Doctoral Dissertation Research in DRMS: Deciding in the Dark--Developmental Differences between Adolescents and Adults in Unconscious Decision-Making

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

It is widely recognized that adolescents exhibit poor decision-making. With regard to driving, drugs, and crime, adolescents are more likely than adults to make choices that place themselves and others in harm's way. Efforts to explain this phenomenon in terms of deficits in risk judgment have largely failed. In study after study, adolescents appear to be as capable as adults of both estimating risk and acknowledging their vulnerability to it. But, if adolescents are as capable as adults of recognizing risk, why then do they engage in more risky behavior than adults? In this Doctoral Dissertation Improvement proposal the co-PI outlines research to test an alternative hypothesis involving unconscious aspects of decision-making. Specifically, the co-PI outlines experiments designed to test the hypotheses that (a) adolescents' unconscious decisional processes are more sensitive to reward and less sensitive to cost than those of older and younger individuals; and (b) that these age differences in sensitivity to reward and cost are amplified when rewards are social in nature. Three computerized decision-making tasks will be administered to 400 individuals ranging in age from 10 to 30 years old. The tasks use time pressure, complex information, and interference with conscious cognition to assess unconscious risk evaluation. By comparing the responses of preadolescent, adolescent and adult individuals, the study will be able to identify deficits and biases in adolescents' unconscious risk judgments that may influence their behavior. The proposed study has the potential to challenge current developmental theory and to inform policy-makers about the mechanisms driving risky behavior in adolescence. In addition, the findings may be used to inform current discourse about rights and responsibilities for adolescents that hinge on their decision-making capacities, such as criminal culpability, medical decisions, informed consent, and the right to vote.