“Our expenses are all for conformity.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A study published in Psychological Science found that adolescents are highly vulnerable to social influences, and that this conformity can be used to promote prosocial tendencies among youth.
This research was conducted by research associate Dr. Gabriele Chierchia, research assistant Blanca Piera Pi-Sunyer, and professor Sarah-Jane Blakemore all from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University College London.
Previous studies have confirmed the high likelihood of adolescents following their peers in making poor or impulsive decisions. Evidence has also shown that young adults engage in conformity, often for selfish reasons (monetary gains) over prosocial ones (monetary costs). In other words, they show evidence of opportunistic conformity.
The purpose of this study was to find whether the association between youth and tendencies to conform could be used to motivate adolescents to engage in more positive, prosocial behavior and influence a sense of affiliation.
Four specific hypotheses were used as the premises behind this study:
age-dependent-influence hypothesis: the likelihood of being influenced depends on one’s age (i.e. adolescents are more likely to be influenced than adults)
peer-influence hypothesis: individuals are more likely to be influenced by their peers (i.e. adolescents will be more influenced by other adolescents vs. adults)
social-influence hypothesis: individuals are more likely to be swayed by social influence from other people than by nonsocial influence from a computer
direction-of-influence hypothesis: the likelihood of being influenced by individuals that are more or less prosocial than oneself (i.e. prosocial or selfish)
The methods of this study include recruiting 220 participants and assigning them to one of three groups: young adolescents (11-14 years), mid-adolescents (15-18 years), and adults (23-35 years). Each participant completed two computer tasks.
The first task, the prosocial-influence task, intended to measure prosocial behavior. The participants were assigned a charitable donation activity; they were given 50 tokens of monetary value and asked to donate to 36 charities. The caveat was that any tokens not given to charities would be returned to the individual.
In the first phase, they were asked to give the tokens out as they pleased; in the second phase, they observed others complete the same activity before doing it themselves.
The second task was an abstract reasoning task done to control for the effects of age and interindividual differences in non-verbal reasoning abilities.
In reference to the age-dependent-influence and direction-of-influence hypothesis, the results displayed that independent of the prosocial or selfish direction of influence, the likelihood of being socially influenced decreased from early adolescence to adulthood. This is supported by the adolescents’ uncertainty about making their own decisions as well as their strong desire to fit in; in fact, this argues against any notion that increased social influence is because of impulsive decision-making.
As per the peer-influence hypothesis and in support of the social influence hypothesis, all participants were equally influenced by peers and non-peers alike. In fact, adolescents were equally as likely to be influenced by adults as other teenagers.
Adolescents also displayed decreased levels of opportunistic conformity than adults since their baseline donations were higher than that of the adults, on average.
In conclusion, social norm related interventions can be effective at motivating youth to be more prosocial due to their vulnerability to peer influences.