An example is given of teenagers doing dangerous things despite stating they consider the risks.

It seems to be that there is a systematic bias in teenage thinking, especially of the male sex; many teenagers I know/have known in the past place a much higher weight on peers' opinions than on parents' opinions, and a considerably higher weight on 'coolness' than on 'safeness.' Cool actions are often either unsafe or disapproved of by the parents' generation. I've started to wonder whether there might be a good evolutionary reason for teenagers to act this way. After all, being liked and accepted by peers is more important to finding a mate than being accepted by the older generation. In an ancestral environment, young males' ability to confidently take risks (i.e. in hunting) would have been important to success, and thus a factor in attractiveness to girls. Depending on just how risky the 'cool' things to do are, and how tough the competition for mates, the boys who ignored their parents' warnings and took risks with their peer group might have had more children compared to those who were more cautious...and thus their actions would be instrumentally rational. If this hypothesis were true, the 'thinking' that leads modern teenagers to do dangerous things would be an implicit battle of popularity-vs-safety, with popularity usually winning because of an innate weighting.

This is a testable, falsifiable hypothesis, if I can find some way of testing it.