Learning to learn: development of social learning across adolescence

A key goal of becoming an adult is to be able to make independent decisions. Should I wear a helmet on the scooter? Should I be drinking at the party tonight? How much should I prepare for the next test? Social learning can help us acquire the necessary knowledge and skills to reach this goal.

Social learning consists in searching and using information from our social environment. Since other people are likely to have faced similar problems to ours, we can use their experience (or lack thereof) to choose whether or not to take their advice.

This means that a crucial skill of a good social learner is to know when and from whom to take advice. Especially in the era of the internet and social media, it can be hard to know who is a trustworthy source of information. When this cannot be known with certainty, we have to rely on social cues to form an opinion. Such cues could be other people’s confidence levels, their success in a given task, or whether or not a large majority agrees on certain issues.

In this project, we will run a series of behavioural experiments to test how adolescents learn to use such different social cues to decide whether or not to use social information.

Who are we looking for:

A student to support us with all the main aspects of the research project. This is a great opportunity to learn how research is done from beginning to end! (But don’t worry, we have a lot of material you can build upon and don’t have to invent anything from scratch).

Your main tasks will be:

–        Contributing to the study design and refinement of research questions

–        Pre-registering the study

–        Collecting data (online, using Prolific)

–        Conducting data analysis

–        Write a report

The ideal candidate is:

–        Comfortable with using R for data analysis

–        Has experience with programming behavioral experiments (any language) or strong motivation to learn

Internship period: Jan/Feb 2023 – May/June 2023 (flexible dates)

Who are we:

You will join the Connected Minds Lab (http://bits-of-information.org/DDN/). In our lab, we value open science practices, such as pre-registration, code review and code sharing. This is an excellent opportunity to learn how these practices are integrated over the course of a scientific project. As part of your internship/thesis, you will be part of our vibrant research community. You will be able to join our weekly lab meetings, where we present our work, invite exciting speakers from all over the world, and try to have fun while doing research.

If you are interested, email Andrea Gradassi with:

●       a short description of your motivation

●       your CV