Uncertainty about others’ trustworthiness increases during adolescence and guides social information sampling

Abstract

Adolescence is a key life phase for developing well-adjusted social behaviour. An essential component of well-adjusted social behaviour is the ability to update our beliefs about the trustworthiness of others based on gathered information. Here, we examined how adolescents (n = 157, 10–24 years) sequentially sampled information about the trustworthiness of peers and how they used this information to update their beliefs about others’ trustworthiness. Our Bayesian computational modelling approach revealed an adolescence-emergent increase in uncertainty of prior beliefs about others’ trustworthiness. As a consequence, early to mid-adolescents (ages 10–16) gradually relied less on their prior beliefs and more on the gathered evidence when deciding to sample more information, and when deciding to trust. We propose that these age-related differences could be adaptive to the rapidly changing social environment of early and mid-adolescents. Together, these findings contribute to the understanding of adolescent social development by revealing adolescent-emergent flexibility in prior beliefs about others that drives adolescents’ information sampling and trust decisions.