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

Knoll, LJ; Leung, TJ; Foulkes, L; Blakemore, SJ; (2017) Age-related differences in social influence on risk perception depend on the direction of influence. Journal of Adolescence , 60 pp. 53-63. 10.1016/j.adolescence.2017.07.002. Green open access

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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.

Type: Article
Title: Age-related differences in social influence on risk perception depend on the direction of influence
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1016/j.adolescence.2017.07.002
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.adolescence.2017.07.002
Language: English
Additional information: © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of The Foundation for Professionals in Services for Adolescents. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Keywords: Adolescence; Development; Social influence; Social norms; Stereotypes; Risk perception
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience
URI: https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1566855
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