Teenagers, Friends and Bad Decisions
By Tara Parker-Pope

I thought this article was extremely interesting. Being a teenage driver, it caught my eye. Temple University did a study on 40 teenagers and adults to see if there are differences in brain activity when adolescents are alone rather than with their friends. This was interesting to me because personally, I believe I drive the same with or without friends. They concluded that there was no meaningful differences in risk taking, regardless of whether friends were watching them. Although there was no difference in risk taking, there was a difference in running yellow lights and crashing. 40% more yellow lights were ran and there was 60% more crashes when the kids knew their friends were watching them. That is crazy!! I don't think I would run a yellow light regardless of if my friends were watching or not. I feel like I am the same driver with or without passengers, but I guess I am bias. I thought this article was pretty interesting, and I enjoyed reading it.