17.4 Taking Risks

Many emerging adults bravely, or foolishly, risk their lives. Extreme risk-taking is not usually considered pathological, but accidents, homicides, and suicides are the three leading causes of death among people aged 15 to 25—killing more of them than all diseases combined. This is true even in nations where infectious diseases and malnutrition are rampant. It is also true historically: Young males have always experienced what demographers call an accident hump at about age 20 (Goldstein, 2011).

Destructive risks are numerous, including having sex without a condom, driving without a seat belt, carrying a loaded gun, and abusing drugs. The attraction of an adrenaline rush is one reason people commit crimes or gamble (Cosgrave, 2010). The worst results of risk-taking are serious injury or death, but arrest is also common. About one-third of emerging adults in the United States have been arrested at least once, usually for drug-related offenses and usually between ages 18 and 21 (Brame et al., 2012).

The reasons for such risk-taking are both social and biological. Although the arrest statistics above include both sexes, the rate of risk-taking is much higher in males than females, again for social and biological reasons.

Anywhere In some ways, life in China is radically different from life elsewhere, but universals are also apparent. This emerging-adult couple poses in front of the Beijing stadium. Any risk-taking here?

© ULANA SWITUCHA/AGE FOTOSTOCK

The social reason is that young men vie for status among other males and for female attention by showing off and destroying other young men, sometimes figuratively and sometimes literally. It seems hard for them to react to an insult from another man, or even an accidental push, by walking away. That is one explanation for the statistics about homicide, since both the victim and the perpetrator are usually emerging adult males (see Figure 17.2). Increased competition for mates may be the reason that the violent death rate of emerging adults in China seems to be increasing, an unexpected consequence of the one-child policy that produced more young men than young women.

Seven Serious Years It may seem as if two adult groups include almost as many offenders and victims as the green emerging adult group, but notice the age span. The adult groups are ten and fifteen years. A person is more than twice as likely to be raped, murdered, or seriously wounded (usually by an emerging adult) at age 20 than age 40).

Source: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2011.
Full Cite: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics. “Homicide Rates in the United States, 1980–2008.” Table 1. http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf

The biological reason is that young men’s hormones, energy, and brain development, which once propelled them to engage in strenuous physical work, now need another outlet. The most popular outlets are sports such as football, wrestling, and the newer extreme sports. One example of an extreme sport is freestyle motocross—riding a motorcycle off a ramp, catching “big air,” doing tricks while falling, and hoping to land upright.

Many young adults are fans or participants of extreme sports; they find golf, bowling, and so on too tame (Breivik, 2010). As the authors of one study of dirtbikers (off-road motorcyclists) explain, particularly from ages 18 to 24 there is a “developmental lag between impulse control and cognitive evaluation of risk” (Dwane, 2012, p. 62). Thrill overwhelms reason.

The conclusion that risk-taking is biological, wired into the male of the species, is suggested by research on another primate, the orangutan. As they leap from branch to branch, male orangutans are more likely than females to grab onto flimsy branches that might break—even though males weigh much more, which means the risk of falling is much greater (Myatt & Thorpe, 2011).

For people, think about this example. A 22-year-old named Travis Pastrana won the 2006 X Games MotoX Freestyle event with a double back flip because, as he explained, “The two main things are that I’ve been healthy and able to train at my fullest, and a lot of guys have had major crashes this year” (Higgins, 2006, D7).

Dangerous Pleasure Here Travis Pastrana prepares to defy death once again as a NASCAR driver. Two days later, his first child was born, and two months later, he declared his race record disappointing. At age 30 he quit, declaring on Facebook that he would devote himself to his wife and family. Is that maturation, fatherhood, or failure?

JOHN HARRELSON/GETTY IMAGES

“Major crashes” are part of every sport Pastrana likes. Four years later, in 2010, he set a new record for leaping through big air in an automobile, speeding off a ramp on the California shore and over the ocean, to a barge more than 250 feet out. He crashed into a barrier on the boat, emerging, ecstatic and unhurt, to the thunderous cheers of thousands of other young adults (Roberts, 2010).

In 2011, a broken ankle temporarily stopped him, but soon he was back risking his life to the acclaim of his cohort, winning races rife with flips and other hazards. In 2013, after some more serious injuries, he said he was “still a couple of surgeries away” from being able to race on a motorcycle, but he decided to race at NASCAR. (But see caption on the left.)

Pastrana is far from the only one attracted to extreme sports. These events attract thousands of adults, who travel long distances and spend large sums of money to jump off famous bridges (base jumping, with parachute), climb the sheer or icy sides of mountains, ride dangerous waves (on a surf board or body surfing), and so on. Such adventure has become a significant niche of tourism (Allman et al., 2009).

Drug Abuse

Although risk-taking has many benefits, the risk-taking impulse sometimes goes awry. The most studied example is substance abuse, recognized as a psychological disorder in the DSM-5.

Drug abuse occurs whenever a person uses a drug that is harmful to physical, cognitive, or psychosocial well-being. Given what is known about health and tobacco, even occasional smoking can be abuse. Some drug use—legal or not—is harmless and is therefore not abuse. However, many abusers think they are merely users, so this distinction is tricky. Denial is common, and harmful, in abusers.

Getting High Climbing may be the most sober way to enjoy the thrills of emerging adulthood. The impulse to do so is universal, illustrated with two examples here: an artificial rock-climbing wall in Somerville, Massachusetts and an Art of Motion festival in Santorini, Greece.

ESSDRAS M SUAREZ/THE BOSTON GLOBE VIA GETTY IMAGES
PREDRAG VUCKOVIC/RED BULL VIA GETTY IMAGES

Drug abuse can lead to drug addiction, a condition of dependence in which the absence of a drug causes intense cravings to satisfy a need. The need may be either physical (e.g., to stop the shakes, settle one’s stomach, or sleep) or psychological (e.g., to quiet anxiety or lift depression). Withdrawal symptoms are the telltale signs of addiction.

Although cigarettes and alcohol can be as addictive and destructive as illegal drugs, from an emerging-adult perspective, part of the lure of illegal drugs is that they are against the law: There is a risk-taking thrill in buying, carrying, and using, knowing that arrest and prison are dangers. No wonder illegal drug use peaks between ages 18 to 25 and then declines more sharply than use of cigarettes and alcohol (see Figure 17.3).

Too Old for That As you can see, emerging adults are the biggest substance abusers, but illegal drug use drops much faster than cigarette smoking or binge drinking. This graph depicts drug use at one time in one nation (the United States in 2008), but these trends are universal.

Source: SAMHSA, 2009.

It may be surprising, however, that drug abuse—particularly of alcohol and marijuana, not cocaine or heroin—is more common among college students than among their peers who are not in college. The overall binge-drinking rate among U.S. college students in 2010 was 37 percent, compared to 28 percent for their age-mates who were not in college (Johnston et al., 2011). That high rate of binge drinking arises from the same drive as extreme sports or other risks—with the same possible consequence (death).

Being with peers, especially for college men, seems to encourage many kinds of drug abuse. The opposite is also true. In fact, the emerging adults least likely to abuse drugs are women who are not in college, living with their parents. Patterns of use, abuse, and addiction are also affected by historical trends; they vary from time to time and from nation to nation. However, the overall trend is curvilinear everywhere, rising during emerging adulthood and then falling with maturity.

What the F—Happened? That’s what 30-year-old Reggie Colby asks. He says he had a happy childhood, tried heroin at age 18, married and dropped out of college, joined the army, and became addicted after an injury in Afghanistan. Since then he has been dishonorably discharged, divorced, and estranged from his daughter. Now he is sheltered by an overpass in Camden, New Jersey, two days after serving time in jail for stealing food. “What happened?” is the right question. Did the stress of emerging adulthood have anything to do with it?

ANDREW BURTON/GETTY IMAGES

With drugs as with many other risks, the immediate benefits obscure the eventual costs. Most young adults use alcohol to reduce social anxiety—a problem for many emerging adults as they enter college, start a new job, speak to strangers, or embark on a romance. It does not occur to them that they might become alcoholics. Similarly, more than half of all college students and more than half of all U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan use “energy drinks,” with high doses of caffeine, to stay awake. They are unaware that such drinks correlate with sexual assault and dangerous driving, and that high doses of caffeine can be lethal (Sepkowitz, 2013).

Indeed, no matter what the drug, crossing the line between use and abuse does not always ring alarms in the user. This was apparent in a study of ketamine use among young adults in England, who justified its use—“a bargain”—even after signs of addiction were apparent (Moore & Measham, 2008). (Ketamine has medical uses, but it is often used as a recreational drug.) A complication with ketamine and many other drugs is that they are potent mood changers: many depressed or anxious emerging adults self-medicate, treating one psychological problem by creating another (Duman & Aghajanian, 2012).

Although family members often try to stop drug abuse, intervention is least likely during emerging adulthood. During these years, parents keep their distance and drug users are unlikely to marry, so abuse can continue unchecked for years.

Yet longitudinal data show that early drug abuse impairs later life in many ways. Those who use drugs heavily in high school are less likely to go to college, and those who begin heavy drug use in college are less likely to earn a degree, find a good job, or sustain a romance (Johnston et al., 2009). Drug abuse during early adulthood may lead to serious physical and mental ailments later in life. Longitudinal research comes to this conclusion in every nation. For instance, a 21-year study in Scotland found that young-adult men who drank heavily doubled their risk of dying by middle age (Hart et al., 1999).

Social Norms

One discovery from the study of human development that might help the health of emerging adults is the power of social norms, which are customs for usual behavior within a particular society. Social norms exert a particularly strong influence on college students. They want the approval of their new peers; social norms matter.

Some social norms work well for emerging adults. This is evident from rates of obesity, since young adults watch their weight in order to be attractive to others, and from rates of exercise, since young adults join sports teams and gyms partly because norms encourage it. However, some norms push emerging adults in destructive directions.

In Chapter 15 you read about the logical error that humans often make called base rate neglect—the tendency to overlook or ignore the frequency of a specific factor when making a judgment or decision, even in the face of overwhelming odds. Compounding this fallacy is something called the availability error, which occurs when people remember most easily the events or people who make a dramatic impact, not the quiet people or everyday events that might make a quieter impact (Kahneman, 2011).

An example from college students is that they notice the flashy, noisy, unusual classmate, and might mistakenly assume such behavior is far more typical than it is. You probably have noticed such prejudice in other people, who judge everyone of a certain ethnic or national background because of what one member of that group has done. In the same ways, base rate neglect and availability error may lead to risk-taking.

Emerging adults are immersed in social settings (colleges, parties, concerts, sports events) where risk-takers are admired. They notice the risk-takers—such as the classmate who brags that he waited until the last minute and wrote a term paper in one night or the star athlete who did something dangerous and unexpected. Because of base rate neglect, they may conclude that such people are not unusual. That might make them overestimate the prevalence of drug use and then follow that example.

For instance, in one experiment, several small groups of college students were offered as much alcohol as they wanted while they socialized with one another. In some groups, one student was secretly recruited in advance to drink heavily; in others, one student was assigned to drink very little; in a third condition, there was no student confederate. In those groups with a designated drinker, participants followed the norm set by the heavy drinker, increasing the average amount of alcohol they consumed, but their drinking was unaffected by the light drinker (reported in W. R. Miller & Carroll, 2006).

The power of social norms as well as the “liquid courage” of alcohol is evident at concerts and sports events when a crowd of people suddenly moves so quickly that some are crushed and trampled, or when a new extreme sport becomes popular. For instance, a small group of young-adult British men formed the Dangerous Sports Club. They told the press they would try bungee jumping on April Fools’ Day in 1979. On that day, they all backed off, telling the press it was a foolish joke. But later, after drinking, one was filmed bungee jumping. Thousands saw the video; then bungee jumping became a fad.

A similar story holds for other extreme sports—hang gliding, ice climbing, pond swooping, base jumping—that were never imagined until one daredevil young adult inspired thousands of others. Media coverage (especially photos and videos) and social networking create a rush, and people follow the trend without thinking about dangers.

An understanding of the perceptions and needs of emerging adults, as well as the realization that college students abuse drugs even more than others their age, has led to a promising effort to reduce alcohol abuse on college campuses. This is the social norms approach, using surveys to make students aware of the true prevalence of various behaviors.

About half the colleges in the United States have surveyed alcohol use on their campuses and reported the results. Almost always, students not only overestimate how much the average student drinks, but they also underestimate how their peers feel about the loud, late talking and other behaviors of drunk students (C. M. Lee et al., 2010). Ironically, those who exaggerate the quantity of drinking are often those who are relatively isolated and depressed. They then drink to be like everyone else, and they only become more depressed.

In general, when survey results are reported and college students realize that most of their classmates study hard, avoid binge drinking, refuse drugs, and are sexually abstinent, faithful, or protected, they are more likely to follow these social norms. This is especially true if the survey is conducted and reported on the Web (not a paper questionnaire with written responses) and if the students are not living with many heavy drinkers (Ward & Gryczynski, 2009). In the latter case, the social norm of their immediate residence may be more powerful than information about students overall.

Recent research continues to find that emerging adults are influenced by perceived norms, including not only how much people drink but also by what the negative consequences might be. The relationship is not always simple—some people and some ideas are much more influential than others—but the general effect of social norms has been found again and again (Wardell & Read, 2013).

An interesting caveat is that when people are drinking and using drugs with other people who are drinking and using drugs, they tend to perceive the positive effects more than the negative ones (Brie et al., 2011). They do not realize that they are keeping others awake; they do not know that someone who has passed out may need medical attention; they think they can drive, or think, or walk when they cannot. That may explain why people who are trying to stop a habit need to avoid people and contexts that might encourage the habit they want to break. [Lifespan Link: The challenges of breaking a habit are discussed in A View from Science, Chapter 20.]

Implications of Risks and Norms

One of my older students, John, told the class about his experience as an emerging adult. At first, he spoke with amused pride. But by the end of his narrative, he was troubled, partly because John was now the father of a little boy he adored, and he realized that his son might become an equally reckless young man.

John told us that, during a vacation break in his first year of college, he and two of his male friends were sitting, bored, on a beach. One friend proposed swimming to an island, which was barely visible on the horizon. They immediately set out. After swimming for a long time, John realized that he was only about one-third of the way there, that he was tired, that the island was merely an empty spit of sand, and that he would have to swim back. He turned around and swam to shore. The friend who made the proposal eventually reached the island. The third boy became exhausted and almost drowned (a passing boat rescued him).

What does this episode signify about the biosocial development of emerging adults? It is easy to understand why John started swimming. Male ego, camaraderie, boredom, and the overall context made this an attractive adventure. Young men like to be active, feeling their strong arms, legs, and lungs.

Like John, many adults fondly remember past risks. They forget the friends who caught STIs, who had abortions or unwanted births, who became addicts or alcoholics, or who died young; they ignore the fact that their younger siblings and children might do the same. Emerging adulthood is a strong and healthy age, but not without serious risks. Why swim to a distant island? More thinking is needed, as described in the next chapter.