Implicit peer versus maternal influence on adolescents’ preferences: Differences by age and gender.

Adolescence is a formative time for identity development. A key component of identity development involves weighing the explicit opinions of close others when forming one's preferences. Little is known about how more subtle forms of social input may influence adolescents' formation of their own preferences. In the present study, we used a novel social influence paradigm to assess shifts in adolescents' preferences after viewing implicitly delivered social influence cues provided from both an adolescent's mother and a real-life friend. In a sample of 100 adolescents (aged 10-17 years), recruited in 50 pairs of real-life friends and their mothers, we tested changes in adolescents' preferences after viewing supposed ratings from each partner. We also confirmed the validity of the novel task and evaluated the effects of individual differences (i.e., participant age, gender) and relationship quality separately with parents and peers on adolescents' preference changes. Results indicated that adolescents' preferences changed as a function of the source of influence (i.e., friend or mother) and endorsement status (i.e., endorsed or not endorsed) of the stimulus, whereby preference ratings increased to stimuli endorsed by friends relative to mothers. This effect was stronger for early versus middle adolescents and for adolescent girls compared to boys. Change in preferences was unrelated to relationship quality with either partner. Findings from this study provide insight into the features of social information that are relevant for adolescent identity development. Specifically, it pinpoints who has strong influence on which adolescents and what characteristics of ecologically based social information are influential. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).