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How do exclusion and adversity drive social learning in adolescence? Here, @drjk.bsky.social, Lyn Ellett and I show that social exclusion reduces adolescent belief flexibility about others at a later point in time, and reduces the ability to generalise from social cues - 🧵 1/5

We found that adolescents typically learn via "social contagion" (becoming more like their partner after observation) rather than "self-insertion" (assuming others will act like them, as in our previous adult samples). Being excluded within the cyberball pre-task alters this learning process...

...pre-exclusion in the cyberball (relatively trivial exclusion!) increased state paranoia, and caused adolescents to become less sensitive to incoming social cues, making participants' beliefs more fixed and diminishing the impact of other-to-self information transfer.