Ana da Silva Pinho is a PhD candidate in the Connected Minds Lab and at the Department of Developmental Psychology. Her project broadly focuses on social learning and behavior change in adolescence. In one line of research, she investigates how adolescents learn from each other, how this is shaped by their social environment (i.e., norms, networks, affiliations) and how this affects behaviour and its diffusion over the course of development. In another line of work, she is interested in the mechanisms (cognitive, computational) involved in reward learning and social media behaviour.

Expertise and research fields

• Adolescent development 
• Social learning
• Behavioural change
• Social norms
• Social media
• Reward learning

Research methods

• Experimental tasks (offline and online)
• Social network analysis
• Computational modeling 
• Surveys

Current research projects

• Majority and popularity effects on norm formation | We show that the impact of majority is stronger than popular peers, and that peers influence adolescents for better: leading to rejection of risk-taking and endorsement of prosociality.
• Social rewards and social media engagement of teenagers: a computational account | We investigate developmental and individual differences in social media reward sensitivity and social media behaviour.
• Adolescent’s sensitivity to normative information from peers and teachers | We investigate the impact of peers and teachers on adolescents’ own norms and behavioral intentions.
• The impact of group norms internalisation on intention of behaviour | We investigate how changes in intentions for real-world behaviours are shaped by direct exposue to group norms and indirectly via a process of norm internalisation across different life stages. 
• The role of valence of online social information on teenagers’ opinions | We investigate the impact of online peer commentary on teenagers’ opinions about real-life matters.