As many adults can attest, teenage behavior is often characterized by impulsivity and impatience. From a psychological perspective, this behavior can result either from disregard for future outcomes or from an over-emphasis on immediate rewards. Prior to the publication of a new study in PNAS, it wasn’t entirely clear which of these two components underlies developmental changes. This new paper examines impatience in teens and finds that it’s mostly a result of teens’ disregard for future outcomes. In their conclusions, the researchers state that increased control and increased integration of future-oriented thought are direct contributors to the changes in behavior that (hopefully) occur as we age.
For this study, 50 participants between the ages of eight and 25 were recruited from the paid participant pool of the Stanford University Psychology Department. Participants completed a task in which they were asked to repeatedly assess their preferences for either a smaller monetary reward that would come sooner or a larger monetary reward that would come later. This task was performed before and during brain scans with a functional MRI machine, which allows researchers to see which parts of the brain were most active.
Analysis of the decisions that participants made revealed that age had an effect on the way that they chose their rewards and revealed an expected decline in impatience for seeing a reward as teenagers grew older. But the researchers could actually separate the two effects. They found that propensity for future orientation increased significantly with age, whereas sensitivity to immediate rewards did not. In other words, our increase in self-control comes from an increased ability to focus on the future rather than a drop in the demand for immediate rewards.
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