What I like about this study is that it doesn’t just reframe healthy eating for adolescents; it recasts adolescent defiance for adults. It depicts teenage rebellion as a potential asset to be cultivated, rather than as a threat to be quashed.

Of course, we don’t know if this behavior change will last longer than a day. To learn more, the researchers will be conducting another experiment next year, following teenagers’ cafeteria choices for months after they’ve read the exposé article.

“What’s really exciting about this study and other work like it is that if you can appeal to kids’ sense of wanting to not be duped, you empower them to take a stand,” said Dr. Ronald E. Dahl, director of the Center on the Developing Adolescent at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Dahl’s own brain-imaging research suggests that adolescent brains are not inferior to adult brains, as is sometimes assumed; to the contrary, they may have special advantages in navigating social hierarchies and adapting to rapid change. “If they are motivated, you can change their behavior profoundly.”

In 2000, an antismoking ad, created in consultation with teenagers, featured a group of young people that piled up 1,200 body bags outside the headquarters of a tobacco company — representing the number of deaths attributed to smoking each day in America. In the ad, an African-American youth calls out the company’s sins over a megaphone, as an older white man peers down nervously from his office above. The spot and others in the campaign turned the Marlboro Man narrative upside down, reframing smoking as an act of corporate submission, rather than rebellion.

In 2009, a study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine estimated that the broader campaign, known as “truth,” prevented some 450,000 young people from starting to smoke from 2000 to 2004.

People who have spent their careers working with teenagers have learned this lesson through trial and error. “There are two adolescent imperatives: to resist authority and to contribute to community,” said Rob Riordan, co-founder of High Tech High, a network of California charter schools. He has found that as students work together toward a shared purpose, the impulse to resist authority fades.

Adults work harder when they have a higher purpose, too. Health care professionals, for example, wash their hands more carefully when signs remind them of the benefits to their patients’ health rather than to their own, according to the organizational psychologist Adam Grant, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.