Misinformation poses a significant threat to modern society. Children and adolescents, highly active on social media, are particularly vulnerable to encountering misinformation from peers. Assessing whether intentionality impacts moral evaluations of misinformers, considering age and group norms, is crucial.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTypically, children and adolescents dislike peers who deviate from their peer group's norm, preferring normative peers who are loyal to the peer ingroup. Yet children and adolescents also consider whether the behavior displayed by a deviant peer aligns with generic societally valued norms when evaluating peers within intergroup contexts. In an age where misinformation is rampant online, seeking the truth exemplifies a generic norm that is widely valued but not always upheld given that individuals often show loyalty to the ingroup.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Appl Dev Psychol
January 2023
Examining the forms of social and moral reasoning adolescents use is important for understanding youth engagement with public health guidelines. The present work examined adolescents' perceptions of social norms and associated reasoning in the COVID-19 context. Participants ( = 127, age = 17.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrevious developmental research shows that young children display a preference for ingroup members when it comes to who they accept information from - even when that information is false. However, it is not clear how this ingroup bias develops into adolescence, and how it affects responses about peers who misinform in intergroup contexts, which is important to explore with growing numbers of young people on online platforms. Given that the developmental span from childhood to adolescence is when social groups and group norms are particularly important, the present study took a Social Reasoning Developmental Approach.
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