Uncertainty about others’ trustworthiness increases during adolescence and guides social information sampling

Abstract

Adolescence is a key life phase for developing well-adjusted social behaviour. An essential component of well-adjusted social behaviour is the ability to update our beliefs about the trustworthiness of others based on gathered information. Here, we examined how adolescents (n = 157, 10–24 years) sequentially sampled information about the trustworthiness of peers and how they used this information to update their beliefs about others’ trustworthiness. Our Bayesian computational modelling approach revealed an adolescence-emergent increase in uncertainty of prior beliefs about others’ trustworthiness. As a consequence, early to mid-adolescents (ages 10–16) gradually relied less on their prior beliefs and more on the gathered evidence when deciding to sample more information, and when deciding to trust. We propose that these age-related differences could be adaptive to the rapidly changing social environment of early and mid-adolescents. Together, these findings contribute to the understanding of adolescent social development by revealing adolescent-emergent flexibility in prior beliefs about others that drives adolescents’ information sampling and trust decisions.

Internal uncertainty impacts social information use in risky choice across adolescence

“…These studies have shown that preferences become clearer (less uncertain) across development 68 . Uncertainty also undergoes developmental change for instance when people decide whether to trust others or not 84 . Previously, it was shown in adults that uncertainty makes novel information more impactful during (social) learning [85][86][87] and drives exploration [88][89][90] .…”

Social learning across adolescence: A Bayesian neurocognitive perspective

“…Using a Bayesian updating model, the authors showed that participants changed their choice preference more often in the direction of the choice made by the other player in the uncertain versus the certain condition and when they were subjectively more uncertain within conditions. Moreover, a recent study in which adolescents had to decide whom to trust revealed an adolescence-emerging increase in uncertainty of prior beliefs, which accounted for differences in information sampling about others' trustworthiness ( Ma et al, 2022 ). In another study by Moutoussis and colleagues, a group of 14–24 year olds played a temporal discounting task in which they could choose between a smaller but immediate reward or a larger but delayed reward, and they indicated their preferences both before and after viewing the preferences of others ( Moutoussis et al, 2016 ).…”

Strategic social decision making undergoes significant changes in typically developing and autistic early adolescents

“…Note that this transition period delineated by the onset of pubertal changes has also been referred to as early adolescence (Holm et al, 2022;Pelham III et al, 2021). Our study focuses on this preadolescent phase, as it may represent a window of opportunity to increase prosocial behavior, positive social outcomes, and decrease the risk for poor health outcomes in adolescence (Flook et al, 2019;Ma et al, 2022). In this study, we aimed to characterize ongoing development underlying cooperation decisions, a key social behavior, in preadolescent children.…”

“…Children and adults have been shown to successfully gather information about a trustee's past behavior to minimize their uncertainty about the trustee's trustworthiness (Vives & Feldmanhall, 2018). Ma and colleagues (Ma et al, 2020(Ma et al, , 2022 assessed how adults and adolescents sequentially sampled information about a trustee's reciprocation history before making cooperation decisions. The authors found that both adolescents and adults sampled information about their partners to decrease uncertainty about their trustworthiness.…”

“…They relied on the same strategy, sampling information to reduce uncertainty of their partners' trustworthiness, but with age, adolescents relied less on their priors and more on efficient information sampling (Ma et al, 2022).…”