UC Berkeley

The public’s understandings and attitudes toward marijuana use as well as changes in the legality and acceptability of marijuana use across the United States have undergone substantial changes in the past few decades. These shifts have led to changes in individuals’ informational assumptions (e.g., various considerations or evidence) that come to be associated with the issue, and have made marijuana use a complex social issue that is often comprised of various relevant facets warranting consideration. During adolescence, developments in individuals’ capacities for recognizing and incorporating multiple aspects of an issue enhances the potential for complexity and variation in judgments. In the present investigation, patterns of adolescents’ judgments and justifications regarding marijuana use are explored through a Social Domain Theory framework.

The sample consisted of 100 high school junior and seniors, ages 16 through 18. Respondents completed a survey with open-ended questions asking about their judgments of marijuana use, as well as judgments of a prototypical moral issue (stealing) and a prototypical personal issue (using one’s allowance money to purchase music). Survey items asked respondents to evaluate and justify each of the three acts generally, as well as under various contingencies. Comparisons of judgment patterns were expected to demonstrate greater homogeneity in evaluations and justifications of the prototypical issues as compared with the marijuana use issue. Informational assumptions about marijuana use were also assessed through questions about the harm (or lack thereof) involved use, and hypothetical conditions regarding the absence or presence of harm.

Results indicated that respondents judged marijuana use across the social domains of reasoning, suggesting that this is an ambiguous social issue; multiple considerations including the prudence of use, individuals’ prerogatives about use, laws prohibiting use, as well as consequences to others if use was prohibited (e.g., medical uses for marijuana) were considered as respondents judged marijuana use. This was in contrast to their judgments of stealing and purchasing music (considered to be prototypical or unambiguous social issues), which were more consistently evaluated within the moral and personal domains, respectively. Moreover, informational assumptions regarding the harm involved in marijuana use suggested an association between respondents’ perceptions of the harm involved in use and their evaluations of the acceptability of marijuana use. Results demonstrated the role of informational assumptions in judgment formation and suggested the complexity in adolescent reasoning about an ambiguous social issue like marijuana use.