Social information use in adolescents: The impact of adults, peers and household composition

Social learning strategies are key for making adaptive decisions, but their ontogeny remains poorly understood. We investigate how social information use depends on its source (adults vs. peer), and how it is shaped by household composition (extended vs. nuclear), a factor known to modulate social development. Using a simple estimation task, we show that social information strongly impacts the behaviour of adolescents aged 11 to 15 years (N = 256), especially when its source is an adult. However, social information use does not depend on household composition: the relative impact of adults and peers was similar in adolescents from both household types. Furthermore, adolescents were found to directly copy others' estimates surprisingly frequently. This study provides novel insights into adolescents' social information use and contributes to understanding the ontogeny of social learning strategies

Developmental asymmetries in learning to adjust to cooperative and uncooperative environments

Learning to successfully navigate social environments is a critical developmental goal, predictive of long-term wellbeing. However, little is known about how people learn to adjust to diferent social environments, and how this behaviour emerges across development. Here, we use a series of economic games to assess how children, adolescents, and young adults learn to adjust to social environments that difer in their level of cooperation (i.e., trust and coordination). Our results show an asymmetric developmental pattern: adjustment requiring uncooperative behaviour remains constant across adolescence, but adjustment requiring cooperative behaviour improves markedly across adolescence. Behavioural and computational analyses reveal that age-related diferences in this social learning are shaped by age-related diferences in the degree of inequality aversion and in the updating of beliefs about others. Our fndings point to early adolescence as a phase of rapid change in cooperative behaviours, and highlight this as a key developmental window for interventions promoting well-adjusted social behaviour