The Impact of Peer Group Size on Adolescent Socially Risky Decision-Making Behavior
Open Access
- Author:
- Leonard, Tess
- Area of Honors:
- Biobehavioral Health
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Nina Lauharatanahirun, Thesis Supervisor
Kari Christine Kugler, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- Decision-making
adolescence
social risk
non-social risk
health promoting behaviors
positive social risk
peer groups - Abstract:
- Adolescence demonstrates a dynamic time where young people are making autonomous decisions to interact with new social groups as they move away from parental control. The decision to interact with new people to make new friends is healthy and normative for adolescents. However, initiating new friendships with peers is socially risky as it introduces potential rejection. There is limited literature that confirms whether the number of peers adolescents choose to approach results in an increased experience of rejection. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis was to investigate how adolescents respond to peer groups within socially risky environments. Furthermore, differing adolescent responses between risky social and non-social environments were measured by a novel social analogue risk task (SART) modified from the well-established Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART; Lejuez et al., 2002). We also examined the correlations between behavioral risk taking during the SART and BART to self-reported risk taking. To measure social risk taking, adolescents (N=192) played the SART where they were faced with decisions to interact (or not) with groups of peers that varied by sizes of one, two, four, or six. Adolescents (N=178) also completed the BART to measure individual non-social risk taking. Results indicated that adolescents differ in their risk taking between social and non-social environments, such that adolescents were more socially risk averse, which may explain why adolescents may shy away from generating friendships with peers. The SART was not correlated with self-reported social risk-taking behavior, but the BART was correlated with one measure of self-reported risk-taking behavior. We found no significant difference in adolescents’ decisions to interact among varying group sizes. This finding may be advantageous for adolescent health as it indicates adolescents are not as sensitive to group size when making socially risky choices to initiate interactions with others. This insensitivity is potentially adaptive during the period of adolescence when youth are exploring and forming new friendships with others and should be further explored in future research.