Are teenagers more swayed by others' generosity than adults?
Young adolescents were the most likely to shift their real-money charity donations toward what others gave, and unlike adults they followed generous examples as readily as stingy ones.
Source
Prosocial Influence and Opportunistic Conformity in Adolescents and Young Adults
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — 3 (age group, between) x 3 (source: adults, teenagers, computer) x 2 (prosocial vs selfish influence) donation task; participants donated, saw others' donations, then donated again.
- N
- N=220 · 220 participants aged 11-35 split into young adolescents (11-14), midadolescents (15-18) and adults (23-35).
- Population
- UK school pupils aged 11-18 tested in school computer rooms and university subject-pool adults aged 23-35.
- Outcome
- Probability and size of changing a donation toward observed donations; response times; baseline donations.
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
Participants aged 11 to 35 received tokens with real cash value and decided how much to donate to each of 36 charities. In a second phase they saw how much other donors had supposedly given to the same charity (the average of adults, the average of teenagers, or a random computer number) and could donate again. An adaptive algorithm made the others' donation either more generous or more selfish than the participant's first choice, so the researchers could compare conformity in both directions.
What they found
Overall, people changed their donation on 43% of trials, and about three-quarters of those changes moved toward the observed amount. Young adolescents (11-14) were more likely to be influenced than midadolescents and adults, especially when others were more generous, and everyone was more swayed by people than by the computer. Teenagers were not more swayed by other teenagers than by adults. Adults showed opportunistic conformity, conforming more to selfish than to generous norms, whereas both adolescent groups conformed equally in both directions; being influenced was linked to slower, not faster, decisions.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Adolescents were tested in their own schools in bigger groups, while adults were tested in small groups at a university, so the setting differs from age and could explain part of the gap. The study did not measure how much money meant to each age group, and participants were never told the token exchange rate. The adolescent lack of opportunistic conformity was unexpected, not preregistered, and the authors say it needs replication. The design is cross-sectional, so it compares different people of different ages rather than tracking change within individuals.
Key terms
- Prosocial influence
- The tendency to act more generously (or less) after seeing how generous other people have been.
- Opportunistic conformity
- Conforming more readily when the norm suits your self-interest, such as copying stingy donors more than generous ones.
- Anchoring
- Being pulled toward a number you have just seen, even when that number is irrelevant, such as a random computer value.
- Peer influence
- Extra susceptibility to influence from people of your own age group compared with other age groups.
- Influence probability
- The share of trials on which a participant changed their decision in the direction of the observed donation.
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Quiz yourself
Which age group was most likely to change its donation toward others' donations?
Common questions
Why include a computer as a source of donations?
People can copy numbers purely because they saw them (anchoring). Comparing human sources with a random computer let the authors show that social influence was stronger than this non-social pull.
Did teenagers copy other teenagers more than adults?
No. Unlike earlier studies of risk taking, adolescents were equally influenced by teenage and adult donors, suggesting peer-specific influence may depend on the domain.
Does being influenced mean acting impulsively?
Apparently not: participants took longer to decide on trials where they changed their donation toward others, which fits a more deliberate process.
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