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

Abstract

In real-world decision-making, sub-optimal risk-taking is characteristic to adolescents, which increases the chance of serious negative outcomes (e.g., road traffic accidents) for them.Nevertheless, we are still lacking conclusive evidence for an inverted U-shaped developmental trajectory for risk-taking, since it is typically not observed in laboratory-based studies. This raises the question whether adolescents are really more risk-takers or when facing a novel risky situation they behave just as children and adults do. To answer that, we used the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) to assess the risky decision making of 173 individuals ranging in age from 7 to 29.The BART provided useful data for characterizing multiple aspects of risk-taking. Surprisingly, we found that adolescents were not more inclined to take risks than children or young adults.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; however, there were no age-related differences in risk-taking 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 plausibility of the BART and 2) theoretical debate about whether the amount of prior experience on its own may account for age-related changes in real-life risk-taking, since risk-taking in a novel and uncertain situation was invariant across developmental stages.