Early Adolescents’ Food Selection After Evaluating the Healthiness of Remote Peers’ Food Choices Cobo Reyes Cano, Ramón Lacomba Arias, Juan Antonio Lagos García, Francisco Miguel Reuben, Ernesto Zenker, Christina Adolescents Food choices Peer effect All authors acknowledge financial support from Cluster Grant, R18023, at Zayed University. Juan Antonio Lacomba and Francisco Lagos also acknowledge support from MCINN-FEDER PGC2018-097811-B-I00; Ramon Cobo-Reyes acknowledges support from the American University of Sharjah FRG20 Grant This study investigates whether asking early adolescents to evaluate the food choices of remote peers improves their own food selection. Participants were students from fifth (N = 219, Mage = 9.30 years) and sixth grades (N = 248, Mage = 10.28 years) of varying nationalities living in the United Arab Emirates (race and ethnicity were not collected). Students saw peers’ healthy or unhealthy food choices before picking their own food. In some conditions, students also critically evaluated the healthiness of the peers’ choices. Evalua- tion of peer choices led to healthier decisions (d = .53) to the point that it offsets the negative impact of observing unhealthy peer choices. This effect is larger for sixth graders compared to fifth graders. 2026-01-14T10:53:56Z 2026-01-14T10:53:56Z 2021 journal article Publisher version: Cobo-Reyes R, Lacomba JA, Lagos F, Zenker C, Reuben E. Early Adolescents' Food Selection After Evaluating the Healthiness of Remote Peers' Food Choices. Child Dev. 2021 Nov;92(6):e1198-e1210. doi: 10.1111/cdev.13631 https://hdl.handle.net/10481/109676 10.1111/cdev.13631 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ open access Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacional Wiley