Adolescents use social information more flexibly than adults during exploration

Adolescents are often portrayed as socially susceptible and prone to risk-taking. However, this sensitivity to others can also serve an adaptive function, helping adolescents navigate uncertainty and gain valuable experiences. In real-world settings, young people constantly face trade-offs between exploring unfamiliar options, exploiting what they know, or learning from others. Yet, these processes are often studied in isolation. We developed an experimental paradigm to examine how adolescents and adults navigate the trade-offs between these options, and when social learning is beneficial or detrimental. In a multiplayer 64-armed bandit task, 178 adolescents and 116 adults were asked to collect as many points as possible. On each trial, participants could either explore a new option, stick to a previously selected one, or copy the choice of another player, a “demonstrator”. We systematically varied the quality of demonstrators to test how participants learned to arbitrate between reliable and unreliable social sources. We hypothesised that because of their social susceptibility, adolescents would outperform adults by copying more often from good demonstrators. Adolescents and adults performed similarly well, however adolescents were more flexible social learners than adults, as they were more likely to increase copying when demonstrators were successful and to reduce copying when they were not. Reinforcement learning modeling showed that adolescents had higher learning rates for learning about demonstrators, and lower decision temperatures, indicating they integrated social information more rapidly and relied less on individual exploration. These findings suggest that adolescents’ social sensitivity, often viewed as a risk factor, can support efficient and adaptive learning when good social sources are present.