Description
PSYC 631
CASE STUDY: DEVELOPMENT AND ETHNICITY
Adolescent Information
Demographics: Monica is a 16-year-old, fourth-generation Latina female.
Medical/Developmental history ? Monica?s medical history is significant for early
maturation/early age of menarche (age 10). She also has a history of childhood obesity, although
she has been at normal weight since age 12. Her medical history is otherwise unremarkable. She
reached all of her developmental milestones within normal limits.
Family history ? Monica was born into a two-parent family, but her biological father left when
she was 2 years old. Her mother raised her as a single-parent for most of her childhood. The
family lived in an urban environment with moderate crime levels, and struggled financially for
many years. Monica is an only child. Monica reports that her relationship with her mother has
been fairly close, although she describes that her mother was a ?strict disciplinarian? for most of
her childhood. Two years ago, Monica?s mother re-married and the family has experienced
increased financial stability and has moved into a less-dangerous neighborhood. Monica gets
along well with her step-father and since he has moved into the home, she notes that her
mother?s parenting style has become more balanced. Her mother still expects correct behavior,
but is more open to discussing issues. Also since the wedding, the family has been regularly
attending a nondenominational Christian church and Monica has started attending youth group
and sometimes volunteers in the church nursery. She notes that in the last year, she has tried to
spend time praying and reading the Bible on her own.
Social history ? Throughout childhood, Monica has always had a small group of close-knit
female friends who are also Latina. Although she does not consider herself ?popular,? she also
has not experienced significant problems with bullying. She reports that her mother has always
been ?over-protective,? and does not let her go many places. Her mother is always reminding her
about the dangers she faces as a minority and often warns her about discrimination and being too
trusting of others.
Monica reports that she has generally stayed out of trouble; however, her friends have
convinced her to smoke marijuana several times in the past. At first she enjoyed the behavior
because it felt new and exciting. However, she reports that in the last year or so it has started
bothering her conscience. She knows that certain important people in her life (e.g., her mother,
her youth pastor) would be very disappointed in her if they found out. She also wants to be a
?good? person and feels that she is not living up to that standard by doing drugs. Therefore, she
reports that she has not smoked in the last 10 months. She reports that in the last year she has
been spending less time with her old friends and more time with other youth from church.
Monica has had a few boyfriends in the past (that her mother does not know about), but
none of the relationships were serious. She reports that she is used to getting a lot of attention
from males, as this has been the case for the past several years. She reports that she has not dated
in the last year because she is trying to focus on school, her relationship with God, and ?finding
herself.?
Academic history ? Monica attends public school and always has. In the past, she has received
low to average grades. Within the last couple years (when entering high school), however, she
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PSYC 631
has experienced increased motivation for school and her grades have steadily improved. She
states that one of her main motivations for improving her grades is so that she can help provide
for her mother if need be in the future. She reports having to battle ?test anxiety? in science and
math classes, since she has heard that females and minorities do more poorly in those subjects.
She reported that her mother has always wanted her to grow up and be a doctor so she could
make a better life for herself, and has constantly reminded her of this goal for as long as she can
remember. Throughout her childhood, she was convinced that she would indeed take that path;
however, in the last year she has started having doubts and has started to explore other future
career options.
Psychological history ? Monica has not been formally diagnosed with any psychological
disorders. She does report that she believes she has been depressed in the past and even though
she is now at a normal weight, she still feels fat sometimes and has battled issues with selfesteem. However, she reports that her mood has improved over the last couple of years and that
she finally feels like she is getting her life together.
Essay Questions
Choose 3 of the 4 to answer. Remember that each chosen essay must be at least one page
(double-spaced) in length. For full credit, you must cite specific research covered in module
readings for each essay sub-component and relate this information to Monica. Include an
APA-style reference page at the end of your assignment. All three essays may be submitted
in one Word document.
1. Discuss how biological/neurological factors might relate to Monica?s functioning.
Specifically address:
? How might her early maturation have influenced her psychological, behavioral, and
social outcomes (be sure to address all three)?
? How might research related to adolescent neurological/reward systems (e.g.,
Galvan, 2010) explain some of her social behavior?
2. Discuss Monica?s moral reasoning and the factors that influence or are influenced by this
reasoning. Specifically address:
? What stage in Kohlberg?s Moral Reasoning theory would you place Monica into
and why?
? According to research (e.g., Einsenberg et al, 2009), how might her general moral
reasoning relate to her psychological and behavioral outcomes?
? How might her parent and peer relationships influence her moral reasoning?
3. Discuss Monica?s identity status and her religious/spiritual development (RSD).
Specifically address:
? What stage of Marcia?s theory of identity formation would you place Monica into
and why? Be sure to explain and relate the concepts of exploration and commitment
in your answer.
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PSYC 631
?
How might Monica?s RSD (see King & Roeser, 2009) have influenced her
psychological, behavioral, and social outcomes in the last couple years since she
began attending church? Include an explanation/discussion of Good and
Willoughby?s (2014) concepts of institutional and personal spirituality/religiosity in
your answer.
4. Based on research contained in Fuligni et al. (2009), discuss the role that ethnicity plays
in Monica?s family relationships, friendships, and education. Specifically address:
? How might ethnicity be related to Monica?s experience of familism/family
obligation and racial socialization?
? How might ethnicity be related to the characteristics and quality of Monica?s
friendships?
? How might ethnicity be related to Monica?s current and past educational
experiences?
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JOURNAL OF RESEARCH ON ADOLESCENCE, 21(1), 211 ? 224
Judgment and Decision Making in Adolescence
Dustin Albert and Laurence Steinberg
Temple University
In this article, we review the most important findings to have emerged during the past 10 years in the study of judgment
and decision making (JDM) in adolescence and look ahead to possible new directions in this burgeoning area of research.
Three inter-related shifts in research emphasis are of particular importance and serve to organize this review. First, research grounded in normative models of JDM has moved beyond the study of age differences in risk perception and
toward a dynamic account of the factors predicting adolescent decisions. Second, the field has seen widespread adoption
of dual-process models of cognitive development that describe 2 relatively independent modes of information processing,
typically contrasting an analytic (cold) system with an experiential (hot) one. Finally, there has been an increase in attention
to the social, emotional, and self-regulatory factors that influence JDM. This shift in focus reflects the growing influence of
findings from developmental neuroscience, which describe a pattern of structural and functional maturation that may set
the stage for a heightened propensity to make risky decisions in adolescence.
Imagine, for a moment, that you are 16 years old. It is
the spring of your sophomore year of high school,
and you feel a newfound sense of optimism about
your social prospects. Best of all, it is Friday night
and you are ready to take advantage of your recently
renegotiated curfew, now extended to 11 p.m. When
pressed for your plans, you tell your parents that you
are just going to the movies and then maybe hanging
out at the coffee shop: No need to worry. In reality,
you know that when your friends pick you up, you
will head straight to the first big keg party to which
you have ever been invited. Everyone will be there.
But you will have to be careful, because these things
get busted by the cops all the time, not to mention
the fact that your parents will be waiting up for you
when you get home. You are not really planning on
drinking at the party, but if you do, you will definitely need some breath mints and a believable
horror movie synopsis. That should be easy enough.
We begin our review with this exercise in creative
visualization not to inspire fear and suspicion in
those among our readers charged with parenting a
teenager, but to illustrate the multitude of factors
that dynamically shape adolescents? choices. On this
one weekend evening, our hypothetical teenager will
make a series of choices with potentially lasting
consequences for his health, safety, criminal record,
family relationships, and social status. These decisions are likely to be influenced not only by his capacity to accurately evaluate the relative costs and
benefits of alternative courses of action, but also the
social and emotional contexts in which he makes the
decisionsFthe mix of excitement and anxiety he
brings to the party, his in-the-moment assessment of
social expectations, and his background fear of getting caught by police or parents, to name just a few.
Stated simply, adolescent decision making is a complex and multiply determined phenomenon.
Fortunately, the last decade of scholarship on adolescent judgment and decision making (JDM) has seen
remarkable progress in modeling this complexity.
Building on normative models of rational decision
making, the field has dramatically expanded its explanatory power by integrating research methods and
theoretical insights from cognitive, developmental,
social, and emotion perspectives, with a growing influence from the neurosciences. Indeed, this movement toward an interdisciplinary perspective has
made it increasingly difficult to define the boundaries
of adolescent JDM as a topic of investigation. After all,
what domain of adolescent behavior does not involve
some degree of JDM? Because space limitations preclude an exhaustive consideration of such an expansively defined literature, our review is necessary
selective, guided by our assessment of the most important developments over the last decade within the
traditional domains of interest to adolescent JDM researchers. Responding to public policy concerns regarding adolescents? relative competence to make
decisions with long-term consequences for their health
and well-being, the field has historically focused on
identifying domains of immaturity in adolescent
Requests for reprints should be sent to Dustin Albert, Temple
University, Department of Psychology, Weiss Hall, 1701 N. 13th
Street, Philadelphia, PA 19122. E-mail: [email protected]
r 2011 The Authors
Journal of Research on Adolescence r 2011 Society for Research on Adolescence
DOI: 10.1111/j.1532-7795.2010.00724.x
212
ALBERT AND STEINBERG
decision making. Although our review reflects this
tradition, we emphasize that many, if not most, adolescents demonstrate remarkable decision-making
competence across a variety of domains. Future research on adolescent JDM should aspire to integrate
current models focused on adolescent immaturity
with the growing literature documenting the biological, psychological, and contextual factors promoting
positive youth development (Lerner, 2009).
Three inter-related developments in adolescent
JDM research serve to organize this review. First,
developmental research grounded in normative
models of rational decision making has made significant gains in identifying the factors that influence
adolescents? choices. Building on foundational work
modeling the key components of rational decision
making, early research in this tradition focused on
identifying aspects of cognitive processing in which
adolescents were deficient relative to adults, particularly with regard to decisions involving risk. In
response to considerable evidence that adolescents
evaluate risky decisions in a manner similar to adults
(Reyna & Farley, 2006), research from the past decade has shifted from an examination of age differences in risk processing toward comprehensive
modeling of the factors predicting adolescents? decisions. Such models have gained considerable explanatory power by examining the interplay of both
risk and benefit perceptions, as well as the role of
experience in modifying these views.
Second, following theoretical developments in the
adult JDM literature (and related trends in cognitive
and social psychology), the field has seen widespread adoption of dual-process models of cognitive
development (see Jacobs & Klaczynski, 2005, for
multiple examples). These models describe two relatively independent modes of information processing, typically contrasting an analytic (deliberative,
controlled, reasoned, ??cold??) system with an experiential (intuitive, automatic, reactive, ??hot??) system
(e.g., Epstein, 1994; Gerrard, Gibbons, Houlihan,
Stock, & Pomery, 2008; Jacobs & Klaczynski, 2002;
Reyna & Farley, 2006). Proponents of dual-process
models argue that traditional cognitive development
research has been limited by its singular focus on the
analytic system, leading to theories of unidirectional
maturational trajectories proceeding from intuitive
to reasoned processing (Klaczynsi, 2005). Given evidence that the use of many heuristics actually increases in adulthood, dual-process proponents argue
that developmental models of JDM must account for
the distinct maturational trajectories of analytic and
experiential systems. In this view, changes in JDM
over the course of adolescence do not reflect a simple
transition from experiential to analytic processing,
but rather result from domain-specific shifts in the
relative dominance of intuition and reason.
The influence of dual-process theories can also be
felt in a third research trend, a growth in attention to
the social, emotional, and self-regulatory factors that
influence adolescents? JDM. This shift in focus reflects the growing influence of findings from developmental neuroscience, which describe a pattern of
structural and functional maturation that may set the
stage for a heightened propensity to make risky
decisions in adolescence. Social and emotional factors relevant to adolescent JDM include normative
changes in core motivational processes, such as
sensation seeking and sensitivity to reward and
punishment, as well as age-related changes in the
relative influence of contextual variables (e.g., the
presence or absence of peers) on risk-taking behavior. Together, evidence for heightened sensitivity to
social and emotional factors in early-to-middle adolescence has offered one plausible account for the
corresponding prevalence of risk taking. Complementary to this focus on social and emotional factors,
research has also described continued development in late adolescence of capacities supporting
growth in self-regulatory competence, which is
thought to contribute to a corresponding decline in
risk taking. Consistent with the dual-process perspectives described above, this research has sought
to push the field beyond the study of ??cold?? cognition and toward explication of the experiential
factors that influence real-world, in-the-moment decision making.
BEYOND RISK PERCEPTION: EXPANDING THE
STUDY OF RATIONAL DECISION MAKING
Before the mid-1990s, research on adolescent JDM
focused largely on whether adolescents used adultlike cognitive processes when making decisions (for
reviews, see Furby & Beyth-Marom, 1992; Quadrel,
Fischhoff, & Davis, 1993). Much of this work
stemmed from concerns about the high prevalence of
risk behavior among adolescents (especially compared with adults) and the consequences of risk
taking for adolescents? health. As a general rule,
adolescents are more likely than adults over 25 to
binge drink, smoke cigarettes, have casual sex partners, engage in violent and other criminal behavior,
and have fatal or serious automobile crashes, the
majority of which are caused by reckless driving or
driving under the influence of alcohol. Because
many of these behaviors appear inherently irrational
when individuals understand their probable long-
ADOLESCENT JDM
term consequences, it was assumed that adolescents
must be less competent than adults in one or more of
the elements of rational decision making.
Normative models of JDM have historically emphasized five broad stages supporting competent decision making, including: (a) identifying options; (b)
assessing the possible consequences of each option; (c)
evaluating the desirability of each consequence; (d)
estimating the probability of occurrence for each consequence; and (e) applying a decision algorithm to the
above information to identify the option with the
greatest subjective utility (Beyth-Marom, Austin,
Fischhoff, Palmgren, & Jacobs-quadrel, 1993; HalpernFelsher & Cauffman, 2001). Drawing upon these and
similar models (e.g., Theory of Planned Behavior;
Azjen, 1985), a great deal of research searched for the
source of adolescents? heightened propensity to make
risky choices by comparing adolescent and adult
performance within specific stages of the decisionmaking process. Specifically, much of this work examined whether adolescents perceive the potential
consequences of risk behavior (i.e., Stage b) and accurately assess the probability of those consequences
occurring (i.e., Stage d) to the same degree as adults.
Contradicting popular conceptions of the typical
adolescent as beset by an ??invulnerability complex,??
adolescents were shown to be no worse than adults at
perceiving risk or estimating their vulnerability to it,
and studies found that increasing the salience of the
risks associated with making a poor or potentially
dangerous decision has comparable effects on adolescents and adults (for a discussion of false leads in the
study of adolescent risk taking, see Millstein & HalpernFelsher, 2002; Reyna & Farley, 2006; Rivers, Reyna, &
Mills, 2008; Steinberg & Cauffman, 1996). Indeed, there
appear to be few, if any, age differences in individuals?
evaluations of the risks inherent in a wide range of
dangerous behaviors (e.g., driving while drunk, having
unprotected sex) or in their judgments about the seriousness of the consequences that might result from
risky behavior (Beyth-Marom et al., 1993; although, see
Cohn, Macfarlane, Yanez, & Imai, 1995, for an exception
where adolescents judge lower risk than adults for
??occasional?? engagement in risk behavior).
Given evidence that adolescents do not differ
much from adults in their capacity to rationally
evaluate risk information, researchers have begun to
look for other explanations of why adolescents, as a
group, make riskier decisions than adults. As we will
describe in later sections, this shift has led to expanded consideration of social, emotional, and selfregulatory factors differentiating adolescent from
adult decision making. At the same time, research
grounded in rational decision theory has made
213
considerable progress in building models describing
the cognitive factors that predict adolescents? healthrisk decisions.
Before the last decade, the field?s reliance on crosssectional self-report studies produced a puzzling set of
findings regarding the relation between risk perceptions and behaviors (for reviews, see Millstein & Halpern-Felsher, 2002; Reyna & Farley, 2006). Given the
assumption that adolescents rationally evaluate costs
and benefits to reach a decision, cognitive models
typically predict that individuals who perceive lower
risk will be more likely to engage in a given behavior.
Although many studies have reported this expected
negative correlation between risk perception and behavior (e.g., Benthin, Slovic, & Severson, 1993; Hemmelstein, 1995), others have found the oppositeFthat
adolescents engaging in risk behavior perceive higher
risks than do nonengagers (e.g., Cohn et al., 1995;
Gerrard, Gibbons, & Bushman, 1996). To a degree,
these contradictory findings can be accounted for by
differences between studies with respect to the conditionality of risk perception assessments (Ronis, 1992).
When risk perceptions are assessed unconditionally
(i.e., ??How likely are you to experience negative consequences from smoking???), risk-takers accurately report a higher degree of personal risk than their peers
who are not engaging in risk behavior. In contrast,
when presented with conditional questions (i.e., ??If
you smoked, how likely are consequences???), risktakers tend to report lower risk perceptions than their
risk-abstaining counterparts.
Such findings highlight both the role of experience
as a modifier of risk perceptions and the need for
longitudinal studies that assess risk perceptions before
individuals engage in risk behavior. Although careful
longitudinal research investigating prospective predictors of health-risk behavior is still much needed
for a variety of domains, the last decade has seen
progress in at least one area. Specifically, a number of
longitudinal studies examining precursors of smoking initiation have provided strong evidence that adolescents who perceive a lower probability of harmful
consequences are more likely to initiate smoking
(Krosnick, Chang, Sherman, Chassin, & Presson, 2006;
Rodriguez, Romer, & Audrain-Mcgovern, 2007; Song,
Morrell, et al., 2009; Song, Glantz, & Halpern-Felsher,
2009). These studies provide an important reminder
that, despite the inability to explain age differences in
risk behavior, risk perception remains a valuable explanatory construct and a viable target for prevention
efforts.
Recent research also has made progress in explicating the role of experience in modifying risk perceptions. As we discussed above, when adolescents
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ALBERT AND STEINBERG
are asked how dangerous an activity would be if they
were to engage in it, individuals experienced in the
behavior consistently report lower risk perceptions
than do those without experience. Although this
finding can be explained in part by a presumed
causal pathway from low-risk perception to subsequent risk engagement, it is also possible that experience with risk behavior causes individuals to adjust
their risk judgments downward. This explanation is
particularly plausible given the low frequency or
long-term nature of negative consequences associated with many risk behaviors (e.g., lung cancer
from smoking, infectious disease from unprotected
sexual activity, motor vehicle crashes resulting from
drunk driving). Although adolescents may initially
adopt the high-risk estimates for these behaviors
provided in health education classes, direct experiences with the behavior in the absence of serious
negative consequences could create a downward
shift in risk perception. Indeed, longitudinal research
indicates that failing to experience a negative
outcome is associated with decreased risk perceptions for alcohol use (Goldberg, Halpern-Felsher,
& Millstein, 2002), drug use (Katz, Fromme, &
D?Amico, 2000), drinking and driving (Nygaard,
Waiters, Grube, & Keefe, 2003), and sexual activity
(Millstein & Halpern-Felsher, 2002). These findings
raise the concern that preventive efforts focused on
bolstering adolescents? perceptions of health risks
could backfire by leading those adolescents with
??successful?? risk-taking experiences to radically
discount the validity of the health information message, thereby increasing their propensity to engage
in further risk behavior. If the Partnership for a Drug
Free America claims that smoking marijuana will
transform your brain into a fried egg, and you
nonetheless share a joint with friends on occasion
and manage to maintain your GPA, then why trust
what they say about cocaine and heroin?
Finally, much of the improvement in predicting
adolescents? decision making has derived from an
expanded consideration of the subjective benefits
that adolescents associate with health-risk behaviors.
For instance, one study found that adolescents? perceptions of the benefits (e.g., social status, pleasure)
of alcohol and tobacco use prospectively predicts
their decisions to drink and smoke 6 months later,
above and beyond age, experience with the substance, and perceptions of risk (Goldberg et al., 2002;
see also Halpern-Felsher, Biehl, Kropp, & Rubinstein,
2004; Meier, Slutke, Arndt, & Cadoret, 2007; Song,
Morrell, et al., 2009). A recent meta-analysis of
studies predicting sexual activity, alcohol and tobacco use, and nutrition behavior in adolescents ages
10 ? 18 found that perceptions of benefits are stronger
predictors than risk perceptions of all four behaviors
(Peters et al., 2009). By considering the benefits
that adolescents? derive from engaging in risk behavior, the field is approaching a much richer
understanding of the subjective factors that shape
adolescents? decisions (Michels, Kropp, Eyre, &
Halpern-Felsher, 2005).
DUAL-PROCESS MODELS OF COGNITIVE
DEVELOPMENT
Despite these improvements in modeling individual
differences in adolescent health-risk behavior, many
scholars have remained unsatisfied with the failure
of rational decision theories to adequately describe
what develops in adolescent JDM (e.g., Jacobs &
Klaczynski, 2002; Reyna & Farley, 2006; Steinberg,
2003). As we noted above, most research on adolescent decision making conducted before the mid1990s sought to identify gains in decision processing
skills, largely based on the assumption that competence developed along a unidirectional, linear trajectory progressing from childhood intuition to
mature, deliberative thinking in adulthood (Jacobs &
Klaczynski, 2002). Investigators concerned with adolescent JDM have raised two strong challenges to
this theoretical framework. First, the claim that decision processing develops over the course of childhood and adolescence toward an end state of
rational, deliberate decision making is inconsistent
with a wealth of evidence from the adult JDM literature that adult decision making is riddled with
cognitive biases and heuristics (see Kahneman,
Slovic, & Tversky, 1982). Indeed, as we will describe
below, developmental studies suggest that certain
heuristics and biases become more prevalent over the
course of childhood and adolescence (Reyna &
Farley, 2006). In essence, if the road of normative development leads to logically rigorous decision making,
most adults fail to reach the destination. Second, given
that few gains in logical reasoning or information
processing are apparent after mid-adolescence (Kuhn,
2009), the development of rational competence cannot
explain the many age differences observed between
adolescents and adults in real-world decision making,
particularly adolescents? heightened risk-taking behavior (Gerrard et al., 2008; Reyna & Farley, 2006;
Steinberg, 2008). We discuss evidence for each of these
critiques in turn and describe a class of dual process
models that have been advanced to account for the
seemingly paradoxical nature of adolescent cognitive
development.
ADOLESCENT JDM
The Development of Heuristic Processing
A large body of research on adult JDM has demonstrated that although adults behave in accord with
logical processing expectations on many JDM tasks,
they also commonly show evidence of biases in
judgment and reliance on heuristic ??shortcuts??
(Kahneman et al., 1982). Rather than interpret this
??heuristics and biases?? literature as evidence that
adults are inherently irrational, some have suggested
that rational (or ??adaptive??) decision making is supported by two separate, parallel modes of cognitionFa conscious, analytic system responsible for
logical, computational processing, and a pre-conscious, experiential system that supports quick, intuitive, heuristic processing, and is based in implicit
memory (e.g., Epstein, 1994; Klaczynski, 2001; Stanovich, 1999). In response to mounting evidence in
support of this and similar dual-process models of
adult cognition, developmental JDM researchers have
argued that theories of cognitive development focused
on the maturation of logical competence have neglected a central aspect of cognition (Jacobs &
Klaczynski, 2002). From this perspective, both the
analytic and the experiential system mature over the
course of development and together support the paradoxical mix of logic and bias observed in adult JDM.
Research guided by dual-process models of cognitive development has demonstrated age-related progressions in the use of different classes of heuristics
that at first glance appear quite paradoxical. On the
one hand, studies comparing younger and older adolescents on a variety of standard JDM tasks demonstrate growth in ??normative?? (i.e., logically coherent,
heuristic-resistant) reasoning from early to middle
adolescence (for a review, see Klaczynsi, 2005). For
instance, middle adolescents show improvements in
statistical reasoning, conditional reasoning, and covariation judgments and show less evidence of outcome bias and use of the ??sunk cost?? fallacy than early
adolescents (Klaczynski, 2001; Klaczynski & Cottrell,
2004). Klaczynsi (2005) has argued that such improvements in normative reasoning are related to the
maturation in adolescence of metacognitive skills; as
adolescents develop the capacity and motivation to
monitor and direct their thinking, they are more likely
to resist the pull of certain heuristics and engage analytic processing systems.
On the other hand, evidence suggests that some
biases and heuristics are engaged more frequently
with age across childhood and adolescence (for reviews, see Jacobs & Klaczynski, 2002; Reyna & Farley, 2006). In particular, studies utilizing a variety of
JDM tasks involving social content have demon-
215
strated age-related increases in the tendency to incorrectly apply stereotype information to reasoning
problems, resulting in more transitivity errors (e.g.,
Markovits & Dumas, 1999), conjunction fallacies
(Davidson, 1995), and use of the representativeness
heuristic (Jacobs & Potenza, 1991). Research on the
development of the representativeness heuristic, the
tendency to rely on salient features of a scenario rather than base rate information to inform likelihood
judgments, nicely illustrates this phenomenon. For
problems involving social content (e.g., Is the perky,
outgoing girl a cheerleader or a member of the
band?), adolescents show an increased propensity to
favor stereotype-based information (e.g., cheerleaders are perky) over base rates (e.g., more girls are
band members than cheerleaders; Jacobs &
Klaczynski, 2002). In contrast, adolescents show developmental gains in the use of base-rate information
on parallel problems that do not involve social content. In sum, adolescents are capable of engaging
both analytical and heuristic processing systems
when making judgments and decisions, but in contexts that activate their increasingly rich and salient
social schemas, heuristic processing appears to gain
influence over the course of adolescent development.
Reasoned and Reactive Pathways to Risk Behavior
The last decade has also seen the advancement of a
growing number of dual-process models to describe
the developmental mechanisms underlying the
heightened incidence of risk-taking behavior in adolescence, relative to adulthood (e.g., Gerrard et al.,
2008; Rivers et al., 2008; Steinberg, 2008). Expanding
upon the rational decision models described in the
first section of this review, these theories typically
argue that age differences in risk behavior cann
