Why are kids reporting that they prefer more dangerous and risky activities than they did 30 years ago?

Katherine Keyes weighs in on her latest paper describing 30 year trends in adolescent risk preference.

The graph below shows the yearly trend in a trait termed ‘risk preference’, spanning the last 30 years among adolescents in the United States. Adolescents who prefer risk tend to engage in more varied, novel, and complex sensations and experiences. We have considerable data to show that risk preference changes across age (see the end of this blog entry for a reading list). When the teen years begin, adolescents typically begin seeking more novel, risky experiences; the preference for risk increases during adolescence and then typically drops off during the transition to adulthood. It’s clear that the roots of risk preference are neurobiological, and evolutionary experts chime in that preference for risk is probably necessary and healthy – seeking out new experiences allows the adolescent to leave the home with little anxiety and go and discover the world as an adult.

Males are represented din Blue and Females are represented in Red

Males are represented in Blue and Females are represented in Red

However, there is substantial individual variation around the population mean of risk preference; high risk preference teens are those that are willing to, for example, go on the highest roller coaster or cliff diving on the family vacation; low risk preference teens are the ones who, perhaps, nervously watch from the sideline.

Breakfast Club [1985]: clear risk preference shown by the flagrant disrespect for Mr. Vernon’s authority, not to mention drug use on school grounds and an illicit trip outside the library

Breakfast Club [1985]: clear risk preference shown by the flagrant disrespect for Mr. Vernon’s authority, not to mention drug use on school grounds and an illicit trip outside the library

But whether a teen wants to go on a roller coaster doesn’t interest me all that much as a public health scientist. It turns out, though, that teens who prefer riskier activities are not only more likely to be first in line for the roller coaster; they are also more likely to engage in drug use, gambling, vandalism, truancy, and experience unintended pregnancy—making risk preference as a concept one of interest for epidemiologists like myself.

In conducting this study, we were not so much interested in individual variation (i.e. what makes some kids prefer risk and not others), but instead in historical variation (i.e. are there time periods in history in which, on average, American teens preferred more risk than others). Historical variation gives us insight into the way in which social context is embedded in our psyche. While risk preference is traditionally believed to be a biological process involving brain maturation with substantial individual differences in trajectories, what would it mean if there were overall population shifts across time, collectively, in the number of teens who prefer risk?

In fact, there are tremendous shifts over time in risk preference (see graph above). We obtained these data from National Institute of Drug Abuse funded ongoing national surveys of high schools seniors conducted every year since 1976 (Monitoring the Future, http://www.monitoringthefuture.org/), using the same questions:

“How much do you agree or disagree with the following statements?”

1) “I get a real kick out of doing things that are a little dangerous.”

2) “I like to test myself now and then by doing things that are a little risky.”.

We summed the responses (on a five-point scale from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”) and took the average by year and for boys and girls separately. As is clear from the graph, there was a dramatic increase in the slope across the 1980s for both genders. After about 1991 the mean stabilized for boys, but the mean has been continuing to increase for girls for the last 20 years. In fact, compared with adolescents responding to surveys in the late 1970s and early 1980s, adolescent girls are more than twice as likely to report that they prefer enjoying activities that were “a little dangerous”.

So what gives? Why did risk preference increase so dramatically in the 1980s, and why does it continue to go up for girls?

Well, to be honest, we don’t know. To our knowledge, this is the first and only study of its kind that contains data examining historical trends in a construct like risk preference, and we certainly did not expect the results. What do we know? We know that the high school seniors of the 1980s were squarely part of Generation X, which sociologically has been characterized by disrespect of authority, and disenfranchisement with traditional gender roles and other stereotypes .

More from the Breakfast Club

More from the Breakfast Club

Generation X came of age in a time of relative economic prosperity, and we saw substantial increases in the proportion of adolescents going to college. The previous generation, those that were high school seniors in the 1970s, were handling a recessed economy and global political struggles, which may have created a national psyche that was less willing to be careless or dangerous in their daily lives. In fact, the proportion of adolescents going from high school to college decreased slightly across the 1970s.

Reality Bites

Reality Bites [1994]: Winona Ryder plays an aspiring videographer working on a documentary about the disenfranchised lives of her friends and roommates.

Adolescents in the late 1980s, on the other hand, delayed the assumption of adult roles, including taking on responsibilities such as decision-making, allowing for the pursuit of activities purely for dangerousness. In sum, clearly paving the way for the 20-something Winona Ryders and Ethan Hawkes of the early 1990s in Reality Bites.

And what about the continued increases in risk preference among women? Again, we don’t have data to specifically unpack the trends in risk preference, but we do know that during this time we saw increases in women going to college and obtaining advanced degrees, and delaying childbearing and marriage. It is possible that adolescent females of the 1980s were experiencing the rewards of the first and second waves of the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and in some ways were able to shed conventions of prior norms of propriety. During this time the prevalence of alcohol disorders in women also increased, and outpaced men’s prevalence increases; progress in smoking cessation among women essentially stalled. Thus while striving for social equity in work and home life, women’s health behavior is also increasingly shaping up to be equitably distributed to that of men.

More from Reality Bites

More from Reality Bites

The prevalence of risk preference, alcohol disorders, smoking, and other externalizing health behaviors remain considerably higher among men than women, but the trends for women continue to increase and deserve our attention and consideration.

Now, to be sure, much of our speculation remains to be tested with data, and I would love to hear others suggestions for why we saw these increases in risk preference.

More broadly, however, historical analyses like we published in this paper can shed a light on facets of public health and health behaviors that we do not normally see. If a trait believed to be as genetically and neuro-biologically rooted as risk preference can shift over time in dramatic ways, what else do we assume to be biological when in fact it may be more socially driven than we previously realized? How does our broader social, political, and economic context shape the way in which we see the world, seek sensation, drive our fear, and assume our adult roles?

We are continuing to analyze these data against a number of other metrics with equally exciting and perplexing results. I’ll report back soon, but first I have to finish watching Stand By Me [1986] for clues to how maturational processes influence the incidence of fight-or-flight response when Kiefer Sutherland surprises you over a dead body with a knife in his hand.

Kiefer-in-Stand-By-Me-kiefer-sutherland-12961906-853-480

 

— Katherine M. Keyes, PhD

 

For all the details of the research project see:

Keyes KM, Jager J, Hamilton A, O’Malley PM, Miech R, Schulenberg JE. 2015. National multi-cohort time trends in adolescent sensation seeking and the relation with problem behavior from 1976 to 2011. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, ePub Jul 2. PMID: 26254018. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26254018

Additional Reading

Arnett, J.J., 1996. Sensation seeking, aggressiveness, and adolescent reckless behavior. Personality and Individual Differences 20, 693-702.

Bachman, J.G., O’Malley, P., Schulenberg, J.E., Johnston, L.D., Freedman-Doan, P., Messersmith, E.E., 2008. The education–drug use connection: How successes and failures in school relate to adolescent smoking, drinking, drug use, and delinquency. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates/Taylow & Francis, New York.

Blaszczynski, A.P., Wilson, A.C., McConaghy, N., 1986. Sensation seeking and pathological gambling. Br. J. Addict. 81, 113-117.

Casey, B., Jones, R.M., Somerville, L.H., 2011. Braking and Accelerating of the Adolescent Brain. J. Res. Adolesc. 21, 21-33.

Crone, E.A., Dahl, R.E., 2012. Understanding adolescence as a period of social-affective engagement and goal flexibility. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 13, 636-650.

Dever, B.V., Schulenberg, J.E., Dworkin, J.B., O’Malley, P.M., Kloska, D.D., Bachman, J.G., 2012. Predicting risk-taking with and without substance use: the effects of parental monitoring, school bonding, and sports participation. Prev. Sci. 13, 605-615.

Fave, A.D., Bassi, M., Massimini, F., 2003. Quality of Experience and Risk Perception in High-Altitude Rock Climbing. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology 15, 82-98.

Hansen, E.B., Breivik, G., 2001b. Sensation seeking as a predictor of positive and negative risk behaviour among adolescents. Personality and Individual Differences 6, 121-122.

Harden, K.P., Quinn, P.D., Tucker-Drob, E.M., 2012. Genetically influenced change in sensation seeking drives the rise of delinquent behavior during adolescence. Dev. Sci. 15, 150-163.

Jager, J., Keyes, K.M., Schulenberg, J.E., in press. Historical variation in young adult binge drinking trajectories and its link to historical variation in social roles and minimum legal drinking age. Developmental psychology.

Johnston, L.D., O’Malley, P., Bachman, J.G., Schulenberg, J.E., 2012. Monitoring the Future national survey results on drug use, 1975-2011: Volume 1, Secondary school students.  Ann Arbor: Institute for Social Research, The University of Michigan.

Keyes, K.M., Li, G., Hasin, D.S., 2011a. Birth cohort effects and gender differences in alcohol epidemiology: a review and synthesis. Alcohol Clin. Exp. Res. 35, 2101-2112.

Keyes, K.M., Schulenberg, J.E., O’Malley, P.M., Johnston, L.D., Bachman, J.G., Li, G., Hasin, D., 2011b. The social norms of birth cohorts and adolescent marijuana use in the United States, 1976-2007. Addiction 106, 1790-1800.

Little, M., Weaver, S.R., King, K.M., Liu, F., Chassin, L., 2008. Historical change in the link between adolescent deviance proneness and marijuana use, 1979-2004. Prev Sci 9, 4-16.

Luna, B., 2009. Developmental changes in cognitive control through adolescence. Adv. Child Dev. Behav. 37, 233-278.

Miles, D.R., van den Bree, M.B., Gupman, A.E., Newlin, D.B., Glantz, M.D., Pickens, R.W., 2001. A twin study on sensation seeking, risk taking behavior and marijuana use. Drug Alcohol Depend. 62, 57-68.

Quinn, P.D., Harden, K.P., 2013. Differential changes in impulsivity and sensation seeking and the escalation of substance use from adolescence to early adulthood. Dev. Psychopathol. 25, 223-239.

Spear, P., 2000. The adolescent brain and age-related behavioral manifestations. Neurosci. Biobehav. 24, 417-463.

Stansfield, K.H., Kirstein, C.L., 2006. Effects of novelty on behavior in the adolescent and adult rat. Dev. Psychobiol. 48, 10-15.

Steinberg, L., 2004. Risk taking in adolescence: what changes, and why? Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. 1021, 51-58.

Steinberg, L., 2007. Risk Taking in Adolescence: New Perspectives From Brain and Behavioral Science. Current Directions in Psychological Science 16, 55-59.

Steinberg, L., Morris, A.S., 2001. Adolescent development. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 52, 83-110.

Zuckerman, M., 2007. Sensation seeking and risky behavior. APA, Washington DC.

 

This entry was posted in Gender, Risk Preference. Bookmark the permalink.

1 Response to Why are kids reporting that they prefer more dangerous and risky activities than they did 30 years ago?

  1. Desy says:

    Very interesting article, to help understanding kids psychology. Thank you for sharing. You are such a great author, I enjoy read your post!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.