A youth-engaged approach to explore adolescent social influence processes within digital contexts

Over the past decade, social media have become one of adolescents’ primary means of peer interactions and a crucial backdrop for important developmental trajectories. The unique features that allow adolescents near-constant opportunities to engage with, learn from, and alter their behaviors to match those of their peers, a process known as social influence. However, how adolescents perceive and respond to digital social influences and the underlying neurobiological processes that support these behaviors remain to be studied. This integrative dissertation sought to investigate adolescent social influence processes within digital contexts using youth-engaged approaches. Using a qualitative photovoice methodology, study 1 found that adolescents’ experiences of digital social influence are shaped both by online and offline contexts and can have both positive and negative developmental impacts. Moreover, we identified several ways in which racially and ethnically minoritized adolescent resist social influence to create digital spaces that better serve their own developmental goals. Study 2 highlighted the unique process of working with adolescents to design a novel neuroimaging task that captures the nuances of their lived experiences on social media. Study 3 used neuroimaging methods to show that negative reward prediction errors in the NAcc predicted greater conformity to peers when seeing digital behaviors that were misaligned from adolescents’ own. Together, these studies show how individual differences, including adolescents’ racial identity or neurobiological sensitivity to reward, can interact with social media affordances to shape how adolescents perceive and conform to social influence online. Moreover, these studies exemplify how traditional research processes can be modified to include youth voices and ensure research questions, methods, and findings are more relevant, accessible, and applicable to those they aim to serve.