Question
Peer Pressure Has a Positive Side
Annie Murphy Paul
2015
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Parents of teenagers often view their children's friends with something like suspicion. They worry that the adolescent peer group has the power to prod its members into behavior that is foolish and even dangerous. Such wariness is well founded: statistics show, for example, that a teenage driver with a same-age passenger in the car is at higher risk of a fatal crash than an adolescent driving alone or with an adult.
In a seminal 2005 study, psychologist Laurence Steinberg of Temple University and his co-author, psychologist Margo Gardner, then at Temple, divided 306 people into three age groups: young adolescents, with a mean age of 14; older adolescents, with a mean age of 19; and adults, aged 24 and older. Subjects played a computerized driving game in which the player must avoid crashing into a wall that materializes, without warning, on the roadway. Steinberg and Gardner randomly assigned some participants to play alone or with two same-age peers looking on.
Older adolescents scored about 50 percent higher on an index of risky driving when their peers were in the room—and the driving of early adolescents was fully twice as reckless when other young teens were around. In contrast, adults behaved in similar ways regardless of whether they were on their own or observed by others. “The presence of peers makes adolescents and youth, but not adults, more likely to take risks,” Steinberg and Gardner concluded.
Yet in the years following the publication of this study, Steinberg began to believe that this interpretation did not capture the whole picture. As he and other researchers examined the question of why teens were more apt to take risks in the company of other teenagers, they came to suspect that a crowd's influence need not always be negative. Now some experts are proposing that we should take advantage of the teen brain's keen sensitivity to the presence of friends and leverage it to improve education.
NOT SO RISKY BUSINESS
In a 2011 study, Steinberg and his colleagues turned to functional MRI to investigate how the presence of peers affects the activity in the adolescent brain. They scanned the brains of 40 teens and adults who were playing a virtual driving game designed to test whether players would brake at a yellow light or speed on through the intersection.
The brains of teenagers, but not adults, showed greater activity in two regions associated with rewards (the ventral striatum and the orbitofrontal cortex) when they were being observed by same-age peers than when alone. In other words, rewards are more intense for teens when they are with peers, which motivates them to pursue higher-risk experiences that might bring a big payoff (such as the thrill of just making the light before it turns red). But Steinberg suspected this tendency could also have its advantages.
In his latest experiment, published online in August, Steinberg and his colleagues used a computerized version of a card game called the Iowa Gambling Task to investigate how the presence of peers affects the way young people gather and apply information. In this variant on the game, a computer would indicate a card from one of four decks, and players could decide to reveal that card or pass. Two of the decks would lead to an overall loss, and two would lead to overall gains. The experimenters told players that some decks were “good” and others “bad” but did not tell players which were which. Over the course of playing the game, participants gradually figured out which decks to return to and which to avoid. In Steinberg's study, which involved 101 adolescent males, researchers randomly assigned participants to play alone or in the presence of three same-age peers.
The results: Teens who played the Iowa Gambling Task under the eyes of fellow adolescents engaged in more exploratory behavior, learned faster from both positive and negative outcomes, and achieved better performance on the task than those who played in solitude. “What our study suggests is that teenagers learn more quickly and more effectively when their peers are present than when they're on their own,” Steinberg says. And this finding could have important implications for how we think about educating adolescents.
Question 3
Write: What is the main idea of paragraphs 5-8?
Annie Murphy Paul
2015
Font Size
Medium
Parents of teenagers often view their children's friends with something like suspicion. They worry that the adolescent peer group has the power to prod its members into behavior that is foolish and even dangerous. Such wariness is well founded: statistics show, for example, that a teenage driver with a same-age passenger in the car is at higher risk of a fatal crash than an adolescent driving alone or with an adult.
In a seminal 2005 study, psychologist Laurence Steinberg of Temple University and his co-author, psychologist Margo Gardner, then at Temple, divided 306 people into three age groups: young adolescents, with a mean age of 14; older adolescents, with a mean age of 19; and adults, aged 24 and older. Subjects played a computerized driving game in which the player must avoid crashing into a wall that materializes, without warning, on the roadway. Steinberg and Gardner randomly assigned some participants to play alone or with two same-age peers looking on.
Older adolescents scored about 50 percent higher on an index of risky driving when their peers were in the room—and the driving of early adolescents was fully twice as reckless when other young teens were around. In contrast, adults behaved in similar ways regardless of whether they were on their own or observed by others. “The presence of peers makes adolescents and youth, but not adults, more likely to take risks,” Steinberg and Gardner concluded.
Yet in the years following the publication of this study, Steinberg began to believe that this interpretation did not capture the whole picture. As he and other researchers examined the question of why teens were more apt to take risks in the company of other teenagers, they came to suspect that a crowd's influence need not always be negative. Now some experts are proposing that we should take advantage of the teen brain's keen sensitivity to the presence of friends and leverage it to improve education.
NOT SO RISKY BUSINESS
In a 2011 study, Steinberg and his colleagues turned to functional MRI to investigate how the presence of peers affects the activity in the adolescent brain. They scanned the brains of 40 teens and adults who were playing a virtual driving game designed to test whether players would brake at a yellow light or speed on through the intersection.
The brains of teenagers, but not adults, showed greater activity in two regions associated with rewards (the ventral striatum and the orbitofrontal cortex) when they were being observed by same-age peers than when alone. In other words, rewards are more intense for teens when they are with peers, which motivates them to pursue higher-risk experiences that might bring a big payoff (such as the thrill of just making the light before it turns red). But Steinberg suspected this tendency could also have its advantages.
In his latest experiment, published online in August, Steinberg and his colleagues used a computerized version of a card game called the Iowa Gambling Task to investigate how the presence of peers affects the way young people gather and apply information. In this variant on the game, a computer would indicate a card from one of four decks, and players could decide to reveal that card or pass. Two of the decks would lead to an overall loss, and two would lead to overall gains. The experimenters told players that some decks were “good” and others “bad” but did not tell players which were which. Over the course of playing the game, participants gradually figured out which decks to return to and which to avoid. In Steinberg's study, which involved 101 adolescent males, researchers randomly assigned participants to play alone or in the presence of three same-age peers.
The results: Teens who played the Iowa Gambling Task under the eyes of fellow adolescents engaged in more exploratory behavior, learned faster from both positive and negative outcomes, and achieved better performance on the task than those who played in solitude. “What our study suggests is that teenagers learn more quickly and more effectively when their peers are present than when they're on their own,” Steinberg says. And this finding could have important implications for how we think about educating adolescents.
Question 3
Write: What is the main idea of paragraphs 5-8?
Answers
GPT-4o mini
The main idea of paragraphs 5-8 is that while previous research indicated that the presence of peers leads to increased risky behavior in adolescents, more recent studies suggest that this social influence can also have positive effects. Specifically, research by Steinberg and his colleagues shows that adolescents may learn more effectively and engage in exploratory behavior when peers are present. These findings have potential implications for enhancing educational practices by recognizing the benefits of peer influence in learning contexts.