The Power of Positive Risk Taking
Ingrid and a group of her friends were playing tetherball on a school camping trip, when her best friend came out of the cabin they were sharing with the popular girls and said, “Come on, we’re going to the boys’ side of camp.”
I’m like, “What?”
She’s like, “Come on, they’re all doing it.”
Ingrid had moments to decide and her best friend kept pushing, “Live a little.”
This may not sound like a big risk, as risks go, but the students had been warned that it carried the possibility of expulsion. As parents know, small things can become big things.
Since its inception in the early 1900s,1 the field of adolescent research was laser-focused on moments just like this, asking why teenagers take negative risks, from everyday negative risks to more momentous ones, like drinking or drugs. It begins with the biological fact that adolescents are more sensitive to rewards than those younger or older than they are.
The focus on negative risk-taking started to shift as researcher began to take a deeper look at the meaning of risk. Eveline Crone of Erasmus University Rotterdam in The Netherlands is one of those researchers. She was conducting an in-depth longitudinal study of close to 300 adolescents2 and noticed a discrepancy. Almost all of the adolescents in her studies were more sensitive to rewards, but very few were like the stereotypical adolescents—reckless, thrill-seeking, rebellious. She says, “We only saw that in a small percentage of the adolescents.”
She began to ask herself, “Why do they have this reward sensitivity when only a small percentage engages in excessive negative risk-taking?”3
This is also a question that Ron Dahl of the University of California, Berkeley has asked. Since adolescents like thrills more than younger children or older adults, maybe adolescents believe they’re more immune to danger. Why else would they want to drive fast or go on terrifying amusement park rides?
But that explanation turned out to be untrue. Dahl has found that the hormones of puberty, including testosterone, appear to increase the activation of fear circuits in the brain, making them more reactive to threat, not less.4
And in fact, Dahl and his colleagues have noted that this has been an enduring paradox in the research.5 Studies show that adolescents are typically quite aware of the consequences of doing dangerous things,6 such as jumping off a high place, though they may take longer to consider these consequences than adults.7
So, if adolescents know (or are told) better, why do they still take risks? In a study of hormonal changes and brain development over time, Dahl and his colleagues realized that this paradox makes perfect sense:
As these hormones—testosterone and the other hormones of puberty—go up, the capacity to activate reward and excitement goes up, too.8
Dahl and his colleagues have been researching “how the two sets of circuits—the fear and the reward excitement circuitry—interact more as puberty occurs.”9 He continues:
Kids want the feeling of thrills. You can’t have a thrill without fear. They don’t go on roller coasters and watch horror movies because they’re fearless. They do it because they like thrills.10
Researchers are now viewing what they call sensation-seeking—“the tendency to seek novel and thrilling experiences in adolescence11— as what I call a developmental necessity. As Eveline Crone puts it:
I now think that it helps you to be explorative, to look at different options and seek out different alternatives, to find your way in new social worlds.12
Dahl expand on this notion, saying that sensation seeking during adolescence enables young people to learn to face fear. In essence, they learn to be brave:
This idea of overcoming our fears is something that’s admired across all cultures. Heroes are basically people who can be brave in important circumstances—whether it’s a firefighter or a soldier or an everyday hero helping others. Being brave is a valued quality.
How do you learn to be brave? Not by being fearless, but by learning to do the right thing even when you’re afraid [emphasis mine]. How do you do that if you don’t practice?13
Ingrid was able to make a quick decision not to go to the boys’ side of the camp because her father had talked with her before the class trip. She could reel off the repercussions of doing something negative and risky because she’d thought them through in advance. If she was expelled, she might have to switch schools, lose her close friendships, and carry an expulsion on her school record. She said to herself,
“Why would I risk everything just to go to the other side of camp?”
There was another very important reason too. She’s had opportunities in her life to do positive things that are equally thrilling, scary, and “risky”–to take a drama class at school. She didn’t originally intend to take drama:
I wanted to be in Beginning Art, but there was no space, so they put me in drama. It was a beginning drama class, full of people who didn’t really like drama, just in it for the easy A, or maybe, like me, they wanted to do something else. But I walked into class that first day with an open mind, thinking this could be great, life-changing. And it was life-changing.
Performing a monologue—memorizing the words and blocking the movements onstage—was frightening.
It was a big class with kids from older grades. As somebody who’d never performed before, I was terrified of doing anything in front of people.
Ingrid went to her teacher and asked for help and her teacher said yes. She came in early to practice but was shaking, just in front of one person—her teacher. “I had no idea how I’d do it to a class of twenty kids from mostly eighth grade.”
Finally, when the day for the performance arrived, she says that she came in extra early and was still shaking and sweating. “There were only three other girls in that class—everyone else was a boy. I don’t know why that made me even more nervous, but it did. Then she called my name to go.”
When I got up there, I’m like, “Whatever! It’s a class full of people you don’t know. They’re eighth graders. They’ll be gone next year. Just do it.” Then I did it.
Taking a drama class gave Ingrid a chance to challenge her fear of acting onstage. Because she had taken this positive risk in her life, she had less of a need to take a negative risk by going to the boy’s side of the camp.
She had tried to reason with her best friend not to do it, but her friend went anyway, Ingrid thinks, because she wanted to fit in with the popular girls. Ultimately, nothing happened because an adult was standing guard at the boys’ side of the camp. When the girls saw him, they ran back, but it could have turned out differently.
When we understand adolescent development, we can see a situation like this and their development in general in a different way— from a fearful, frightening time because kids do stupid risky things to a time when we can be offering them opportunities to take positive risks.
This is a somewhat new concept in adolescent research. In fact, in 2019, Natasha Duell of the University of North Carolina and Larry Steinberg of Temple University14 set out to review the literature on positive risks and found only three studies, compared with thousands of studies on negative risk-taking. Let me repeat that. There were only three studies! These three studies reveal that the same young people who are more likely to take positive risks are also more likely to take negative risks, possibly because they’re more drawn to risk in general.
In a subsequent study of positive risks with 223 adolescents ages sixteen through twenty,15 Duell and Steinberg defined positive risks as:
Activities, like taking a class where they know nothing about the subject or it seems challenging, like it was for Ingrid;
Actions, like standing up for what they believe is right even though someone might disagree; and
Relationships, like starting a friendship with someone new when they’re not sure how their other friends would react.
They found that both positive and negative risks are associated with higher sensation-seeking, but positive risk-takers aren’t likely to be impulsive. and they are more engaged in school.
In 2016, Eva Telzer of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill surveyed existing research on the limbic system that underlies reward sensitivity. While the older view is that this system is related to increased risk, Telzer emphasizes that this system can also be related to decreased risk-taking behavior.16
This finding promotes a more constructive view of adolescent development:
It challenges the widely supported model of adolescence as a period of heightened vulnerability by suggesting that traditionally negative behaviors like risk-taking could foster positive development if those risks are taken to benefit others!17
In a 2020 study of positive and negative risk-taking, Telzer, Eveline Crone and their colleagues added the notion of taking risks that help others.18 Their measure of risks that help others included:
Sacrificing the teens’ own goals to help a friend with their goals
Helping a friend find a solution to their problem
Giving money to a friend or a peer because they really needed it
These too are small, everyday things. Telzer and their team found that underlying both positive and negative risk-taking was a similar behavioral trait—it is not just sensation seeking but also fun-seeking.
Teenager are often drawn to right the wrongs of the world. Just think how wonderful it would be if we rethink risks and then offer more young people opportunities to take positive risks that are challenging, fun and at best make the world a better place.
Granville S. Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton, 1904).
Barbara R. Braams et al., “Longitudinal Changes in Adolescent Risk-Taking: A Comprehensive Study of Neural Responses to Rewards, Pubertal Development, and Risk-Taking Behavior,” Journal of Neuroscience 35, no. 18 (May 2015): 7226–7238, https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4764-14.2015.
Eveline A. Crone, interview by Ellen Galinsky, September 1, 2017.
Ronald E. Dahl, interview by Ellen Galinsky, October 11, 2017; Ronald E. Dahl, email message to Ellen Galinsky, January 24, 2023.
Jeffrey M. Spielberg et al., “Exciting Fear in Adolescence: Does Pubertal Development Alter Threat Processing?,” Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience 8 (April 2014): 87, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2014.01.004.
Valerie F. Reyna and Frank Farley, “Risk and Rationality in Adolescent Decision- Making: Implications for Theory, Practice, and Public Policy,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 7, no. 1 (2006): 1–44, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1529-1006.2006.00026.x.
Abigail A. Baird, Jonathan A. Fugelsang, and Craig Bennett, “What Were You Thinking? An fMRI Study of Adolescent Decision Making,” ResearchGate, January 2005, https://www.researchgate.net/profile/A_Baird/publication/268048958_What_were_you_thinking_An_fMRI_study_of_adolescent_decision_making/links/551a85680cf244e9a45882a5/What-were-you-thinking-An-fMRI-study-of-adolescent-decision-making.pdf.
Ronald E. Dahl, interview by Ellen Galinsky, October 11, 2017.
Spielberg et al., “Exciting Fear in Adolescence.”
Ronald E. Dahl, interview by Ellen Galinsky, October 11, 2017.
Natasha Duell and Laurence Steinberg, “Positive Risk Taking in Adolescence,” Child Development Perspectives 13, no. 1 (March 2019): 49, https://doi.org/10.1111/cdep.12310.
Eveline A. Crone, interview by Ellen Galinsky, September 1, 2017.
Ronald E. Dahl, interview by Ellen Galinsky, October 11, 2017.
Natasha Duell and Laurence Steinberg, “Positive Risk Taking in Adolescence,” Child Development Perspectives 13, no. 1 (March 2019): 48–52, https://doi.org/10.1111/cdep.12310.
Natasha Duell and Laurence Steinberg, “Differential Correlates of Positive and Negative Risk-Taking in Adolescence,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 49, no. 6 (June 2020): 1162–1178, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-020-01237-7.
Eva H. Telzer, “Dopaminergic Reward Sensitivity Can Promote Adolescent Health: A New Perspective on the Mechanism of Ventral Striatum Activation,” Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience 17 (2016): 57–67, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2015.10.010; Eva H. Telzer et al., “Ventral Striatum Activation to Prosocial Rewards Predicts Longitudinal Declines in Adolescent Risk Taking,” Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience 3 (2013): 45–52, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2012.08.004.
Eva H. Telzer, “Parenting and Peer Relationships/Positive Risks,” Adolescent Virtual Speaking Series, Bezos Family Foundation, February 11, 2021.
Neeltje E. Blankenstein et al., “Behavioral and Neural Pathways Supporting the Development of Prosocial and Risk-Taking Behavior Across Adolescence,” Child Development 91, no. 3 (2020): e665–e681, https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1111/cdev.13292.