Age‐related differences in social influence on risk perception depend on the direction of influence

Abstract

Adolescents are particularly susceptible to social influence. Here, we investigated the effect of social influence on risk perception in 590 participants aged eight to fifty-nine-years tested in the United Kingdom. Participants rated the riskiness of everyday situations, were then informed about the rating of these situations from a (fictitious) social-influence group consisting of teenagers or adults, and then re-evaluated the situation. Our first aim was to attempt to replicate our previous finding that young adolescents are influenced more by teenagers than by adults. Second, we investigated the social-influence effect when the social-influence group's rating was more, or less, risky than the participants' own risk rating. Younger participants were more strongly influenced by teenagers than by adults, but only when teenagers rated a situation as more risky than did participants. This suggests that stereotypical characteristics of the social-influence group – risk-prone teenagers - interact with social influence on risk perception.

Age differences in the prosocial influence effect

“…As a result, we cannot draw conclusions from the current study about whether the results are unique to prosocial behaviour (although studies indicate that age‐related decreases in social influence are seen for other types of behaviour too, such as risk perception and antisocial behaviour; Knoll et al., 2015, 2017; Steinberg & Monahan, 2007; Sumter et al., 2009). Further studies could assess how age affects prosocial, neutral and antisocial influence within the same paradigm.…”

“…Linear mixed-effects models were used for all analyses. All statistical analyses were conducted in R (R Core Team, 2013) using lme4 (Bates, Mächler, Bolker, & Walker, 2014) and were based on the models used by Knoll and colleagues (Knoll et al, 2015;Knoll et al, 2017). Linear mixed effects models provide appropriate estimators for unbalanced designs (Schielzeth & Nakagawa, 2013).…”

“…This decision was made because we were not investigating the effect of the direction of influence (although this question is examined in Knoll et al., 2017); we were only interested in the magnitude of influence.…”

“…Previous research has shown that susceptibility to social influence is at its highest in late childhood (approximately age 8–10 years) then gradually decreases across the adolescent years (approximately 11–18 years) and into adulthood (19 years and above; Knoll, Leung, Foulkes, & Blakemore, 2017; Knoll, Magis‐Weinberg, Speekenbrink, & Blakemore, 2015; Steinberg & Monahan, 2007; Sumter, Bokhorst, Steinberg, & Westenberg, 2009). As such, relative to adults, children and adolescents are particularly susceptible to being influenced by others.…”

Developmental patterns of change in the influence of safe and risky peer choices on risky decision‐making

“…Most previous work has focused on how peers influence decisions towards making more risky decisions and therefore this finding might seem surprising at first. However, some studies that have looked at peer influence towards more safe decisions have shown that adolescents also conform towards safer decisions when a peer exhibits safer norms (Cascio et al., ; Knoll, Leung, Foulkes, & Blakemore, ). Similarly to risky decision‐making, the situations in which peers can move decisions towards safety is dependent on the type of peer influence and the type of decisions.…”