It is well established that teenage drivers have higher accident rates than do older drivers. One of the reasons is that they have particularly high rates of driving while intoxicated. Currently, there is considerable educational information available at schools, in the media, from parents, and from other sources describing how dangerous it is to drive after drinking alcohol. Nevertheless, despite this awareness of the risk of driving while drunk, many teenagers still engage in this behavior.

Why would a teenager engage in a behavior that he or she knows places him or her at high risk for a driving accident? One might think that the rate of driving while intoxicated would be close to 0, given how strongly teenagers are advised not to do so. A school principal comes to you, as a young human development scholar, and asks for some ideas about why drunk driving occurs and what the school can do about it. In this paper, use the theories covered in Chapter 1 of your Human Development textbook to consider why driving while intoxicated occurs and to provide advice to the school principal.

To address the principal’s request, analyze why drunk driving occurs using three of the following theories from your textbook, lesson, and two outside references:

Freud’s psychosexual theory
Erikson’s psychosocial theory
classical conditioning (Pavlov)
operant conditioning (Skinner)
social learning theory
Piaget’s theory
Bronfenbrenner’s theory
As part of your analysis, be sure to incorporate a brief review of each theory, including its basic purpose, its major claims, and, finally and most importantly, how the theory would explain why teenagers drive intoxicated when they know the risks of that behavior.

For each of the three theories, you should include the following:

Its basic purpose.
A brief description of the theory’s major claims. For example, a few of Freudian theory’s major claims include that personality consists of an id, ego, and superego and that much of our behavior is caused by unconscious motivations. A few of operant conditioning’s major claims are that behavior that is reinforced is more likely to occur again and that behavior that is not reinforced will be less likely to occur in the future.
How the theory could be used to help us understand why teenagers may drink and drive when they know it is risky to do so.
Then, in a concluding section, state which theory you believe does the best job of helping us understand why driving while intoxicated occurs. Most importantly, defend your choice in terms of why this theory is better than the others in explaining this phenomenon. Finally, provide advice to the school principal regarding how to encourage people to be more service oriented.