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Question: I am interested in whether there is anything in the brain that means adolescents become more interested in gaining the respect and attention of their peers rather than that of the adults around them. With young children they are very keen to please and gain recognition from the adults around them, but with adolescents it seems they find greater reward in the attention from peers. Is there anything behind this?
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Comments
vmarshall commented on :
That’s interesting. I’m wondering if there’s anything teachers can do to replicate/simulate that same feeling in teenagers as the appreciation they gain from their peers. Would certainly help relationships and outcomes between teachers and students if it were possible.
Nicola commented on :
Not sure simulation of being a peer is possible (or desirable!) since partly adolescents are seeking to fit themselves into a peer reference group. But some of the ‘lack of respect’ evident probably stems from social anxiety and difficulty reading people – so more explicit approaches by parents and teachers about how they feel / what they are thinking may go some way.
Lucía commented on :
There is important work by David Yaeger on how interventions and interactions should acknowledge teens desire to feel respected and be accorded status (instead of “telling them what to do”). Here is the link: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318166019_Why_Interventions_to_Influence_Adolescent_Behavior_Often_Fail_but_Could_Succeed
Kinga commented on :
Nicola mentioned theory of mind. There is also the development of metacognitive skills. The ability to see ourselves from “”outside””. It is natural that teen consider their peers to be important reference points.
Richard commented on :
No short answer to this question . . . but. . .
Gardner and Steinberg (2005) used a driving simulator with a game called ‘Chicken’. In the game, the participants had to drive as far as possible along a track and collect points according to the distance travelled. Each participant played the game several times. In each round, the researchers gave the participants a signal to tell them that a barrier might imminently appear, resulting in a crash that would result in no points from that particular round. It was up to the participant how risky to be and how far they decided to keep driving after the signal appeared. In planning the study, the researchers had thought that the number of crashes would act as a measure of risk-taking. However, when these were counted and compared between three different age groups (adolescents, young adults aged between 18 and 22 and adults), there was no difference between them. This finding (and many others from similar risk-based studies) seems to fly in the face of what we observe in adolescent behaviour. After all, it is during adolescence that we observe elevated rates of experimentation with alcohol, tobacco, drugs, unprotected sex, violent and non-violent crime and reckless driving. So why in such a consequence-free situation did the adolescents not take a few more risks? It is possible that real-life risk-taking situations are simply difficult to simulate in a laboratory environment and, therefore, the results do not reflect what would happen in a real-world situation. Nevertheless, employing such a reductionist approach (i.e. isolating all but a single experimental factor) in such studies is the only effective method to attribute the cause of particular events in a study. All an experimenter can do is ensure the scenario provided is as realistic as possible for the scientific issue being investigated. The finding of Gardner and Steinberg does appear robust, however, and a further experiment revealed the explanation for the similarity of scores between participant groups when researchers repeated the same game – this time with an audience. In this version, the study included the addition of two observers from the same age group as the participants who watched them playing the game. Now the results were strikingly different (Steinberg, 2007). The adolescent group had twice as many crashes when surrounded by their peers. In contrast, the adults were unaffected. The findings were clear: adolescents are far more likely to behave recklessly when in a group. When we add this to the fact that adolescents are driven to spend such a large amount of their time among peers (as we learned at the beginning of this chapter), this could mean that they rarely get the chance to make the more considered decisions we know that they are capable of making.
Richard commented on :
The above from Ian Devonshire’s chapter in Neuroscience for Teachers