Taking Risks on Behalf of Parents and Friends in Young Adulthood

• In Event: 3-138 - Beyond Sex, Drugs, and Rock n’ Roll: The Adaptive Functions of Adolescent Risk-Taking

Integrative Statement

Though risk taking is often framed as anti-social and destructive, recent work has begun to suggest that this may not always be the case. Teens and young adults regulate their behavior if their decisions affect others, and often take risks with the intention of helping others (Do, Guassi Moreira, & Telzer, 2017; Guassi Moreira & Telzer, 2018). While it is clear that close social others – including friends and parents – can impact risky decision making in young adults, most prior research has examined parental or friend influence on risky decision making in isolation (Chein, Albert, O’Brien, Uckert & Steinberg, 2011; Telzer, Ichien, & Qu, 2015). This is a significant limitation because in the real world, individuals must often make choices that differentially impact multiple close others. In the present two studies, we sought to fill this knowledge gap by examining how young adults consider their parents and peers when making risky choices.

In study 1, 174 young adults (mean age = 20.72 years, SD =2.16; 54 female) completed a variant of the Columbia Card Task to examine how young adults prioritize a parent and friend when making decisions that have opposing consequences for each. On each trial, participants viewed 16 overturned cards on a computer screen and were told that they could win points by turning over “gain” cards and lose points by turning over “lose” cards. For half of the trials, participants stood to gain points for their parent and to lose points for their friend and these contingencies were flipped for the other half of trials. On each trial, participants had to choose whether to turn over cards (risky choice) or whether to end that trial (safe choice). Across the sample, participants were significantly more likely to turn over a card when their parent stood to benefit and their friend stood to lose (γ=2.585, p=.001).

In study 2, we examined whether the effects of study 1 generalized to other forms of decision making. In a sample of 46 participants (mean age = 20.26, SD=1.39; 31 female), we again administered the modified Columbia Card Task as well as two other paradigms. The two other paradigms assessed (i) similarity of self-parent and self-friend representations using a trait lexical judgment task and (ii) how readily participants learned various reward contingencies on behalf of their parent or friend. We replicated our Columbia Card Task findings and further found that participants rated themselves as marginally more similar to their parents (mean parent – friend similarity: .05, t = 1.9, p = .06), and learned significantly better on behalf of their parent (mean parent - friend learning index: 23, t = 3.5, p < .01). Importantly, learning propensity for parents vs friends predicted preferences for parent over friend on the Columbia Card Task (γ = 0.313, p = .042).

Together, these results suggest that young adults weigh parents more heavily than friends when making risky choices. Future work will examine how these preferences change across development and what neurocognitive ingredients give rise to such preferences.

Authors

• Jennifer Silvers, UCLA
  Presenting Author

• Joao Guassi Moreira, University of California, Los Angeles
  Non-Presenting Author