Adolescents frequently engage in risky behaviors that endanger both themselves and others. Critical to the development of effective interventions is an understanding of the processes adolescents go through when deciding to take risks. This article explores two information processing systems; a slow, deliberative, analytic system and a quick, intuitive system. The advantages and disadvantages of reliance on intuitive decision making and the difficulties adolescents must overcome in overriding intuitive processing with analytic processing are featured.