Tina Venema is a social psychologist who currently works as a post doc at Aarhus University (Denmark) on the topic of destructive behaviour. She completed my PhD on the effectiveness of nudges at Utrecht University (The Netherlands). Throughout her career she has always been fascinated by the question why people continue to make decisions that are bad for them.

Project description

Peer influence is cited as one of the strongest predictors of maladaptive behaviours in adolescents. Decades of research suggest that this social modelling is primarily motivated by the desire to belong to the modelled group, and by the desire to reduce uncertainty about what the appropriate behaviour is. While the first motive received much research attention, Research is lacking in regarding the uncertainty reduction account. Technologies such as mouse-tracker software provide novel opportunities to unobtrusively measure this aspect of peer influence. This study will investigate whether undesirable decisions by adolescents due to bad peer influence is mediated by reduced uncertainty about the decision.

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