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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...

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...