ArticleNature communications2021
Preference uncertainty accounts for developmental effects on susceptibility to peer influence in adolescence.
Article in Nature communications, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 57 citations in OpenAlex.
- The effects of digital peer support interventions on physical and mental health: a review and meta-analysis.Epidemiology and psychiatric sciences · 2025Pooled it
- An Experimental Study on the Influence of Friends and Popular Peers on Adolescents' Risky Decisions in a Private and Public Context.Journal of youth and adolescence · 2026Article
- Understanding the impact of misinformation on adolescents.Nature human behaviour · 2026Review
- The Social Sources Adolescents Consult for Daily Life Choices: Variations in Age and Decision Domains.Journal of adolescence · 2026Article
- Determinants of Rule-Breaking in Adolescence.Journal of adolescence · 2025Article
- Developmental differences in social information use under uncertainty: A neurocomputational approach.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2025Article
- Teacher knows best? The social influence of teachers and peers in high school.Journal of research on adolescence : the official journal of the Society for Research on Adolescence · 2025Article
- Decrease in decision noise from adolescence into adulthood mediates an increase in more sophisticated choice behaviors and performance gain.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Social conformity updates the neural representation of facial attractiveness.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Older adults are relatively more susceptible to impulsive social influence than young adults.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Revisiting adolescence as a sensitive period for sociocultural processing.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2024Review
- Longitudinal changes in the value and influence of parent and peer attitudes about externalizing behaviors across adolescence.Developmental psychology · 2024Article
- Longitudinal variation in resilient psychosocial functioning is associated with ongoing cortical myelination and functional reorganization during adolescence.Nature communications · 2024Article
- The social transmission of empathy relies on observational reinforcement learning.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Identifying who adolescents prefer as source of information within their social network.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Self-reported childhood family adversity is linked to an attenuated gain of trust during adolescence.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Confirmatory reinforcement learning changes with age during adolescence.Developmental science · 2023Article
- Local and global reward learning in the lateral frontal cortex show differential development during human adolescence.PLoS biology · 2023Article
- Social influence in adolescence as a double-edged sword.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
10 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Adolescents are prone to social influence from peers, with implications for development, both adaptive and maladaptive. Here, using a computer-based paradigm, we replicate a cross-sectional effect of more susceptibility to peer influence in a large dataset of adolescents 14 to 24 years old. Crucially, we extend this finding by adopting a longitudinal perspective, showing that a within-person susceptibility to social influence decreases over a 1.5 year follow-up time period. Exploiting this longitudinal design, we show that susceptibility to social influences at baseline predicts an improvement in peer relations over the follow-up period. Using a Bayesian computational model, we demonstrate that in younger adolescents a greater tendency to adopt others' preferences arises out of a higher uncertainty about their own preferences in the paradigmatic case of delay discounting (a phenomenon called 'preference uncertainty'). This preference uncertainty decreases over time and, in turn, leads to a reduced susceptibility of one's own behaviour to an influence from others. Neuro-developmentally, we show that a measure of myelination within medial prefrontal cortex, estimated at baseline, predicts a developmental decrease in preference uncertainty at follow-up. Thus, using computational and neural evidence, we reveal adaptive mechanisms underpinning susceptibility to social influence during adolescence.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.