Ciranka Simon, van den Bos Wouter
Center for Adaptive Rationality, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany.
Department of Psychology, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Universtiy of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Commun Psychol. 2025 Sep 16;3(1):137. doi: 10.1038/s44271-025-00314-6.
Adolescents are often thought to be more susceptible to social influence than people in other age groups. This is often explained by altered reward processing or heightened social motivations, such as a need to belong to a group during adolescence. However, uncertainty also makes people more susceptible to social information. While researchers agree that adolescence is a time of great uncertainty, the role of uncertainty in explaining susceptibility to social influence across development remains unclear. Here, we asked 166 participants aged 10-26 to make 144 risky decisions in a lottery experiment, either with or without observing social information and nested within conditions of low and high uncertainty. Modelling susceptibility to social influence as Bayesian updating suggests that despite the same levels of uncertainty between participants, their own internal uncertainty about the utility of choices underwent a negative linear age trend, contributing to age-related differences in susceptibility to social influence across adolescence. Our results suggest that the adolescent development of peer influence is at least in part driven by age differences in the internal uncertainty about how to decide.
青少年通常被认为比其他年龄段的人更容易受到社会影响。这通常是由奖励处理的改变或增强的社会动机来解释的，比如在青春期有归属某个群体的需求。然而，不确定性也会使人们更容易受到社会信息的影响。虽然研究人员一致认为青春期是一个充满巨大不确定性的时期，但不确定性在解释整个发育过程中对社会影响的易感性方面所起的作用仍不明确。在这里，我们让166名年龄在10至26岁之间的参与者在一个彩票实验中做出144个风险决策，决策过程中有的有社会信息可供观察，有的没有，并且嵌套在低不确定性和高不确定性的条件下。将对社会影响的易感性建模为贝叶斯更新表明，尽管参与者之间的不确定性水平相同，但他们自身对选择效用的内部不确定性呈现出负线性年龄趋势，这导致了整个青春期对社会影响的易感性存在与年龄相关的差异。我们的结果表明，同伴影响的青少年发展至少部分是由关于如何做决定的内部不确定性的年龄差异所驱动的。
