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Category: Project

Description: Adolescents demonstrate an enormous capacity to prosocially help others, even when doing so may incur social risk to themselves. Using an accelerated longitudinal design, this study tested whether underlying perceptions of social risks and prosocial tendencies develop together over time. Adolescents (Mage = 12.82 years, 10-14 years at wave 1; N = 893) were assessed with self-report measures at baseline and one- and two-year follow-ups. We found that young adolescents showed more prosocial tendencies during years when they were less tolerant of social risk. However, the link between social risk tolerance and prosocial tendencies changed significantly from grades 6 to 10, such that older adolescents showed marginally more prosocial tendencies during years when they were more tolerant of social risk. Additional individual differences by empathy (but not sensation seeking) emerged. Results suggest that the ability to tolerate social risks may be associated with prosocial engagement.