Question
Peer Pressure Has a Positive Side
Annie Murphy Paul
2015
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Parents of teenagers often view their children's friends with something like suspicion. They worry that the adolescent peer group has the power to prod its members into behavior that is foolish and even dangerous. Such wariness is well founded: statistics show, for example, that a teenage driver with a same-age passenger in the car is at higher risk of a fatal crash than an adolescent driving alone or with an adult.
In a seminal 2005 study, psychologist Laurence Steinberg of Temple University and his co-author, psychologist Margo Gardner, then at Temple, divided 306 people into three age groups: young adolescents, with a mean age of 14; older adolescents, with a mean age of 19; and adults, aged 24 and older. Subjects played a computerized driving game in which the player must avoid crashing into a wall that materializes, without warning, on the roadway. Steinberg and Gardner randomly assigned some participants to play alone or with two same-age peers looking on.
Older adolescents scored about 50 percent higher on an index of risky driving when their peers were in the room—and the driving of early adolescents was fully twice as reckless when other young teens were around. In contrast, adults behaved in similar ways regardless of whether they were on their own or observed by others. “The presence of peers makes adolescents and youth, but not adults, more likely to take risks,” Steinberg and Gardner concluded.
Yet in the years following the publication of this study, Steinberg began to believe that this interpretation did not capture the whole picture. As he and other researchers examined the question of why teens were more apt to take risks in the company of other teenagers, they came to suspect that a crowd's influence need not always be negative. Now some experts are proposing that we should take advantage of the teen brain's keen sensitivity to the presence of friends and leverage it to improve education.
Question 2
Write: What is the main idea of paragraphs 2-4?
Complete the sentence starter in the space below:
Psychologists Laurence Steinberg and Margo Gardner discovered that… However,…
Annie Murphy Paul
2015
Font Size
Medium
Parents of teenagers often view their children's friends with something like suspicion. They worry that the adolescent peer group has the power to prod its members into behavior that is foolish and even dangerous. Such wariness is well founded: statistics show, for example, that a teenage driver with a same-age passenger in the car is at higher risk of a fatal crash than an adolescent driving alone or with an adult.
In a seminal 2005 study, psychologist Laurence Steinberg of Temple University and his co-author, psychologist Margo Gardner, then at Temple, divided 306 people into three age groups: young adolescents, with a mean age of 14; older adolescents, with a mean age of 19; and adults, aged 24 and older. Subjects played a computerized driving game in which the player must avoid crashing into a wall that materializes, without warning, on the roadway. Steinberg and Gardner randomly assigned some participants to play alone or with two same-age peers looking on.
Older adolescents scored about 50 percent higher on an index of risky driving when their peers were in the room—and the driving of early adolescents was fully twice as reckless when other young teens were around. In contrast, adults behaved in similar ways regardless of whether they were on their own or observed by others. “The presence of peers makes adolescents and youth, but not adults, more likely to take risks,” Steinberg and Gardner concluded.
Yet in the years following the publication of this study, Steinberg began to believe that this interpretation did not capture the whole picture. As he and other researchers examined the question of why teens were more apt to take risks in the company of other teenagers, they came to suspect that a crowd's influence need not always be negative. Now some experts are proposing that we should take advantage of the teen brain's keen sensitivity to the presence of friends and leverage it to improve education.
Question 2
Write: What is the main idea of paragraphs 2-4?
Complete the sentence starter in the space below:
Psychologists Laurence Steinberg and Margo Gardner discovered that… However,…
Answers
GPT-4o mini
Psychologists Laurence Steinberg and Margo Gardner discovered that the presence of peers significantly increases risky driving behaviors among adolescents, with younger teens exhibiting even more reckless behavior than older teens. However, Steinberg later suggested that the influence of peers might not always be negative and could be harnessed positively, particularly in educational contexts.