Social Anxiety, Avoidance, and Decision-Making in Adolescents: A Culturally Stratified Test of Social Information Processing Pathways

Adolescence is a developmental period in which social-evaluative sensitivity intensifies and interpersonal conflicts acquire heightened psychological weight. However, the processes through which internally experienced vulnerabilities, and especially social anxiety, determine conflict behaviour are not well defined, especially in non-Western socio-ecologically diverse settings. This work is a contribution to the social information processing (SIP) theory, as it tests a moderated-mediator framework in which social anxiety is an antecedent of the selection of a conflict resolution strategy and, subsequently, of the quality of decision-making among adolescents. Structural equation modelling with bootstrap-based indirect effect estimation and measurement invariance analysis was employed to study these pathways in a stratified sample of an Indian adolescent population ( N = 496) categorised into urban, semi-urban, and rural residence groups. The results show that it is not the overall reduction in problem-solving that is the prevailing process through which societal anxiety leads to low-quality decisions. The findings have practical implications for the design of specific interventions, in that minimising avoidance-oriented evaluative processing can have more beneficial effects on decision motivation in universal skills training, particularly when community relations are tight, leading to greater social consequences. Altogether, the findings provide statistically supported evidence consistent with SIP theory and elucidate the mechanisms underlying the association between avoidance and decreased decision-making quality among adolescents in socio-ecological contexts.