Information, risk perceptions, and smoking choices of youth Frank Sloan & Alyssa Platt Published online: 27 January 2011 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 Abstract Conventional wisdom maintains that youths take risks because they underestimate probabilities of harm. Presumably if they knew the true probabilities, they would behave differently. We used the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to assess whether differences between subjective and objective probabilities that an adverse outcome to self will occur are systematically related to a harmful behavior, initiating smoking. We find that youths are generally pessimistic about probabilities of their own deaths and being violent crime victims. After smoking initiation, youths increase subjective probabilities of death by more than the objective increase in mortality risk, implying recognition of potential harms. Virtually all 12–14 year-olds know that smoking causes heart disease. The minority who believe that smoking causes AIDS are less likely to become smokers; i.e., risk misperceptions deter rather than cause smoking initiation. Messages designed to deter smoking initiation should stress other disadvantages of smoking than just probabilities of harm. Keywords Subjective beliefs . Smoking . Optimism bias JEL Classification D81 . I12 Cigarette smoking in the U.S. has declined among adults in recent decades but not among adolescents (Carvajal et al. 2000; Lantz 2003; Nelson et al. 2008). The lack of decline in adolescent smoking is a concern, especially since most smokers initiate the habit in adolescence and early adulthood. 1 A widely held view is that youths engage in risky activities, even those for which the adverse effects to self are well known, because they believe that they are invulnerable. 2 They presumably underestimate the probabilities of negative J Risk Uncertain (2011) 42:161–193 DOI 10.1007/s11166-010-9111-z 1 See e.g., Lundborg and Lindgren (2004) for documentation. 2 According to Millstein and Halpern-Felsher (2002), people have speculated about the lack of competence in recognizing and assessing risk since the time of Aristotle. F. Sloan (*) : A. Platt Department of Economics, Duke University, Box 90097, Durham, NC 27708-0097, USA e-mail: fsloan@duke.edu