In our last Forensic View, we saw that adolescent cognition can be very different from that of adults. Part of this derives from developmental differences in the prefrontal cortex, but there are also psychological determinants of adolescent behavior that bring some teenagers to the attention of the criminal justice system.
Adolescents may be more predisposed to risky behaviors than are adults. Adolescents may take risks in cars that a typical adult would not. Adolescents may try dangerous drugs or engage in gang or casual violence that most adults would avoid.
If, as the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget suggested, adolescents, like adults, are capable of formal operations, of full abstract reasoning, then why are some adolescents predisposed to dangerous behaviors?
Many modern developmental psychologists disagree with Piaget’s ideas, and indeed there are many elements of his theories that are at least oversimplified. My own early research pointed out some of these difficulties with Piaget’s theories of childhood (e.g., Gollin & Sharps, 1987; Sharps & Gollin, 1985; Sharps, 1992). Yet Piaget’s concept of adolescence may prove particularly useful in dealing with the adolescent attraction to dangerous behaviors, including criminal behaviors. Piaget’s thinking included the idea of adolescent egocentrism.
This is not the egocentrism of early childhood, in which the child may not differentiate between self and surroundings, nor is it egocentrism in the nonscientific sense, in which a person may be overly self-involved. Rather, this is a form of self-concept that derives from the adolescent’s relative lack of adult experience. Since the adolescent has not yet lived long enough to have had the level of experience that simple longevity provides, he or she may see personal experiences as central and unique.
Consider pimples. Many adult readers of this post may notice a facial pimple. They squeeze it and go to work, oblivious of the tiny facial mark. But if an adolescent has a pimple, especially on the eve of the Big Dance or whatever, he or she may go to extraordinary lengths to disguise it—makeup, bandaids, Liquid Paper, or possibly left-over house paint. Adolescents are certain that everyone at the Big Whatever will be staring with laser-like focus at the facial blemish in question, and when they utterly fail to conceal it, they may in fact write poetry to their own acne ("Alas, such a great zit have I") in their angst and horror…
…and it’s only a zit.
Adults have experience. They know that nobody will notice their zits, because everybody else is too busy worrying about paying the rent. Or about their own zits. Whichever. The adolescent, however, lives in a world where the lack of adult experience may lead to a sense of being central and unique… and if you’re central and unique, everybody must be watching you. You are, in effect, the hero of your own epic.
We see heroes on TV all the time. TV cops. TV soldiers. They drive suicidally, they get hit in the head with guns, they are wounded but continue to fight on—they are effectively invulnerable. The hero never gets written out of the script.
Real cops and soldiers, of course, are often careful drivers, careful of the equipment they know may fail if pushed too hard. They get concussions, and wounds incapacitate them—but not on TV or other media. And media constitutes much of the experience to which adolescents have typically been exposed. Simply because they haven’t lived that long.
This means, for Piaget, that adolescent egocentrism may lead to a sense of adolescent invulnerability.
Adolescents aren’t really invulnerable, of course—but since they may see themselves as central and unique, in a way, they are heroes to themselves, and heroes are never written out of the script. Adolescents, as heroes, may be invulnerable. In their own minds.
And as an adolescent, a powerful narcotic can’t kill me if I’m invulnerable. I try it to prove I’m tough. Being in a gang isn’t dangerous for me—I join the Eastside Evil Hamsters, or whatever it is, and enter gang warfare enthusiastically, clutching a gun or a baseball bat. I engage in a fistfight with a larger adolescent in a concrete parking lot without fear—and fracture my skull on a parking barrier. This happened in Central California, and I would bet that the adolescent victim was surprised ("This can’t happen to me!"). But it happened.
Cognition Essential ReadsIt can’t happen to me. I don’t have a lot of real-world experience, so I feel central and unique, like a hero, so it can’t happen to me.
And then it does.
This is not true of all adolescents, of course. There are individual differences, in cognition and in the level of experience. I have personally talked with teenaged soldiers, veterans of infantry combat in the never-ending border brush-wars in parts of Southeast Asia, who exhibit no trace of adolescent egocentrism or invulnerability. They have experienced the death of other adolescents, blown to pieces by claymore mines suspended in barbed-wire entanglements, and they know damned well that “it” could happen to them. This awareness is resident in the mind, in mental response to experience, rather than in the inexorable dynamics of brain development.
And, believe it or not, that’s good.
If an adolescent predisposition to harmful behavior was completely “hard-wired” in human brain development, psychologists couldn’t do much about it. However, when we see that “kids” with experience of the horrors of infantry warfare may show no evidence of adolescent egocentrism or invulnerability, we know that at least part of these adolescent predispositions is psychological. We can therefore intervene productively with the at-risk adolescent, through the proper application of evidence-based psychoeducation and psychotherapy.
Psychologists are therefore at the forefront of the prevention of adolescent hazardous and criminal behavior. Evidence-based psychoeducation and psychotherapy may form a very real bulwark against these dangers. Solid research and application in the best ways to provide these interventions should therefore be a very high priority for research psychologists and clinicians alike.
Gollin, E.S., & Sharps, M.J. (1987). Visual perspective-taking in young children: Reduction of egocentric errors by induction of strategy. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 25, 435-437.
Sharps, M.J., & Gollin, E.S. (1985). Memory and the syntagmatic-paradigmatic shift: A developmental study of priming effects. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 23, 95-97.
Sharps, M.J. (1992). Facilitation of taxonomic recall in preschool children. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 30, 137-139.
