Social influence in adolescence as a double-edged sword

Abstract

Social learning is fundamental to human development, helping individuals adapt to new conditions and cooperate in groups. During the formative years of adolescence, the social environment shapes people’s socio-cognitive skills needed in adulthood. Yet, peer influence during this pivotal developmental stage is generally associated with risky and unruly conduct, with eminent negative long-term effects on adolescents’ educational, economic and health outcomes. Here we show, in contrast to this traditional view, that the impact of peers on adolescents’ behaviour can also be markedly positive. Exposure to disobedient peers provoked rule breaking, and selfish peers reduced prosocial behaviour, particularly in early adolescence. However, compliant peers also promoted rule-following and fair peers increased prosociality. A belief formation task further revealed that early adolescents tend to assimilate social information, while older adolescents prioritise personal views. Our results suggest that these developmental patterns reflect a decline in an underlying domain-general factor of social sensitivity during adolescence, and highlight early adolescence as a key window for peer-based interventions to improve developmental trajectories.

Internal uncertainty impacts social information use in risky choice across adolescence

“…However, our results still show that social information impacted the youngest participants most, due to developmental differences in uncertainty. Our finding that social impact in risk-taking declines with age matches other studies showing similar developmental trends of social impact in risk-taking 64,65 , riskperception 92,93 , prosocial behaviour 94 , rule-following and belief formation 61 . However, our results offer a novel perspective towards these developmental trends.…”

“…Participants performed the marble task (figure 1) and a battery of social decision-making tasks reported elsewhere 61 , as well as the digit-span test to control for working memory capacity 62 and the CFT-20R, to control for general cognitive ability 63 .…”

Social learning across adolescence: A Bayesian neurocognitive perspective

“…Whether this increased peer influence is negative or positive appears to be context-dependent and modulated by the norm within the peer group. ( Choukas-Bradley et al, 2015 , van Hoorn et al, 2016 , Chierchia et al, 2020 , da Silva Pinho et al, 2021 , Molleman et al, 2021 ). For instance, adolescents show increased risk-taking when they are being observed by peers versus when they played the game alone while playing a simulated driving task ( Gardner and Steinberg, 2005 , Chein et al, 2011 ) or a gambling task ( AR Smith et al, 2014 ), but also increased cognitive control when playing a Go/No Go task on behalf of a high compared with a low status school mate ( Sharp et al, 2022 ) and increased prosocial behavior after having received prosocial feedback from a peer ( van Hoorn et al, 2016 ).…”

Peer-mediated social signals alter risk tolerance in teenage boys based on how far they are from their peers

“…Estimation tasks (Molleman, Kurvers, et al, 2019;Molleman et al, 2020Molleman et al, , 2022 have recently been used to study people's behavior, in which they can revise their initial estimates after observing what another person estimates. This approach provides a detailed and quantified account of how social cues affect behavior.…”