Teenagers are more likely to try out illegal substances than adults or children, they are also more likely to drive recklessly and have unprotected sex. Put simply – teenagers, compared to other age groups are greater risk takers.

However, research has demonstrated that teenagers have the ability and the knowledge to make competent judgments regarding risks, just like adults. So, why are they more likely to engage in risky behavior?

In the latest issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, which is focusing on understanding the teenage brain, Laurence Steinberg and Jason Chein of Temple University and Dustin Albert of Duke University believe that risky behavior in some teenagers reflects the unique effect of peer pressure on the still-developing teenage brain.

As children enter their teens, they spend more and more time with their peers. The feedback they get from friends and colleagues at school might tune their brain’s reward system to be more sensitive to the reward value of risky pursuits. This sensitivity may drive teenagers to concentrate on the short-term benefits of making risky choices over the safer, long-term alternatives.

The cognitive control system in our brains, which helps “put the brakes” on risky behavior, takes longer to mature.

The authors wrote:

“If adolescents made all of their decisions involving drinking, driving, dalliances, and delinquency in the cool isolation of an experimenter’s testing room, those decisions would likely be as risk averse as those of adults.

But therein lies the rub: Teenagers spend a remarkable amount of time in the company of other teenagers.”

The authors explain that a new wave of research at a point where behavior and neuroscience overlap suggests that peer pressure and conformity fundamentally changes the calculus of teen risk taking.

In a previous study published in 2009, Steinberg and team discovered that 14-year-olds were much greater risk takers in a driving simulation game when they were tested in the presence of their peers, compared to the same test without their peers around. While a 14-year old takes twice as many risk in the presence of peers, older adolescents were found to take 50% more risks.

More recently, Steinberg and colleagues showed that adults do not take more risks when observed by their peers, but teenagers do. The teenagers also had more activity in the ventral striatum and orbitofrontal cortex regions of the brain, which are involved in evaluating rewards.

Research appears to show that when adolescents are with their peers, their risky decision-making tendencies are heightened because of a change in the way their brains process rewards.

Randall W. Engle, professor of psychology at Georgia Tech and editor of Current Directions in Psychological Science, said:

“The phrase ‘What were you thinking?’ is known to every parent of a teenager. And yet, psychological research has historically neglected teenagers, focusing instead on children or adults.”

New techniques available today for studying the brain and its development allow scientists to have a deeper understanding of how teenagers think and behave, the authors explained.

B.J. Casey, guest editor of the special issue and Director of the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology at Weill Cornell Medical College, wrote “The articles in this special issue on the teen brain provide the latest findings from human imaging and animal studies on topics that range from self-control to peer influence to policy.”

Instead of portraying the teenage brain as somehow ‘defective’ “the contributors paint a picture of a brain that is sculpted by both biological and experiential factors to adapt to the unique social, physical, sexual and intellectual challenges of adolescence,” Casey added.

In a previous study carried out at the University of Vermont, researchers explained why the teenage brain is more wired for drug abuse.

Written by Christian Nordqvist