Social influence in adolescence: behavioral and neural responses to peer and expert opinion

Abstract

Social influence plays a crucial role during the teen years, with adolescents supposedly exhibiting heightened sensitivity to their peers. In this study, we examine how social influence from different sources, particularly those with varying normative and informational significance, affect adolescents opinion change. Furthermore, we investigate underlying neural dynamics to determine whether these two behaviorally similar influences share their neural mechanisms. Twenty-three participants (14-17 years old) gave their opinions about facial stimuli and received feedback from either a peer group or an expert group, while brain responses were recorded using concurrent magnetoencephalography. In a second rating session, we found that participants opinions changed in line with conflicting feedback, but only when the feedback was lower than their initial evaluation. On the neural level, conflict with the peer group evoked stronger neural responses than conflict with experts in the 230-400 ms time window. Nevertheless, there was no greater conformity toward peers. Moreover, conflict compared to no conflict decreased neural oscillations in the beta frequency range (20-27 Hz) at the right frontal and parietal channels. Taken together, our findings do not support the general assumption that adolescent behavior is excessively vulnerable to peer norms, although we found heightened neural sensitivity to peer feedback.