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.

Keywords: Adolescence; Development; Risk perception; Social influence; Social norms; Stereotypes.

Fig. 1

Illustration of the trial sequence. Participants were asked to imagine that someone was engaged in an activity (in this example, crossing the street on a red light). They then rated the activity's risk by using a computer mouse to move a slider on a visual analogue scale. After making this rating, participants were shown a risk rating of the same situation that was ostensibly provided by a group of either adults or teenagers (the social-influence group). The ratings from the social-influence group were actually randomly generated. Finally, participants were asked to rate the same situation again. Adapted and reprinted from (Knoll et al., 2015). (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

Fig. 2

The graph presents the difference between the two slopes for the average change in risk rating after seeing the ratings of the social-influence groups, predicted by using the estimates of the linear mixed-effect model, for five age groups. A positive difference indicates a greater degree of influence by the social-influence group adults than by teenagers. A negative difference indicates a greater degree of influence by the social-influence teenagers than by adults. Asterisks indicate significant main effect of peer-influence (adults vs teenagers) within age group and interaction on peer-influence effects between age groups (* p < 0.05).

Fig. 3

The graph shows the average differences in rating (ratings 2 minus rating 1) with standard error bars. Results are shown separately for the adult social-influence condition and the teenager social-influence condition, for each age group. Bars on the left (‘Lower group ratings’) were from the conditions in which the social-influence group rated risk lower than participants' initial rating. Bars on the right (‘Higher group ratings’) were from the conditions in which the social-influence group rated risk higher than participants' initial rating. Asterisks indicate significant main effect of peer-influence (adults vs teenagers) within age group and interaction on peer-influence effects between age groups (** p < 0.01, * p < 0.05, black: Bonferroni corrected result; grey: uncorrected result).