Go Ahead, I Dare You

In the popular 1955 movie “Rebel Without a Cause,” moody teenager Jim Stark makes a bad choice. He decides to drive his ’49 Mercury at high speed toward a seaside cliff in a game of “chicken” with his nemesis, the bully Buzz Gunderson. It’s actually a worse life decision for Buzz, who loses the game and perishes in the Pacific Ocean.

American culture has shifted dramatically in the half century since heartthrob James Dean starred in this cult classic. But some things have not changed, including the fact that teenagers make risky, and often life-threatening, choices. The deadly “chickie run” may be a cultural artifact, but it has been replaced by other risks, including widespread drug use and HIV infection, and adolescents continue to put themselves in harm’s way.

Why? As a parent of three boys, I want to interview the Jim Starks of the world. First I want to shake them by the lapels, but then I want to ask them these questions: What were you thinking? What precisely was going on in your reasoning process when you said to yourself, “Sure, racing my car toward a cliff is an OK thing to do”?

Surprisingly, behavioral scientists have actually done these interviews with hundreds of American adolescents. In order to explore really stupid behavior, they have asked what seem to be really stupid questions: Is it a good thing to set your hair on fire? Drink Drano? Go swimming where sharks swim?

The results are fascinating, and unsettling. While teenagers are just as likely as adults to get the answer right (the correct answer is “No”), teens actually have to mull the question over momentarily before they answer. As summarized by psychologists Valerie Reyna of Cornell and Frank Farley of Temple in the current issue of the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, teenagers take a split second longer than adults to reject such patently inane behaviors. And more of the teenage brain lights up, suggesting that they are actually going through some kind of deliberative calculation before concluding what the rest of us assume is obvious.

This is not a good thing. While we tend in our culture to celebrate reason and careful, deliberative decision making, some psychologists are now arguing that the opposite value sometimes holds. The emerging view is that the brain is a dual-processor, with certain neurons dedicated to systematic crunching of information, and others (probably older and more primitive from an evolutionary point of view) making fast intuitive leaps. These leaps, the new research suggests, may lead to healthier decisions. In other words, impulsivity sometimes trumps logic and caution.