We are often too quick to think of peer pressure as a negative thing.
But fortunately this behaviour doesn’t tend to last long. A study, led by the London School of Economics and Political Science and published in the journal Nature, has found that teenagers are likely to become less selfish by the time they reach adulthood.
Researchers closely analysed the decision-making processes of 60 teenagers and 28 adults after giving them a sum of up to £6 and asking them to choose how much of the money they’d keep and how much of it they’d give to others. The researchers then repeated the experiment with a friend of the participant watching to see whether this would affect the teenagers’ decisions. The researchers used a mouse cursor, a way of analysing thought processes in depth.
The teenagers, who were aged between 15 and 18, kept far more of the money for themselves than the adults did. They were less likely to award themselves as much of the money when a friend was watching them, but the teens were still more likely to show selfish behaviour than the adults.
Dr Nicolette Sullivan, Assistant Professor in the Department of Management at the London School of Economics and Political Science, said the study shows teenagers are “inherently more selfish than adults, but that this often disappears in adulthood”.
“Parents are often concerned that their teenagers act only with regard to their own self-interest,” Sullivan says. “We did find that when making decisions alone, teenagers were slower to think about others, compared with adults, However, this tends to go away when they reach adulthood so parents can rest assured that with age, their teenagers will become much better at considering others.”
Sullivan said that we are often too quick to think of peer pressure as a negative thing, but in the presence of friends their age, the teenagers in the experiment acted more generously than when they were alone.
“Peer influence is largely thought to be problematic,” Sullivan said. “Instead, our study shows that the presence of peers can diminish selfish behaviour among teenagers.”
Sullivan advises parents to urge their teenagers to pause more before making decisions that can affect others. “Taking a short pause before acting can help teenagers - and all of us - to think more about how our actions will affect others,” she said. “This allows information about others to catch up in our minds.”
The research quoted in this article is entitled 'Peer presence increases the prosocial behavior of adolescents by speeding the evaluation of outcomes for others', published in Nature.