A Rhetorical Analysis Of Beautiful Teenage Brains By Laurence Steinberg

In David Dodds’, article Beautiful Teenage Brains (2011) he explains how teenagers are more willing to take risks than adults because unlike adults, they value reward more heavily. He provides evidence of researchers like psychologist Laurence Steinberg and his findings at Temple University. Where Steinberg observed adolescents and adults separately play a video game and recorded the difference in their actions with and without an audience. He also uses information obtained by Casey a neuroscientist at the Weill Cornel Medical College. The author's purpose for writing this article is so adults especially parents can gain some knowledge of what it is that’s going on in teenager’s brains to be more aware along with the teenagers themselves.

His introduction starts off with comparing and contrasting teenagers and adults, not with an opinion of his own, but with words of Laurence Steinberg stating, “14-17-year olds are the biggest risk takers, although they reason their way through problems just as well as adult’s teens overestimate risk” (Dodds 1). He later moves on explaining why teens take more risk saying, “Teens take more risks not because they don’t understand the danger but because they weigh the risk versus rewards differently” (Dodds 1). The reason this happens is that unlike adults they value the outcome more so the rewards they get are more important to them than the danger. He talks about the experiment conducted by Steinberg where he has teenagers and adults play a video game that rewards you for taking a certain amount of risk but punishes you for taking too much (Dodds 1). Observing how these two groups acted without a crowd was the first step, then adding a crowd was the second step to try to understand the differences and what he found out was that, “teens would take twice as many risks when friends were watching but adults drove no differently” (Dodds 1). This is because teens want to feel “cool.” Finally, he ends with feedback from a neuroscientist at the Weill Cornel Medical College where she says teens can take the risk as far as