Social relationships in adolescence: Trust and reciprocity

One of the most prominent changes in adolescence concerns the way adolescents experience and develop social relationships. Two processes that are highly important for developing secure and intimate social relationships are trust and reciprocity. Trust helps individuals to develop social relationships, whereas reciprocity is crucial for maintaining social relationships. This chapter investigates the development of trust and reciprocity from a behavioral and neuroscience perspective. In the first section, the authors show that economic games that manipulate trust and reciprocity conditions can be informative for understanding motivations for trusting others, including the developmental changes in these processes. Next, the authors describe neuroimaging studies that examined trust and reciprocity in adults and adolescents. Special emphasis is given to possible individual differences relating to gender, perspective taking skills, and social context, factors that all may influence trust and reciprocity behavior. Finally, the chapter will end with several compelling questions that are important for relating lab-based experimental designs and neuroscientific studies to understanding trust and reciprocity in the complexity of adolescents’ daily lives.

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