%0 Journal Article
%T Heightened Adolescent Risk
%A Daniel Romer
%A Ivy N. Defoe
%A Judith Semon Dubas
%J Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences
%@ 2372-7330
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/2372732218801037
%X Surveys concur that adolescents disproportionately engage in many real-world risk behaviors, compared with children and adults. Recently researchers have employed laboratory risky decision-making tasks to replicate this apparent heightened adolescent risk-taking. This review builds on the main findings of the first meta-analysis of such age differences in risky decision-making in the laboratory. Overall, although adolescents engage in more risky decision-making than adults, adolescents engage in risky decision-making equal to children. However, adolescents take fewer risks than children on tasks that allow the option of opting out of taking a risk. To reconcile findings on age differences in risk-taking in the real-world versus the laboratory, an integrative framework merges theories on neuropsychological development with ecological models that emphasize the importance of risk exposure in explaining age differences in risk-taking. Policy insights and recent developments are discussed
%K risky decision-making
%K risk-taking
%K age differences
%K meta-analysis
%K adolescence
%K policy
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2372732218801037