Judgment and Decision Making in Adolescence

In this article, we review the most important findings to have emerged during the past 10 years in the study of judgment and decision making (JDM) in adolescence and look ahead to possible new directions in this burgeoning area of research. Three inter-related shifts in research emphasis are of particular importance and serve to organize this review. First, research grounded in normative models of JDM has moved beyond the study of age differences in risk perception and toward a dynamic account of the factors predicting adolescent decisions. Second, the field has seen widespread adoption of dual-process models of cognitive development that describe 2 relatively independent modes of information processing, typically contrasting an analytic (cold) system with an experiential (hot) one. Finally, there has been an increase in attention to the social, emotional, and self-regulatory factors that influence JDM. This shift in focus reflects the growing influence of findings from developmental neuroscience, which describe a pattern of structural and functional maturation that may set the stage for a heightened propensity to make risky decisions in adolescence.