An effort-based social feedback paradigm reveals aversion to popularity in socially anxious participants and increased motivation in adolescents

Dienke J Bos, Emily D Barnes, Benjamin M Silver, Eliana L Ajodan, Elysha Clark-Whitney, Matthew A Scult, Jonathan D Power and Rebecca M Jones

PLOS ONE, 2021, vol. 16, issue 4, 1-16

Abstract: We created a novel social feedback paradigm to study how motivation for potential social links is influenced in adolescents and adults. 88 participants (42F/46M) created online posts and then expended physical effort to show their posts to other users, who varied in number of followers and probability of positive feedback. We focused on two populations of particular interest from a social feedback perspective: adolescents relative to young adults (13–17 vs 18–24 years of age), and participants with social anxiety symptoms. Individuals with higher self-reported symptoms of social anxiety did not follow the typical pattern of increased effort to obtain social feedback from high status peers. Adolescents were more willing to exert physical effort on the task than young adults. Overall, participants were more likely to exert physical effort for high social status users and for users likely to yield positive feedback, and men were more likely to exert effort than women, findings that parallel prior results in effort-based tasks with financial rather than social rewards. Together the findings suggest social motivation is malleable, driven by factors of social status and the likelihood of a positive social outcome, and that age, sex, and social anxiety significantly impact patterns of socially motivated decision-making.

Date: 2021
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0249326 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 49326&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0249326

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0249326

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().