Trust in adolescence: Development, mechanisms and future directions

Abstract

Trust is the glue of society. While the trust we place in close others is crucial for our wellbeing, trust in strangers is important to fulfill needs that families and friends cannot provide. Adolescence is an important phase for the development of trust in strangers, because the social world of adolescents expands tremendously. We provide an overview of the development of trust in adolescence by reviewing studies that used the trust game, an experimental paradigm to measure trust between dyads during monetary exchange. We start from the notion that trust is a form of social reinforcement learning in which prior beliefs about the trustworthiness of others are continuously updated by new information. Within this framework, development in adolescence is characterized by increasing uncertainty of prior beliefs, a greater tolerance of uncertainty, and a greater tendency to seek and use new information. Accordingly, there is evidence for an increase in initial trust and better adaptation of trust during repeated interactions. Childhood psychological and social-economic adversity may impact this development negatively. To further our understanding of these individual differences, we suggest ways in which the trust game can be enriched to capture trust dilemmas that are relevant to youth with diverse backgrounds.