Identify and describe three main reasons that adolescents engage in reckless or risky behavior.

Risk taking is a developmentally appropriate propensity as it serves autonomy-related goals.Contravention of adult norms by experimentation with deviant behaviors has always been part of the adolescent experience and is,in fact,statistically normative.Most adolescents will take risks,especially in the context of potentially rewarding outcomes,but they also learn from these adventures because of executive functions that continue to increase over the course of adolescence.Some adolescents engage in risky behavior without thinking,manifesting an underlying trait impulsivity that may continue from childhood and culminate in adoption of risky lifestyles.
Behaviors traditionally considered deviant are increasingly becoming part of the experimental repertoire of teens who are considered well adjusted.Hersch (1998)closely followed the activities of adolescents in a suburban high school for several years.She got to know the students well,becoming an "insider" in the world of adolescents,and was able to document the escalation of dangerous pursuits as a normal part of contemporary adolescent life."Behaviors once at the fringe of adolescent rebelliousness have not only permeated the mainstream culture of high school but are seeping into the fabric of middle school" .
Peers affect adolescents' risky behavior.We know that teenagers are more likely to take risks when they are in the company of their peers (Gardner & Steinberg,2005),but why is this the case? What power do peers exert,and how do they do it? A very careful look at peer influence processes on one risky behavior,smoking,can provide a window into this process.Liu and her colleagues (Liu,Zhao,Chen,Falk,& Albarracín,2017)reviewed 75 carefully done longitudinal studies from sixteen different countries to explore how peers affect smoking initiation and maintenance.Countries were evenly representative of those with more individualistic (e.g.U.S. )and more collectivist (e.g.Middle East)orientations.The findings reveal some key relationships.Adolescents were about twice as likely to begin smoking (initiation)if their friends smoked.Friends provide opportunity,models and means for risk-taking.
Cognitive features like adolescent egocentrism also play a role in risky behavior by supporting the fiction that risky behavior is exciting but not potentially catastrophic.Arnett (1992)implicates adolescents' weaknesses in reasoning about probability,a kind of formal operational thinking,as particularly important here.
It appears that some teens put themselves at risk because they are responding to triggers that cue big,short-term rewards;they do not do a cost/benefit analysis.This is what you would expect if the emotional system is activated without benefit of control from the cognitive system.However,even when adolescents feel vulnerable and do engage the cognitive control system,their approach to evaluating risk may keep them from being as risk averse as they should be.Reyna and Farley (2006)suggest that when probability analyses are new to adolescents,they are likely to do cost/benefit assessments that favor risk taking,just as Arnett suggests.They often perceive the relative costs,which are usually low probability,as well worth the potential rewards.