[A press release via Jezebel.com]: University of Minnesota Medical School researcher Iris Borowsky, M.D., Ph.D., and colleagues found that one in seven adolescents believe that it is highly likely that they will die before age 35, and this belief predicted that the adolescents’ would engage in risky behaviors … Those who engaged in risky behaviors such as illicit drug use, suicide attempts, fighting, or unsafe sexual activity in the first year were more likely in subsequent years to believe they would die at a young age. Vice versa, those who predicted that they’d die young during the first interview were more likely in later years to begin engaging in these same risky behaviors and have poor health outcomes.
8 Reader Comments
9:48 am
Here’s the Jezebel link, FYI, with some additional info.
10:48 am
That’s a confusing bit of research.
And a kid will tell you anything.
“I think I’m gonna die young.”
“OK, I’ll write that down.”
11:00 am
You don’t think social scientists have ways of controlling for that kind of thing rat?
11:04 am
So this notion that one will die young…
Culturally taught? Learned from parents?
11:06 am
empirical observation?
11:08 am
Self-fulfilling prophecy.
11:15 am
Perhaps.
Seems like a fairly safe study to take on.
11:30 am
Back when I was 25, the idea of reaching 30 was difficult. It had become culturally ingrained in us (the Boomers) that over-30 meant a person was over-the-hill.
Actually, life got more fun after 30.
How much of this inner turmoil and inner angst is the result of current event?
I’m amazed at all the carp we lived thru and, most of the time, without ever thinking the world would really end: Cuban missile crisis (only 4+ hours to nuclear war we late found out), Vietnam, 6-Day War, political assassinations and attempts (JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm X, Geo. Wallace, Ford), oil embargo, Yom Kippur War, Fall of Saigon (huge loss of face for the US), rampant inflation, double-digit interest rates, etc., etc.