Exploration is associated with socioeconomic disparities in learning and academic achievement in adolescence

Adolescents from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds often underperform on tests of learning and academic achievement. Existing theories propose that these disparities reflect not only external constraints, like limited resources, but also internal decision strategies that adapt to the early environment and influence learning. These theories predict that adolescents from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds explore less and exploit more, which, in turn, reduces learning and academic achievement. Here, we test this possibility and show that lower socioeconomic status in adolescence is associated with less exploration on a reward learning task (n = 124, 12–14-year-olds from the United States). Computational modeling revealed that reduced exploration was related to higher loss aversion. Reduced exploration also mediated socioeconomic differences in task performance, school grades, and, in a lower-socioeconomic status subsample, academic skills. These findings raise the possibility that learning disparities across socioeconomic status relate not only to external constraints but also to internal decision strategies and provide some mechanistic insight into the academic achievement gap.