Poster #232 - Who Influences who? Differential Susceptibility to Social Influence in Children and Adolescents

• In Event: 1-115 - Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Section - Social Relationships

Integrative Statement

Children and adolescents use people with whom they identify as a reference point for how they perceive and judge their environment (Stallen et al., 2013). In this process, people of different age may play differing roles as reference groups. The current study investigated the importance of adults, adolescents, and children as reference groups with regard to children’s and adolescent’s perceptions of clothing styles. Clothing can be a way to express one’s personality and can create an important form of identity-signaling (Berger, 2008). As clothing style becomes especially important during adolescence and give that it may serve to establish one’s social position among peers, we expected that adolescents would be more susceptible to the influence of other adolescents than of children, when judging the degree of coolness ascribed to clothing. Children were expected to be more susceptible to influence from their own peers (i.e., other children) and adults than adolescents.
We used a computer-based experiment to test our expectations. Participants included 70 adolescents (M = 13.98 years, SD = .89; 62.9% girls) and 59 children (M = 8.02 years, SD = .81; 52.5% girls). In a first neutral condition (A), participants were asked to rate the “coolness” of 36 t-shirts. In a second condition (B), participants were told that people of different ages (adolescents, adults and children) had already rated the t-shirts and that participants would need to add their own ratings. The difference between the judgments of conditions A and B was used as an indicator of social influence.
When considering the entire group of children and adolescents (n = 129), a Wald-test showed a significant change in participants’ assessments from the neutral condition (A) to the social influence condition (B) in the direction of all reference groups (p < .001), indicating social influence. More detailed comparisons between children and adolescents were conducted using multi-level analyses. We found no difference between adolescents’ and children’s susceptibility to influence from adolescents and adults. In contrast, a significant two-way-interaction (p = .006) between participant age group (children vs. adolescents) and reference group revealed that children were more susceptible to the influence of children than adolescents to children.
Results indicate children and adolescents are generally susceptible to social influence in clothing style judgments. Adolescents and children were equally influenced by other adolescents. Children might consider adolescents to be experts in clothing style and were thus influenced by them. Children, in contrast, were a more important reference group for children than for adolescents. Children may consider other children to be peers and thus an important reference group; adolescents, in contrast, may seek to avoid being associated with children. Adults appeared to play a similar role for both children and adolescents. As adults neither represent a peer group for children nor for adolescents, it is possible they exerted similar influence on children and adolescents. Possible implications for supporting children and adolescents in developing their social identity will be discussed.

Authors

• Sara Egger, University of Fribourg
  Presenting Author

• Philipp Nicolay, University of Wuppertal
  Non-Presenting Author

• Christian Huber, University of Wuppertal
  Non-Presenting Author

• Christoph Michael Müller, University of Fribourg
  Non-Presenting Author