Teens are unusually cool with ambiguity
Most teenagers engage in unsafe behaviors because of a comfort with the ambiguous, not because they have a taste for risk, a new study from NYU suggests.
“What we found was that when risks were precisely stated, adolescents avoided them at least as much, and sometimes more, than adults,” adds co-author Ifat Levy, an assistant professor of comparative medicine and of neurobiology at the Yale School of Medicine, a co-author of the study.
“Adolescents were, however, much more tolerant for ambiguity: when risks were not precisely known, they were more willing to accept them compared to adults. Biologically this makes a lot of sense: young organisms need to be open to the unknown in order to gain information about their world.”
Full story at Futurity.
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