflection of this emphasis, the recent National Research Council and Institute of Medicine report on underage drinking includes two separate background papers on this topic, which provide a foundation for this overview. The classic conclusion in this domain is that adolescents have not yet achieved full maturity of their cognitive processing and that they are more likely than adults to make risky decisions. A large body of literature exists containing many variations on the theoretical underpinnings for this conclusion. We will not attempt to review this material in any depth for this article, but a few ideas that have been central to this conclusion are worth noting. One is that the transition to the Piagetian concept of "formal operations" in thinking style has not yet taken place. Another view is that adolescents are very egocentric and feel invulnerable to harm because of their perceived uniqueness. Still another view is that adolescents use rational thinking in fewer situations than adults and depend more on intuitive processing that involves cognitive heuristics and judgment biases.

Social considerations are a potentially important factor; that is, adolescents are understood to be very interested in their social standing among their peers and therefore are more vulnerable to decisionmaking that relies heavily on what other adolescents are doing. Related to this notion is that personal identity is less well established in adolescence, with the result that young people are more influenced by what they perceive others around them to be doing. A more recent version of this theme is based on neurological development: the neural substrate for emotional behavior develops in advance of the more frontal, rational decisionmaking portion of the brain. Other versions of this theme are more specific to the alcohol field. For example, a recurrent view is that young people systematically overestimate the frequency and quantity of drinking being undertaken by their peers.

Although there may be aspects of the above views that warrant further consideration, our understanding of the general domain of cognitive development and risk taking also is evolving in a way that offers an entirely different perspective on these issues. First of all, adolescent decisionmaking generally has not been found to be inferior to that of adults. When called upon to make reasoned decisions using abstract processes, adolescents generally do as well as adults. In many instances, however, both adolescents and adults perform poorly; unless reasoned thinking is somehow explicitly required in a particular circumstance, both adolescents and adults will use the more intuitive style of problem solving, leading to a generally equal rate of errors. It is evident, therefore, that we cannot entirely attribute the apparent riskiness of adolescence to fundamental differences in problem solving between adolescents and adults. Where differences do appear, however, is in real-world situations that may have social and/or emotional overtones. In these situations, adolescents often do not make the same choices as adults. When adolescent decisionmaking is analyzed closely for underlying processes, the results suggest that adolescents do not use appropriate base rate information about peers but instead use social heuristics or "rules of thumb" rather than actual counts of behavioral frequencies to vary their judgments based on particular contexts (e.g., to use different judgment rules when they are with social peers with high standing in the peer group, etc.).

It is important to appreciate that adults also make decisions and judgments based on these biases. It is just that the particular content areas that accentuate biased decisionmaking may be different, as may the contexts in which these biases most often occur. And in some domains, decisionmaking actually may become more biased (i.e., based on social heuristics) as children mature into adolescence. It is clearly not the case, therefore, that humans become more "rational" with age in a linear fashion.

Hence, although it is clearly appropriate to apply cognitive development and decisionmaking models to the understanding of adolescent drinking, these models should be informed by the emerging picture of adolescent development. For example, it might be best to broaden our conceptualization of adolescent thinking and not assume that adolescent thinking is deficient in some sense relative to adult decisionmaking, only to arrive at "full" levels of cognition with adulthood. Instead, adolescent thinking and decisionmaking may be better understood as fully developed for the purpose for which they evolved; that is, to deal with the tremendous transitions that humans face at this stage of life. How to integrate this emerging understanding of adolescence with the need to reduce adverse outcomes from drinking is a critical question.

About the Author

NIH is the nation's medical research agency - making important medical discoveries that improve health and save lives. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), a part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is the primary Federal agency for conducting and supporting medical research.