Development
Are teenagers more swayed by others' generosity than adults?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
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.
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.
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Key findings
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.
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
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