On a trip to Dallas last week, I stayed in a large hotel that was playing host to a convention of high school student members of a service organization. A group of boys was roughhousing on a balcony where only a low railing served as a barrier against a 3-floor drop to the lobby, and it looked like a shove in the wrong direction would send someone over the edge. Down swept a small phalanx of chaperones exclaiming what a bunch of idiots the kids were. The young fellows sauntered off, muttering about “over-reacting,” and “always ruining it when we’re having fun.”

To adults, the reason for this behavior seems obvious: Kids are illogical and don’t understand the risks of their behavior. We assume that they do risky things – like use drugs, drive drunk, or have unprotected sex – because they are irrational beings. Like my grandmother would say: “Those kids just don’t have any sense.”

Enter Cornell professor Valerie Reyna to show us that we’re wrong about this, and our misconceptions have implications for how we try to help kids make less risky decisions. A faculty member in Human Development, Prof. Reyna conducts groundbreaking work on judgment and decision making. And she has taken the additional step of turning her basic research into practical programs to help young people.

In the laboratory under controlled conditions, she has conducted many studies of children and adolescents. Following a translational research model, she and her colleagues wanted to first understand the causal mechanisms that generated risky behavior. What she learned in the lab about the psychology of adolescent risk-taking and about how risky decision making changes with age, she found could then be used to modify unhealthy behavior.

The findings are fascinating. It turns out that adolescents don’t take risks because they are irrational and feel invulnerable and immortal. In fact, it’s because they are too logical. Adults can access informed intuition to avoid risk, whereas adolescents count up and weigh risks versus immediate benefits, and often the risk comes out on top. As Prof. Reyna puts it, “We found that teenagers quite rationally weigh benefits and risks. But when they do that, the equation delivers the message to go ahead and do that, because to the teen the benefits outweigh the risks.”

Existing prevention curricula that had been developed tended to have effects that faded over time and were not as large as they could be.  Prof. Reyna translated her research findings into a curriculum based on both theory and empirical findings.  She has created interventions to teach adolescents to think categorically—to make sweeping, automatic gist-based decisions about life: “unprotected sex bad,” “illegal drugs bad.”

After more than 800 teenagers participated in a randomized controlled trial, the investigators found that the curriculum was more broadly effective, and its effects lasted in many cases for long periods of time.

Prof. Reyna’s web page Resources on Risky Decision-Making in Adolescence is a terrific resource. I recommend starting by watching one of her presentations on the topic, conveniently available on the site. An article in the New York Times provides a quick overview. If you are a professional working with adolescents (or if you have one in your family) you’ll find a whole new way of looking at why kids take risks.