Prosocial Influence and Opportunistic Conformity in Adolescents and Young Adults.
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.
['Chierchia|Gabriele|G|0000-0002-5623-4573', 'Piera Pi-Sunyer|Blanca|B|0000-0002-6707-9943', 'Blakemore|Sarah-Jayne|SJ|']
D000293:Adolescent D000294:Adolescent Behavior D000328:Adult D000533:Altruism D002648:Child D006801:Humans D010379:Peer Group D012309:Risk-Taking D012919:Social Behavior D055815:Young Adult
conformity social influences adolescent development cooperation open data open materials prosocial decisions