Characterizing how social contexts shape risky decision making across adolescence

Abstract

Adolescence has been a focus in scientific research due to the dynamic social and cognitive development that unfolds during this transitional period between childhood and adulthood, as individuals begin to navigate a more complex social environment. Two of the characterizing features of this period are heightened rates of risk taking and elevated importance of peer relationships. While adolescent risk taking and susceptibility to peer influence are often viewed as negative and potentially harmful, this dissertation examines risk as a neutral concept, adopting the definition of risk as outcome variability from the judgment and decision making literature. Papers 1 and 2 used an economic decision making paradigm and computational modeling to assess age-related changes in risk preferences and the underlying decision processes, while Paper 3 used longitudinal data to expand our understanding of how fluctuations in social support in real life may impact adolescent risk taking, using both behavioral experiments and self-report survey measures. Paper 1 found early adolescence to be a window of heightened sensitivity to social contexts that require adjudicating between self- and peer-interest in risky decisions. Peer observation over Zoom did not evoke additional age-related differences in risk preference. Paper 2 found that individuals in general overestimated their friends’ risk preferences, and that older adolescents and young adults were more adept at flexibly taking friends’ perspectives in decision making. Paper 3 found that within-person fluctuations in perceived close friend support were not associated with levels of risk preference in adolescents, whereas between-person levels of perceived close friend support had a stronger association with risk preference among younger adolescents. Taken together, these findings shed light on social and cognitive mechanisms that unfold at different stages during adolescence that underlie individuals’ risky decision making.