From Nature to Nurture: The Behavioural Science of Young People

The host introduced Coppin as CEO and Head of Research of Esher House, noting the company's world-leading work on the psychology of young people and how it translated into practical applications in employment and careers. Coppin opened with a personal anecdote from age 14 about being told the average British person loses their virginity at 18 (18.3 in Australia) and his subsequent realisation that his school friends, who claimed earlier ages, were not telling the truth. The point: data and academic evidence are essential foundations, but generalisations must always allow for personalisation through modern technology.

Coppin framed behavioural science as the discipline that replaces opinion with fact, conventional wisdom with evidence, and risk with information. Programmes informed by behavioural science feel safer to fund and easier to scale because the underlying mechanisms are documented rather than assumed.

He demonstrated cognitive bias by showing the audience an image of a person and asking them to silently form a first impression in three seconds. The point: humans form opinions based on appearance within seconds, drawing on cognitive biases shaped by both nature and nurture. Coppin's recent apprenticeship and student completions work used eight specific biases. Over 120 cognitive biases have now been documented in the literature.

Coppin proposed four foundational principles that simplify the complexity of human decision-making.

Humans do whatever is easiest. Energy conservation as evolutionary adaptation, not laziness.

Humans are highly social. Acting to impress others or avoid embarrassment, peaking between ages 13 and 25.

Humans crave a sense of control. Resistance to perceived coercion, even when the coerced action is desirable.

Humans are terrible at self-control. Across 3 million VIA participants globally, self-control is the lowest-ranked of 24 character strengths in every culture. Coppin referenced Walter Mischel's classic marshmallow test as a foundational study he would return to later.

Citing the School of the Adolescent at the University of California, Berkeley, Coppin identified three converging factors that make 2018 a unique moment in human history for adolescent development.

First, there are over 1.2 billion teenagers on the planet, the largest absolute and proportional number ever.

Second, the technological revolution amplifies both the best and worst aspects of adolescence: connection and community, but also exclusion, fear of missing out, exploitation, and mental health problems.

Third, adolescence now lasts longer. Earlier onset of puberty (physiological) combined with later traditional markers of adulthood (moving out, starting a family, taking on responsibility) creates an extended developmental window.

The combined effect, in Berkeley's framing, is an unprecedented opportunity to "encourage youth to be a force for good." Coppin pushed back on the framing: his research suggests young people are already inherently good and authentic. The job is to get out of their way and facilitate, not to engineer.

Coppin walked through the neuroscience. The amygdala (Greek for "almond", named for its shape) is the cluster of neurons that processes emotion, impulse, and reward. It is fully functional from birth. The prefrontal cortex processes logic, reasoning, impulse control, and mood regulation. It does not begin developing meaningfully until around age 13 and does not finish until the mid-20s.

The result is over a decade of human life in which the emotional and reward system operates without the brake of mature impulse control. A landmark experiment showed faces displaying various emotions to adults and young people. Adults correctly identified emotions 100% of the time. Young people correctly identified them only about 50% of the time. The "I made you your favourite cheese sandwich, why do you hate me so much?" misreading is not pathology; it is developmental neuroscience.

Young people are not antisocial. They are hyper-social. Every action is calibrated to peer judgement, social status, and the avoidance of embarrassment. Even apparently antisocial behaviour (delinquency, gang affiliation) is calibrated against in-group social rewards.

Risk-taking, including the documented increase in selfie-related deaths globally, is driven by a disproportionate reward response. The amygdala produces large reward signals for actions that will impress peers; the underdeveloped prefrontal cortex cannot push back. Where a child or an adult-over-25 would show "no measurable response" to social rewards in brain imaging, an adolescent's reward system is shouting.

Coppin highlighted a paradox of adolescent identity: young people want to be unique but not freakish, different but not isolated. The result is the formation of subcultures (mods, rockers, romantics, hip-hop, metal) where every member believes they are uniquely understood by no one, while looking around at peers identical to themselves. This is not contradiction; it is sociology.

Graffiti tagging is "young people screaming at the world saying I'm making a difference, I'm not just a number." The same impulse is what makes young people, when they enter the workforce, capable of changing organisations and the world. Most adult job-related stress is downstream of having lost this impulse and replaced it with the next mortgage payment.

Adolescents naturally feel tired around 1am due to delayed melatonin onset, compared with about 10pm for adults. The biology is universal. Schools and workplaces that demand 7am or 8am starts work against the biology of the people they aim to develop.

Coppin layered a broader critique of schooling. Forty-minute lessons assume attention architecture that does not exist; the prefrontal cortex cycles attention every 90 seconds. Streaming young people by performance at age 11 (when language acquisition windows are individually variable) labels late-developers as "bad at languages" before they have had a chance. Compliance-trained students cannot suddenly become entrepreneurial graduates the day after they leave school. Finland banned the majority of homework and test scores rose. Schools are improving on these dimensions, but the change is glacial.

Coppin shared research from the UK-based Year 13 Group debunking conventional wisdom about adolescent information sources. The actual hierarchy of career advice sources for young people: parents and carers (about 50%), Google searches, friends, school career advisers, siblings, and finally social media. The narrative that "young people only listen to influencers" is empirically false. Career engagement strategies designed around social media as the primary channel often miss their target audience entirely.

Between 2011 and 2014, millions of teenagers abandoned Facebook. The fastest-growing user groups are now 35-plus and 55-plus, with three times more 55-plus users than teenagers. Coppin shared a teenage perspective: posting a perfectly filtered selfie only for "Nan" to comment "you look lovely, a bit too much makeup" is intolerable, driving teens to platforms older relatives don't yet understand (Snapchat, Instagram, and platforms emerging since). Career engagement strategies on Facebook miss most of their target audience and reach the wrong demographic instead.

Two hundred thousand years of human evolution selected for pessimism. The pessimist who heard a rustle in the bushes and stood up survived; the optimist who stayed seated was eaten by the saber-toothed tiger. The descendant population reads ambiguous messages negatively by default.

This evolutionary inheritance interacts badly with modern written communication. More text and email is exchanged than ever in human history, and recipients systematically interpret ambiguous tone in the most negative way possible. Emoticons (introduced in 1982) and emoji (introduced in 1999) are not trivial; they are essential prosthetics for facilitating human communication when face-to-face cues are absent.

At age 16, young people are programmed to crave popularity. There are two distinct kinds: status (being admired, aspired to, attention-getting) and likability (being valued for who you are by people who know you). Modern social media platforms make it easier than ever to build status without building likability. Coppin used the Hannah Montana to Miley Cyrus arc as a public example: a transition driven by a craving for status that may not have been matched by the protective effect of likability.

Walter Mischel's marshmallow test offered children a marshmallow with the promise of two if they could wait. Roughly one third could wait five minutes. Only about 5% of children historically could wait the full 15 minutes. Those who waited were tracked over decades and showed measurably better outcomes: higher SAT scores, better employment, higher earnings, lower BMIs.

The conventional wisdom is that children today are worse at self-regulation. Coppin presented the empirical counterpoint: in modern replications, 10% of children can now wait the full 15 minutes, twice the historical rate. The "kids these days" narrative is false. The follow-on insight: self-regulation is one of the most powerful predictors of life outcomes, but the trajectory is improving, not deteriorating.

Coppin presented Search Institute research identifying five foundational factors for youth success.

First and most powerful: a personal relationship with an adult who cares.

Second: a safe place to go.

Third: a healthy start in early childhood.

Fourth: marketable skills.

Fifth: personal virtues and strengths valued by community, allowing the young person to be part of something bigger than themselves.

Coppin overlaid this with a four-layer model of resilience: self-interest, close family and friends, community, and something larger than the community. The more layers a young person carries, the more capable they are of weathering setbacks (such as the Australian average of 15 unsuccessful job applications before a successful one).

Coppin presented his Department of Employment data on stage of change in young Australian jobseekers. The conventional Canberra wisdom was that young people emerge from school believing they are "management material" and refusing to flip burgers. The data debunked this. Compared with over-21 unemployed Australians, the under-21 cohort was substantially less in the action stage, more in preparation (genuinely wanting a job but lacking confidence in skills and themselves), and notably less in the unauthentic action stage that Coppin's research had identified. Young Australians are more authentic, less "bullshitty", and more often in the contemplation stage where they would benefit from confidence-building rather than skills-training.

Coppin closed with the species-level argument. Human progress, from the Out of Africa migration through every major social and technological leap, has been disproportionately driven by young people. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg founded their companies between ages 19 and 21. Plato and Aristotle were teenagers when sitting at Socrates's feet. Young people drove the colour revolutions in Eastern Europe, the protests against Vietnam War conscription, and (the week of the talk) the road safety protests bringing Dhaka, Bangladesh to a halt.

The species needs the rashness, social consciousness, and authenticity of youth. Practical implications for the audience working with young people: be clear rather than subtle (because emotional misreading is normal), expect preparation-stage and contemplation-stage hesitancy rather than action-stage confidence, capitalise on social status drive, protect from embarrassment, avoid forced exercises that ignore biology, and (above all) be authentic and avoid patronising. The authentic adult ally is the single most powerful intervention an organisation can offer a young person.