Adolescent Risk-Taking and Social Meaning: A Commentary

By Cass R. Sunstein. 2008

90 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Why do adolescents take risks? What is the appropriate response to adolescent risk-taking? This Commentary for a special issue of Developmental Review, discussing a set of papers in that issue, explores these questions with attention to changes in the adolescent brain, to dual-processing theory, to social influences, and to fuzzy-trace theory. It contends that adolescent risk-taking is often driven by the social meaning of risk and caution, and that social meaning operates as a tax on or a subsidy to behavior. Changes in social meaning present a serious collective action problem, but also a valuable opportunity for both law and policy.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Decision Sciences, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/496dd55b7ab5783e57e7d72429273b5156a11294

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Laurence Steinberg
2. Dustin Albert

In General Decision Sciences

1. Dustin Albert
2. Laurence Steinberg
3. Ty W. Boyer
4. B. Casey
5. Margo Gardner

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Laurence Steinberg
2. Dustin Albert
3. D. Baumrind

Citations in the corpus

• Judgment and Decision Making in Adolescence (2011, background): “Research on social heuristics and social prototypes highlight the increasing importance of “social meanings” for guiding behavior in adolescence (Sunstein, 2008).”