Prosocial Influence and Opportunistic Conformity in Adolescents and Young Adults

Abstract

Adolescence is associated with heightened social influence, especially from peers. This can lead to detrimental decision-making in domains such as risky behavior but may also raise opportunities for prosocial behavior. We used an incentivized charitable-donations task to investigate how people revise decisions after learning about the donations of others and how this is affected by age ( N = 220; age range = 11–35 years). Our results showed that the probability of social influence decreased with age within this age range. In addition, whereas previous research has suggested that adults are more likely to conform to the behavior of selfish others than to the behavior of prosocial others, here we observed no evidence of such an asymmetry in midadolescents. We discuss possible interpretations of these findings in relation to the social context of the task, the perceived value of money, and social decision-making across development.

Social influence in adolescence as a double-edged sword

“…Developmental research on social influence in adolescents has traditionally emphasised its negative effects, such as the encouragement of substance use and having unprotected sex [7,9]. Our study shows that peers can provide good examples to support rule compliance, prosociality and belief formation, supporting the emerging view that peers can also have a markedly positive impact and promote socially desirable behaviour in adolescents [11,13,26]. Our experiments tightly controlled the provision of social information, allowing us to quantify how good and bad examples impacted behaviour, while avoiding confounding effects of individuals influencing each other, and selecting certain people as social sources [45].…”

“…1). Early adolescents have a high sensitivity for peer behaviour, while older adolescents prioritised personal preferences and beliefs (confirming results of [26]). In the context of rule following and prosociality, the strong impact of social information use among early adolescents might reflect high levels of uncertainty about their personal values and preferences [9].…”

“…Adolescence is a key period for the development of prosocial behaviour, as awareness grows about the consequences of their actions for others and for society at large [24]. Observing prosocial peers can prompt prosocial acts even when reciprocity is impossible, but exposure to selfish peers can also reduce willingness to give up resources to benefit others [25,26]. Participants completed a variant of the Dictator Game, a commonly used tool to measure prosocial preferences [27].…”

How peer influence shapes value computation in moral decision-making

“…Another limitation of our study is that we do not have a non-social control condition (e.g., Chierchia et al, 2020 ), and therefore cannot completely disentangle the effects of social influence and time (or mere repetition effect). Nevertheless, it is worth noting that any effects of task repetition would be matched between the prosocial and antisocial conditions, but the effects we observed in this study are mostly condition-specific, and prosocial and antisocial influence impacted moral decision-making in opposite directions and modulated distinct components of value accumulation.…”

“…Moral behavior is contagious. Observing generous, cooperative or helpful behavior in peers encourages people to adopt similar behaviors themselves ( Dimant, 2019 ; Jung, Seo, Han, Henderson, & Patall, 2020 ; Nook, Ong, Morelli, Mitchell, & Zaki, 2016 ), and people are more likely to lie, steal, punish and harm others when their peers do the same ( Bandura, Ross, & Ross, 1961 ; Chierchia, Pi-Sunyer, & Blakemore, 2020 ; Dimant, 2019 ; Fabbri & Carbonara, 2017 ; FeldmanHall, Otto, & Phelps, 2018 ; Gino, Ayal, & Ariely, 2009 ; Son, Bhandari, & FeldmanHall, 2019 ). Although peer influence on moral behavior (or moral influence) is well-documented, several open questions remain.…”