Why teens are more self-serving than adults in social situations

Researchers have found that adolescents focus more on their own interests compared to adults when navigating social dilemmas, even when their interaction partners show greater willingness to cooperate.

The study, published today in as the final Version of Record after appearing previously as a Reviewed Preprint, supports previous findings that teens tend to cooperate less than adults, and sheds new light on how our willingness to work with others chaneLife ges from youth into adulthood. eLife’s editors describe it as important work, with a solid experimental approach to investigate cooperative behaviours in adolescents.

In everyday life, people often need to choose between acting in a way that serves their own interests and cooperating with others. While cooperation can help build positive relationships and reach shared goals, it can also mean giving up some immediate personal gain. 

“Adolescence is a time when young people learn how to navigate friendships and work with others in groups, but research suggests they remain less cooperative at this stage of life. We wanted to build on those findings to understand why this is the case,” says Xiaoyan Wu, who completed her PhD at State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, and IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University, China, and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Wu is a co-first author of the study alongside Hongyu Fu, a doctorate student at State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, and IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

The team recruited 261 participants to the study: 127 adolescents aged 14–17 years and 134 adults aged 18–30 years. They used a repeated cooperation game called the Prisoner’s Dilemma Game, where each participant was partnered up and placed in a situation where they could either work together for a shared benefit, or try to gain more for themselves at their partner’s expense. The researchers used this approach to see whether the younger participants failed to notice when a partner behaved kindly and in a cooperative manner, or whether they noticed it but were more tempted than adults to take advantage of the situation and gain more for themselves.

They saw, first of all, that teens cooperated less than adults, in line with the previous findings. This lower level of cooperation was not observed generally during the task, but occurred especially after their adult partners had cooperated in previous rounds. They also found that teens and adults were similarly good at estimating how cooperative the other person was – suggesting that adolescents notice when others are willing to work together, but feel less motivated to reciprocate.

The researchers also developed computational models to investigate the dynamic variables guiding participants’ cooperative decision making in the repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma Game. They incorporated both the participants’ expectations of their partner’s cooperation and the reward of reciprocity. Their models revealed that adults cooperated more in response to their partner’s consistent cooperation, while this pattern was absent in adolescents. However, both groups decreased cooperation in response to their partner’s consistent defection, indicating shared responses to non-cooperative behaviour.

“Our findings contribute to an understanding of the developmental aspects of cooperation and the cognitive-affective processes underlying cooperative decision making,” says co-first author Hongyu Fu. “By comparing the cooperative behaviours between adolescents and adults during the game and integrating computational modelling, we share valuable insights into the mechanisms driving cooperative behaviour across different developmental stages.”

The researchers note that there are some limitations to their work. For example, their study involved using artificial opponents with pre-determined cooperation patterns, while it is possible that participants might behave differently in more natural scenarios. Additionally, although participants were recruited from Beijing and nearby regions, minimising regional and cultural variations, they may still differ in their socioeconomic status and social experience. These differences could interact with developmental processes in shaping their cooperative behaviours.

Taking these limitations into account, the authors say their work provides an initial step in understanding cooperation motivations, with the potential for future research to explore these behaviours in more real-world contexts.

“Increasing our understanding of these behaviours could have implications for designing effective interventions to better support teenagers’ social development,” concludes senior author Chao Liu, Professor at State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, and IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research. “Our results suggest that it may help to teach teens to understand others’ intentions, as well as to strengthen how much they value fairness and reciprocate when others are kind and cooperative. It will be interesting for future studies to test whether the patterns we’ve observed also appear in more realistic situations and in more diverse groups of young people.”

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