Do adolescents take more risks? Not when facing a novel uncertain situation

Abstract

Real-life risky behavior seems to peak in adolescence, increasing the chance of negative and even irreversible outcomes, such as road traffic accidents, in this period of life. We are still lacking conclusive evidence, however, for an inverted U-shaped developmental trajectory for risk-taking. This raises the question whether adolescents are really more risk-prone or when facing a novel risky situation, they behave just as children and adults do. To answer this question, we used the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) to assess the risky decision making of 188 individuals ranging in age from 7 to 30. The BART provided useful data for characterizing multiple aspects of risk-taking under uncertainty. Participants in all age groups were able to adapt their learning processes to the probabilistic environment and improve their performance during the sequential risky choice. Surprisingly, we found that adolescents were not more inclined to take risks than children or young adults at any stage of the task. Likewise, neither negative feedback reactivity nor overall task performance distinguished adolescents from the younger and older age groups. Our findings prompt (1) methodological considerations about the validity of the BART and (2) theoretical debate on whether experience accumulation on its own may account for age-related changes in decision making both in the lab and the real world, since risk-taking in a novel and uncertain situation was invariant across developmental stages.