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Background: Adolescents are constantly in interaction with their social environment, which enables them to observe others behaviour and opinion. These social interactions are important for learning from others how to behave in the world (Bandura, 1971; McLeod, 2016). Due the rise of social media, adolescents have gained even more access to the behaviour and opinions of others (Lenhart, 2015; Rideout, 2015; Crone & Konijn, 2018). Importantly, social interactions change during adolescence. Adolescents spend more time with their peers and value their peers’ opinions more, also known as the social-orientation phase (Blakemore, 2008; Crone & Dahl, 2012). This shift in social relationships is accompanied by a greater sensitivity to peer influence (Steinberg & Monahan, 2007). A large body of research has identified the impact of peers in various domains, such as pro-sociality (Van Hoorn, Van Dijk, Meuwese, Rieffe & Crone, 2014) and risk behaviour (e.g. Albert, Chein & Steinberg, 2013; Braams, Davidow & Somerville, 2018; Knoll, Magis-Weinberg, Speekenbrink & Blakemore, 2017). Previous research has operationalised this peer influence as the presence of peers (Gardner & Steinberg, 2005; Chein, Albert, O’Brien, Uckert, & Steinberg, 2011; Van Hoorn, Van Dijk, Guroglu, & Crone, 2016; Cascio et al., 2015; Power et al., 2018; Somerville et al., 2018) or the delivery of social information to the adolescents, such as the choice or opinion of a peer (Cohen & Prinstein, 2006; Braams, Davidow & Somerville, 2018). These approaches treat the adolescent as a passive perceiver of social information. However, humans are not only at the passive, receiving end of social interactions. In fact, real-world social interactions also consist of active seeker-receiver interactions (Wilson, 1999; Case, 2002; Kuhlthau, 1993). It is likely that adolescents actively seek out social sources to inform their decisions. This line of reasoning follows from social learning theory (Bandura, 1971), and adolescents’ social-emotional development, which makes them particularly sensitive and attentive to social cues (Steinberg, 2018; Somerville, 2013). Taking this seeking process into account enables us to assess when and how much social information adolescents want to use, and from which agency. Given adolescents’ sensitivity to the social environment, as well as their access to a plethora of media sources, it is essential to investigate this understudied part of the social influence process. Treating the adolescent as an active agent raises the question in which circumstances they would look for social information. Social learning theories have proposed the copy-when-uncertain strategy (Weizsäcker, 2010; Morgan et al., 2012). Uncertainty about how to behave or which decision to make can be reduced by observing the behaviour and opinions of others who are in a similar situation; here the action of others is used as a guideline to display the adaptive behaviour. Studies focussing on the role of uncertainty have shown that adults and young adults are indeed more likely to use social information when they are uncertain (Toelch, Bach & Dolan., 2014; Ciranka & van den Bos, 2019). For adolescents this uncertainty may be a frequent issue, as they are challenged with new situations and behaviours in daily life. Study: Our study proposes a novel social search paradigm to investigate the impact of uncertainty on social information seeking. This questions were investigated in the context of adolescents’ social networks at school, including classes from two different Dutch high schools. The paradigm included a commonly used risky decision-making task (Blankenstein, Crone, van den Bos & van Duijvenvoorde, 2016; Van den Bos & Hertwig, 2017), in which adolescents choose between a safe option and a risky option. Choice data from 93 adolescents was collected in two sessions. In the first wave participants played the task alone. In the second wave participants played the task again, but with the option to gather social information from their classmates (i.e. classmates’ choices) prior to their decision. This study is first in exploring when and how much adolescents rely on their own social network, to inform their decisions. |
