It's A Rush: Antisocial Decision-Making

Question 1: What is the theory being tested in this study?
The article chosen is entitled “It’s a Rush”: Psychosocial content of antisocial decision making”. The authors used the setup of the past and recent juvenile justice system as the background to this study. In particular, the study is based off of the conditions of trying adults in comparison to adolescents. Other theories suggest that the decision performance of adolescents lags behind their cognitive capacity due to psychosocial influences such as peer pressure thereby impeding on their antisocial decision making. Overall it has been found that there is a positive association between vulnerability to psychosocial influences and, antisocial decision making and delinquency. This study

In other words, the authors of this article predicted the answer to be yes for both questions presented with regards to the purpose of the study.
Question 3: How are they proposing to test these hypotheses?
For this study, three samples were evaluated: adolescents, young adults and adults. The subjects used for this study were as follows; the adolescents were high school students, the young adults were undergraduate students and, the adults were the parents of these undergraduate students. Interclass correlations (ICCs) were run on the depend variables to ensure that there were no major relations between the young adult and adult samples. Other steps such as excluding high school students that were 18 years of age and other particular background variables within the study were taken to ensure the best results possible. Information such as gender, race and level of education was collected and considered. However, of all the variables the level of education was not included as a control variable because of its strong correlation with the age of each individual. The participants were asked to answer scenario based questions from the Youth Decision Making Questionnaire (YDMQ) and then the responses were sorted in terms of psychosocial content

The study ultimately proved to be an extension on research that has been previously carried out and published. It was found that for adolescents, there was greater psychosocial content involved in the antisocial decision making when compared to adults for all four of the indices used which are anger, peer pressure, short term benefits and sensation seeking. However, it was also found to be the same for young adults in comparison to adults as well. Furthermore, moral reasoning was found to have increased with age and adolescents showed signs of decreased fear when compared to the young adults and the adults. In conclusion, the results show that adolescents were in fact influenced by psychosocial variables more than the adults. The study found a greater effect of psychosocial content on self-report criminal behaviour among the adolescent group than the adults but the difference was not as significant between the young adults and the adults. In terms of other more specific aspects such as sensation seeking, there was not much of a difference between adolescents and young adults. This was actually found to be a differing result to past