Social norms in adolescent risk engagement and recommendation

Social influence is an important determinant of adolescent risk-taking, but little is known about how social norms contribute to adolescents’ tendency to recommend and engage in risky behaviours. Using the Adolescent Risk-taking Questionnaire, we assessed subjects’ (n=198, age=10-26) propensity to engage in and recommend risk-taking as well as their perception of risk-norms. Adolescents recommended risk-taking more often compared to children and young adults. Perceived social norms were the most important factor predicting engagement in risky behaviours, and adolescents perceived risk-taking to be more normative than children or adults. Our findings highlight two mechanisms that contribute to adolescent risk-taking; active recommendation and perceived social norms. On this basis, we discuss potential means to attenuate excessive adolescent risk-taking

Social learning across adolescence: A Bayesian neurocognitive perspective

Adolescence is a period of social re-orientation in which we are generally more prone to peer influence and the updating of our beliefs based on social information, also called social learning, than in any other stage of our life. However, how do we know when to use social information and whose information to use and how does this ability develop across adolescence? Here, we review the social learning literature from a behavioral, neural and computational viewpoint, focusing on the development of brain systems related to executive functioning, value-based decision-making and social cognition. We put forward a Bayesian reinforcement learning framework that incorporates social learning about value associated with particular behavior and uncertainty in our environment and experiences. We discuss how this framework can inform us about developmental changes in social learning, including how the assessment of uncertainty and the ability to adaptively discriminate between information from different social sources change across adolescence. By combining reward-based decision-making in the domains of both informational and normative influence, this framework explains both negative and positive social peer influence in adolescence

A Bayesian Model of Social Influence under Risk and Uncertainty

Humans live in an uncertain world and often rely on social information in order to reduce uncertainty. However, the relationship between uncertainty and social information use is not yet fully understood. In this work we argue that previous studies have often neglected different degrees of uncertainty that need to be accounted for when studying social information use. We introduce a novel experimental paradigm to measure risky decision making, wherein social information and uncertainty are manipulated. We also developed a Bayesian model of social information use. We show that across different levels of uncertainty; social influence follows similar principles. Social information is more impactful when individuals are more uncertain. Notably, this relationship holds for experimental manipulations of uncertainty but also for subjective uncertainty within experimental conditions. We conclude with discussing that social influence can be better understood when paying credit to subjective uncertainties and preferences.</p

The neurocognitive development of social decision-making

This thesis describes a series of experiments that investigated the relation between brain development and the development of social behaviorLEI Universiteit LeidenDevelopmental pathways of social-emotional and cognitive functioning - ou