U.S. Teens Portrayed as Violent, Unethical

Robert Roy Britt, Editorial Director, LiveScience.com

More than a quarter of all U.S. teenagers think violent

behavior is at least sometimes acceptable, and one in

five say they behaved violently toward another person in

the past year, according to a new poll.

Most said self-defense (87 percent) or helping a friend 

(73 percent) were acceptable justifications for violence.

But 34 percent said revenge was a sufficient motivation.

The poll was conducted by Opinion Research for the

school-support organization Junior Achievement and the

tax and consulting firm Deloitte, LLC.

More than three-fourths of the respondents who said

violence is acceptable also consider themselves ethically

prepared to enter the work force. That sticks in the craw

of David W. Miller, director of the Princeton University

Faith & Work Initiative and a professor of business ethics

at Princeton University.

In an analysis released with the poll, Miller suggests the

survey results bode ill for the future workforce. It's not

clear that's the case, however. In fact, teens are known

to think differently than adults because their brains have

not matured. Scans reveal that teens' ethics change

dramatically as they grow into adulthood. Or do they?

'Highly troubling'

The survey of 750 young people (half boys, half girls) age

12 to 17 was conducted between Oct. 9 and Oct. 12. The

results were released this week.

"It is highly troubling that so many teenagers have a self-

image of ethical readiness and the confidence in their

ability to make good decisions later in life, yet at the

same time freely admit to current behavior that is highly

unethical," Miller said in a statement accompanying the

poll results.

"Employers will have their hands full if a quarter of teens

grow up still willing to resort to violence and other

unethical behavior when it comes to making decisions

about how to settle differences, protect their interests or

get ahead," said Miller, who is also author of "God at

Work: The History and Promise of the Faith at Work

Movement (Oxford University Press, 2006).

There are potential problems with Miller's take on the poll,

however.

Teens lie

First, polls can be greatly skewed based on how

questions are framed and by how honestly people

respond. Adults are known to lie through their teeth in sex

surveys, for example. In one Web-based survey, women

claimed on average 8.6 lifetime sexual partners. The men

claimed 31.9. Some researchers doubt those disparate

figures are accurate. A follow-up survey found about

5 percent of each sex said they lied and more than

10 percent said they knew their answer wasn't accurate.

It's reasonable to assume that teenagers, who are prone

to prevaricate and whose brains are known to be not fully

formed, might fib, knowingly or unknowingly, about heavy

questions on topics like violence.

In a telephone interview today, Miller agreed to this

possibility, but he cites another question in the poll aimed

at getting around this issue: Some 41 percent of the

respondents reported a friend had behaved violently

toward someone else in the past year. That response,

Miller said, is less likely to involve lies.

Words vs. actions

Second, it's also quite possible few of the teens would

actually act on the hypothetical responses they gave.

LiveScience's Bad Science Columnist Ben Radford

points out that a study of teen virginity pledges, as an

example, found that nearly 90 percent of them broke their

vow. Another study at Harvard University found that more

than half of adolescents who make signed, public pledges

on things like virginity and violence give up on their

pledges within one year. And in what will not sound ironic

to any parent, three-fourths of the teens who pledged not

to have sex but did, later denied having made the pledge.

Miller questions whether lying about sexual activity, which

may be driven more by hormones than reason, translates

to the poll on violence. "We lie about some things, and at

the same time, we tell the truth about other things," he

said. "Lying in one category does not mean logically we'll

lie in others."

Miller also said, regarding words vs. deeds, that today's

teens are exposed to exponentially more violence on TV,

in video games, in movies, on the Internet, and even in

popular extreme sports like kick boxing, "making violent

acts seem normative. That's something prior generations

didn't have."

Teens grow up

Third, without a similar version of this teen violence poll

having been done decades ago, it is impossible to know

whether Miller's basic concern - that the state of a

teenage mind on such things as intentions and ethics

actually predicts adult behavior - holds any water. In fact,

science has plenty of evidence to suggest the opposite.

A 2006 study involving questions about how participants

(teens and adults) would react to certain situations was,

importantly, coupled with brain scans while they

answered.

Scientists found that teens, frankly, don't care about

people's feelings as much as adults do. The part of the

brain associated with higher-level thinking isn't fully

operational.

Specifically, teens were found to barely use the part of

the brain known to be involved in thinking about other

people's emotions when considering a course of action.

"Thinking strategies change with age," said neuroscientist

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore of the University College

London. "The fact that teenagers underuse the medial

pre-frontal cortex when making decisions about what to

do, implies that they are less likely to think about how

they themselves and how other people will feel as a result

of their intended action."

The idea of violence in a teen's mind, then, is not likely

viewed the same as in an adult mind.

Miller, too, allows that teens change. "Let's hope so!" he

said. "All teenagers in all generations go through a stage

of boundary testing ... and figuring out where the right

ethical boundaries are," he told me. "At some level there's

nothing new in that. On the other hand, the data is pretty

compelling."

Coupled with other data that suggest today's teenagers,

and the millennials before them, "tend to embrace ethical

relativism, that even as they mature into adults, they will

have cultivated habits and brains that are capable of

rationalizing behavior that serves their interests, 

irrespective of traditional societal expectations or

understandings of right and wrong," he said.

"I wouldn't overreact" to the survey," Miller said, "but I

think to under-react and interpret it as natural youth

boundary testing is naive too."

Unethical adults

Lastly, Miller worries not just about violence but that

teens will carry their ethical relativism into adulthood. On

that point he might be right: A lot of adults have lousy

ethics. One need look no farther than the Wall Street

Ponzi scheme of Bernard Madoff or the New England

Patriots head football coach Bill Belichick's cheating last

year for proof.

Bad ethics is not just the purview of the powerful, either.

Nearly 20 percent of U.S. adults think cheating on taxes 

is morally acceptable or is not a moral issue, according to

a Pew Research Center survey in 2006. About

10 percent think it's okay to cheat on a spouse.

Cheating is not the same as violence, of course, but if

the issue is modern teen ethics, then adults who

supposedly grew up in a better era are not necessarily a

model to which today's teens ought to aspire. 

·           Strange Humans: Why We ... 

·           Why Teens are Lousy at Chores 

·           Why We Lie 

轉貼自︰

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20081219/sc_livescience/usteensportrayedasviolentunethical;_ylt=AvtXRIeK5IbL3lSHNIcPLmkbr7sF