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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

502 adolescents (15-17) played an interactive pre-task Cyberball, where they were either excluded or included, and then took part in the Intentions Game (elifesciences.org/articles/104...) to make and predict another's social decisions. We examined both behavioural and computational outcomes...

...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.