Abstract
Adolescents aspire for independence. Successful independence means knowing when to rely on one's own knowledge and when to listen to others. A critical prerequisite thus is a well‐developed metacognitive ability to accurately assess the quality of one's own knowledge. Little is known about whether the strive to become an independent decision maker in adolescence is underpinned by the necessary metacognitive skills. Here, we demonstrate that metacognition matures from childhood to adolescence (N = 107) and that this process coincides with greater independent decision‐making. We show that adolescents, in contrast to children, take on others’ advice less often, but only when the advice is misleading. Finally, we demonstrate that adolescents’ reduced reliance on others’ advice is explained by their increased metacognitive skills, suggesting that a developing ability to introspect may support independent decision‐making in adolescence.
Highlights
Adolescents strive for independence, and are often accused of not listening to their parents’ advice
To test the hypothesis that advice taking during adolescent development is linked to an improved metacognitive efficiency, we tested three age groups of participants, 8–9 years, 12–13 years and 16–17 years
Age groups did not differ in IQ (as measured by WASI-II, F(2,104) = 1.24, p = 0.294; see Table 1) and IQ did not relate to any task-based measures
Summary
Adolescents strive for independence, and are often accused of not listening to their parents’ advice. | wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/desc 1 of 13 | 2 of 13. Resistance to authority (Kuhn & Laird, 2011) and increased risk-taking behaviours (Duell et al, 2018) during this period have led to the assumption that adolescents still lack the necessary abilities for making good independent decisions. This stands, at least in part, in contrast to legal and constitutional rights that allow adolescents to make independent decisions without consulting others first (e.g. medical treatment decisions, online privacy consenting, driving, voting). What are the cognitive processes that enable us to become independent and good decision makers, and when do they develop?
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