Life is full of risks. Should I invest my savings in the stock market
and risk losing everything? If I take up smoking I run the risk of
seriously damaging my health. We have to stay constantly alert if we
want to stay out of harm's way, something we must also teach our
children as they grow.
As parents, one of our most basic instincts is to protect our children.
When they are young this is easy enough to do but by the time they've
reached their teenage years it is significantly harder to make ourselves
heard.
We often hear of car accidents involving young people where speed is
sometimes the cause. Is it that young people take greater risks or do
they make poorer decisions?
How much risk we are prepared to take, and even how we judge risk in the
first instance, are affected by several factors. Unsurprisingly, our
brains play a central role.
There are two systems within the brain that have some control over how
we analyse risk. The more primitive system is located in the amygdala
and is comparatively old in evolutionary terms.
This is the part of the brain that reacts instantly when we are faced
with danger. For example, if you have ever sat in your house at night
and heard a loud, unexpected, banging noise in another room, you may
feel a rush of blood to your heart, your chest feels constricted and
your breathing speeds up.
Adrenaline
This is the amygdala kick-starting the release of adrenaline into your
bloodstream, triggering the fight-or-flight response.
This kind of instantaneous response works really well -- if you are a
lizard or a leopard! The faster you can notice threats and either run
away from them or fight back, the more likely you are to live to
reproduce.
But our brains have had to adapt to new risks. Some apparently scary
things are not as risky as they seem. Other frightening situations are
better handled by staying put in order to reduce future risk by managing
or dealing with the current risk.
So there is an evolutionary advantage to being able to hold off the
fight-or-flight response while you work out a more sophisticated
analysis of the situation.
It is this second risk-analysis system that sets us apart from other
animals. This analytic, reasoning brain system is located in the
neocortex in the frontal lobe area and has developed relatively
recently, evolutionarily speaking. It only appears in mammals and is
slower to act.
So we have two systems for reacting to risk -- a primitive intuitive
system and a more advanced analytic system -- and they are operating at
the same time and sometimes in opposition. When they do come into
conflict it's hard for the analytic side to overcome instinct, for the
neocortex to contradict the amygdala.
For example, those of you who have ever had a fear of the dark will know
that despite assurances that no danger lurks in the darkness (neocortex
reasoning), the darkness itself still causes anxiety (amygdala
instinctual fear reaction).
A lot of the mistakes we make in responding to risks, it seems, are the
results of errors that this neocortex reasoning makes.
When we look at the risk judgments of children and teenagers, we see
they make even more errors than adults do. This is due to the physical
immaturity of their brains. The final part of the brain to completely
mature is the frontal lobe area, which doesn't fully develop until our
mid-twenties.
Speed
The mistakes we make in judging risks are due to the shortcuts the
neocortex uses to speed up its processing of risk. In a rush to analyse
the risk of a situation we use rules of thumb known as heuristics.
One such heuristic is that we fear ancient risks more than modern risks.
We may fear snakes more than car accidents even though the statistics
show many more people will die from road traffic accidents than will die
from snake bites.
So those risks that have been with us for hundreds of millions of years
are more hard-wired in our brains than risks that have only been present
for a hundred years or less.
Another heuristic, or bias, that might affect this is that we aren't
afraid enough of those risks that we think we are in control of. This is
particularly relevant for teens.
So, because we have control of steering, acceleration and braking, we
believe that cars are less likely to do damage to us than snakes.
If you have ever been a passenger in a car that veers towards a ditch or
an oncoming car the fright you get is greater, usually, than the fright
that the driver gets because they have the capacity to affect what
happens.
We fear the risks that others might pose to us because of their
malevolence or negligence more than we fear the risks we pose to
ourselves by things like smoking or obesity.
A third heuristic is that we fear spectacular but unlikely dangers more
than everyday dangers. For example, all parents worry about harm coming
to their children. The exaggerated fear of child abduction that followed
the saturated coverage of
Madeleine McCann's disappearance is a
good example of this spectacular but unlikely danger bias.
Harmed
All of the data, gathered over years, shows that children are more
likely to be abused by a relative or someone known to them than by a
stranger. Despite this, most parents still believe that their child is
at greater risk of being harmed by a stranger.
A fourth heuristic is that we fear immediate consequences more than
long-term consequences. A teenager who decides to smoke will be more
worried about getting caught by their parents and punished for smoking,
than they will of dying of lung cancer.
Other things we know about risk are that our risk thermostats vary. Some
people will be prepared to accept a higher level of risk than others in
the same circumstances.
Our risk thermostat stays stable throughout our lives. One study in the
US showed, however, that the presence or absence of peers can change our
tolerance to risk.
It measured the level of risk that a group of older teenagers and a
group of adults were prepared to take while driving in a car simulator.
Specifically they examined whether the participants decided to drive
through an amber traffic light or not.
When they then retested all of the adult and teenage participants on the
same route, but with friends in the car simulator as well, they found
that more teenagers drove through the amber light than they had
initially.
Adults, on the other hand, stayed stable (with or without friends
present they maintained the same level of risk in their driving). This
suggests that teenagers will take more risks when their friends are
around.
The emotions of fear and anger bias our risk judgments in opposite
directions. Anger leads us to underestimate risks and fear leads us to
overestimate risks.
When we are angry, for example if we are in a fit of road rage after
being cut off by another driver, we may attempt dangerous manoeuvres
such as overtaking, that put ourselves or others in danger. By contrast,
most of us moderate our speed (at least for a while) after witnessing
the aftermath of a road accident.
What is abundantly clear is that we all make mistakes when trying to
judge risk but age has a significant role to play. This is evidenced by
the fact that adults tend to make fewer errors because our brains are
more mature and more practised at making these judgments. We also take
less risk in the company of our peers than teenagers will.
When it comes to the risks that teenage drivers are prepared to take,
there are more factors at play than telling them to slow down. We must
try to influence the decisions that teenagers will make, especially in
dangerous situations.
However, influencing their decisions is a delicate tightrope walk. If
there is too little interference from us they get exposed to unnecessary
risks. If there is too much interference our advice gets rejected out of
hand.
In next month's feature I will look more closely at decision-making, in
the context of what we now know about risk, to see how we can best
influence our children and teenagers.
By teaching them the skills of decision-making we give them a vital tool
for keeping themselves and others safe.
- David Coleman
Irish Independent |