Reducing Underage Drinking A Collective Responsibility (2004) / Chapter Skim
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5 Perceptions of Risk and Social Judgments: Biases and Motivational Factors--Janis E. Jacobs
5 Perceptions of Risk and Social Judgments: Biases and Motivational Factors--Janis E. Jacobs
Pages 417-436
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From page 417... ...
In this chapter, after briefly reviewing previous research on adolescent cognition related to decision making, I discuss a number of reasoning, motivational, and developmental issues that are critical to our understanding of adolescent risk taking.
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From page 418... ...
. A big difference between this second set of studies and the first was that they focused on real-world issues, social situations, and judgments based on prior experiences, whereas the other studies were concerned with cognitive performance under ideal conditions.
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From page 419... ...
BIASES IN SOCIAL JUDGMENTS The overriding theme in the adult judgment and decision-making literature has been that adults commonly fall prey to judgment biases, ignore important information, rely on seemingly inappropriate decision making shortcuts, and make nonoptimal decisions across a wide array of situations when they are making social judgments (for reviews see Dawes, 1988; Nisbett, 1993; Plous, 1993)
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Nonoptimal Decisions Due to Judgment Biases In social psychology, the terms "intuitive statisticians," "intuitive psychometricians," and "intuitive social scientists" (Nisbett and Ross, 1980) have been used to label adults' use of statistical rules to make everyday social judgments.
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In one of the first studies on the development of judgment heuristics (Jacobs and Potenza, 1991) , we found that, although even first graders ignored base rate information to make social judgments, this bias increased across the elementary school years and the use of social categories as an explanation for social judgments increased between sixth grade and college.
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Such base rate information in the real world seldom is presented to us as we make judgments, however, leaving us to "collect the data" for ourselves. Previous research indicates that even adults have a tendency to overestimate small and underestimate large base rates (Lichtenstein, Slovic, Fischhoff, Layman, and Combs, 1978)
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From page 423... ...
We found that children at all grade levels were generally overestimating the base rates of behaviors, while slightly underestimating attitudinal base rates; however, even first-graders' estimates only deviated from the criterion by an average of 1.11 points on an 11-point scale. The most important finding was that accuracy increased for both behavioral and attitudinal estimates throughout the elementary school years (Jacobs et al., 1995)
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From page 424... ...
One of the most intriguing findings from the studies just reviewed is that there are individual differences in judgment biases -- we have a group of teens out there who perceive fewer long-term consequences of alcohol use, who are "extreme overestimators" of others' behaviors, and who exhibit greater overconfidence and perceptions of immunity. The same group of adolescents is also reporting more alcohol use, engaging in more deviant behaviors in general, doing more poorly in school, and exhibiting lower self-esteem.
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From page 425... ...
. This is supported by the findings from the adolescent risk taking literature that suggest that judgments about hypothetical scenarios do not predict actual behaviors that are self-invested for risk-taking behaviors, such as marijuana smoking (Bauman, 1980)
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From page 426... ...
Some support for adolescents' self-enhancement or self-protection bias can be found in a series of studies done by Klaczynski and his colleagues to examine the use of biased judgments that are personally relevant. By presenting "evidence" that is either consistent with or threatening to their goals and beliefs, they found that adolescents exhibit more biased reasoning and less statistical reasoning on scenario problems that threaten their personal goals (Klaczynski and Fauth, 1997; Klaczynksi and Gordon, 1996)
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From page 427... ...
. The 26-year-old is more concerned about the negative outcome of losing the job because of previous choices concerning college major, geographic location, and financial obligations for a car and home that have preceded this job.
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From page 428... ...
Although no one really believes that decisions are made in a vacuum, the important roles of family and friends as decision making models and teachers have often been ignored. Families provide an arena in which fledgling decision makers try their new skills, and where more experienced decision makers model appropriate behavior or even provide instruction on how to make decisions (Jacobs and Ganzel, 1993)
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From page 429... ...
and make it clear that experience with underage drinking without negative consequences may lead to misattributions and a heightened sense of invulnerability. A related issue is the serial nature of everyday decision making.
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The chapter presents an image of the development of judgment and decision making skills that runs contrary to that painted by traditional developmental theories because the evidence suggests that judgment heuristics and other biases appear to be linked to increases in knowledge and to the construction of personal theories about the social world. As different social concepts are acquired, and as these become increasingly consolidated, adolescents are likely to base their judgments on social category information, increasing rather than reducing the potential for biased judgments.
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From page 431... ...
As the developmental and adult studies reviewed here illustrate, logical deductive reasoning strategies are not frequently used when social judgments are being made about events with uncertain outcomes. Therefore, teaching rational decision making skills alone is not likely to make an impact on everyday, seat-of-the-pants choices about underage drinking.
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From page 432... ...
. Bayesian inference: Combining base rates with opinions of sources who vary in credibility.
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. A panel study of subjective expected utility for adolescent sexual behavior.
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. Motivated scientific reasoning biases, epistemological beliefs, and theory polarization: A two-process approach to adolescent cognition.
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. Base rates can affect individual predictions.
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From page 436... ...
. Social roles and strategies in prediction: Some determi nants of the use of base rate information.
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