Parents
If parents do not want to believe that teens’ risky behaviors are consequences of their inabilities in disciplining their children, they may use the teenage brain myth as an excuse to why their children are not behaving well.
Therapists for Child Discipline
When therapists want to prove their competence over other therapists, they want some edge that can make them stand out. Since the public likes science, adding any topic in the brain science to their talk may allow those therapists to get more customers.
The media
Newspapers and popular magazines cannot provide latest scientific findings in detail because of their limited space and duty to be eye-catching, which leads them to omit limitations to those primary findings.
Brain Scientists and the Pharmaceutical Industry
This may sound weird, but it may be not if we consider who are funding their research. For example, if a pharmaceutical company funds a research, they want a result showing that the brain structure and functions strongly affect human risky behaviors; the pharmaceutical industry needs to show how medication can help control people’s behaviors. Therefore, brain scientists (psychologists?) are expected to find positive results, not negative results. If brain scientists are valued only when they find a strong influence of the brain structure and functions on behaviors, then it is easy to imagine that they may want to overestimate or overstate the role of the brain in human behaviors, which could also support the legitimacy of the teenage brain myth.
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I think that the reason that the public likes science is because it is usually given to us through a comforting familiar source. Usually the local news gives us shocking glimpses of some new discovery, but the media often could only give a small snippet of what was discovered. The media is a lot of people's fill on contemporary information in everything, but it not always as trustworthy as they put themselves out to be. This is a really awesome insight JT! かっこいい！！
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