Social Status, and Public Goods Game: Measuring Adolescents’ Public and Private Conformity Based on Confederate’s Status and Decision

Peer influence is one of the controversial matters since adolescents are more likely to be susceptible to it during this developmental period. We examined how adolescents are influenced by the prosocial and antisocial decisions of peers with different knowledge-based statuses (high and low) in public and private contexts, as well as to assess whether personality and gender play a role. 132 boys, and 139 girls (M = 17, SD = 1.495) were randomly assigned to one of the four conditions of a 2x2 combination of the confederate’s decision and status factors. Each adolescent filled out the NEO_FFI personality scale and then participated in a two-part experiment with seven virtual confederates. In the first part, to manipulate the knowledge-based social status, participants completed the Quantitative Estimation task. Then, adolescents participated in a modified Public Goods Game to measure conformity towards high and low-status decisions in public and private contexts. Results indicated that adolescents tended to conform more to high-status peers rather than low-status ones, particularly in prosocial decisions over antisocial decisions. Interestingly, girls showed more conformity to low-status peers in public prosocial decisions, while boys tended to conform to high-status peers and internalize the influence privately. High-status individuals were influential in getting adolescents to internalize antisocial behavior, even without public acknowledgment. Personality traits such as Agreeableness and Extraversion also played a role in conforming behaviors. Overall, the findings suggest that leveraging the influence of high-status peers could help in promoting prosocial behavior and discouraging free-riding among adolescents in social decision-making contexts.