Why young people might not heed your warnings

Campaigns to get young people to stop smoking may find more success by focusing on the positive benefits, such as having more money and better skin, rather than emphasising negative outcomes like increased disease risk, according to UCL research. The study reveals that young people have greater difficulty in learning from bad news and using it to interpret their risk of future events. This might explain why they often do not respond to warnings. We all make decisions based on what we believe may happen in the future as a consequence of our actions. We change our beliefs and choices based on information we gather from the world around us. However, people have a natural tendency to ignore negative information when making decisions, a trait that may be particularly pertinent to young people, who tend to engage in more risky and dangerous behaviour. Researchers at UCL asked volunteers aged between nine and 26 to estimate how likely they think they are to personally experience a range of adverse life events, such as being involved in a car accident or getting lung disease.