What’s the best way to influence a teenager?

What’s the best way to influence a teenager?

If you’re raising a teenager, you already know the challenge. And the dangers: careless driving, alcohol and drug abuse, unprotected sex. Helping them make good decisions – that is, helping them accurately assess the short- and long-term risks – seems a distant dream. But a recent study hints at a fresh approach that may influence their behavior. 

And the message is simple: focus on positive, not negative, outcomes. For example, if your teenager has taken up smoking, it’ll be more helpful to emphasize the benefits of stopping (“you’ll have more money, and better skin”) than the potential long-term negative consequences (“you’ll get lung cancer”).  Similarly, when trying to influence teens to cut back on alcohol and drug use, it may be more effective to emphasize improved sports performance than the long-term health risks.

In a press release, the authors explained: “. . . People have a natural tendency to ignore negative information when making decisions, a trait that may be particularly pertinent to young people, who tend to engage in more risky and dangerous behavior.” The study, conducted by researchers from University College London in the UK, was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and was funded the Wellcome Trust and the Royal Society.

The study’s findings, said study author Dr. Christina Moutsiana, “could help to explain the limited impact of campaigns targeted at young people to highlight the dangers of careless driving, unprotected sex, alcohol and drug abuse, and other risky behaviors."

Added co-author Dr. Tali Sharot: "Our findings show that if you want to get young people to better learn about the risks associated with their choices, you might want to focus on the benefits that a positive change would bring rather than hounding them with horror stories."

In the study’s introductory remarks, the authors provided this broad overview: “Human decision making is markedly influenced by beliefs of what might occur in the future. We form and update those beliefs based on information we receive from the world around us. However, even when we are presented with accurate information, cognitive biases and heuristics restrict our ability to make adequate adjustments to our prior beliefs.”

How was the study conducted? Participants, ages 9 to 26, were asked to assess the relative dangers of potential adverse life events (e.g., car accident, getting lung disease). The researchers then showed participants the actual statistics for these events and noted how each person adjusted their belief, after learning that the risk was higher or lower than they had estimated.  The bottom line: when it’s good news, our beliefs change; when it’s bad, news, not so much.  

Said the study authors: “The results show that younger participants were less likely to learn from information that shows them that the future is bleaker than expected. In other words, even when they know the risks, they have difficulties using that information if it's worse than they thought it would be. By contrast, the ability to learn from good news remained stable across all ages.”

While buoyed by the findings, Dr. Moutsiana offered this cautionary note.  She told Medical News Today that “while positive messages about not smoking might be more effective than negative messages, other factors, such as social pressure, need to be considered in why teenagers smoke.”  Added Moutsiana, in the Medical News Today article: “"We used events related more to physical danger. . . . It is possible that events that relate more to social pressure might have a different effect. Therefore it needs to be examined in control experiments."

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