The individual may be encouraged to change their behavior, attitudes, and even values to match their peers. People are susceptible to peer pressure because of a desire to belong as well as for a fear of not belonging. It begins as soon as children start to pay attention to what other children think about them.
- Peers also contribute to declining preferences for STEM courses among adolescent girls (Raabe et al., 2019).
- It’s not just a challenge faced by teenagers; adults in various settings, including those in drug rehab or pursuing sobriety, encounter it too.
- The cultivation of compatibility is essential for success in the adolescent peer world, because it makes one a more desirable companion and reduces the risk of friendlessness and exclusion.
- Further evidence that peer influence is not limited to deviance comes from research on prosocial behavior.
- Perceived norms can determine openness to an experience, which shapes decisions about how to behave should the opportunity arise.
Children and adolescents
We discuss why adolescents are especially vulnerable to peer influence and how this contributes to developmental changes in conformity. The rapid onset of a diverse array of maladaptive behaviors during the early years of adolescence occurs at the same time as important shifts in the social world, the most obvious being the increasing salience of peers. The sudden adoption of troublesome and troubling behaviors is conventionally attributed to peer influence (Gifford‐Smith et al., 2005). A firm foundation of longitudinal and experimental data has established the importance of peers during adolescence and tied peer influence to adolescent adjustment outcomes (Brechwald & Prinstein, 2011). In this review, we summarize recent findings that reinforce these conclusions and turn our attention to explaining the functions of peer influence. Using alcohol or drugs increases anyone’s chances of giving in to which of the following is a type of indirect peer pressure?.
The nature of negative peer pressure
By seeing someone else do something positive, even if it’s challenging, you may reflect on your own life choices, goals, and where you spend your time. You can also positively peer pressure others by the way you respond to situations. For instance, if your friend is body-shaming another person, you can say, “Actually, it can be really harmful to criticize people’s bodies like that.” If taken to an extreme, they may develop exercise addiction, causing them to neglect schoolwork and social activities, and ultimately, use exercise and competition in sports as their main outlet for coping with the stresses of life. Drug use is a necessary prerequisite to drug misuse and substance use disorders, making it a key risk factor. A 2020 study estimates that in 2016, 11.6% of adult drug users had problematic drug use or an addiction.
Peer Influences on Adolescent Decision Making
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As adult oversight rapidly recedes, peers assume enormous significance (Coleman, 1961). Adolescents quickly learn to rely on close peers for companionship, protection, and guidance as they navigate novel contexts where norms are established and enforced by peers. Afraid of the social consequences of nonconformity, most conclude that the best way to get along is to go along. Unspoken pressure to conform can play a significant role in substance use.
New Evidence on Relationship Contexts
We also administered tasks for cognitive control (Go/No-Go) and preference for immediate-over-delayed rewards (Delay Discounting). In your journey toward sobriety and recovery from addiction, understanding https://ecosoberhouse.com/ plays a crucial role. It’s not just a challenge faced by teenagers; adults in various settings, including those in drug rehab or pursuing sobriety, encounter it too. Peer pressure is the influence exerted by a peer group, encouraging individuals to change their attitudes, values, or behaviors to conform to group norms. The consequences of peer influence may be well‐established, but its motives and functions are not. Peer influence serves many purposes, but we hold that one of its most important functions is to increase similarity between friends and affiliates, because similarity enhances compatibility, reducing the social risks that accompany differences and dissimilarity.
Oxytocin neurotransmission has been implicated in a variety of social behaviors, including facilitation of social bonding and recognition and memory for positive social stimuli (Insel & Fernald, 2004). New research sheds light on peer influence over health‐related behaviors. Network studies confirm that adolescent friends become more similar over time in physical activity (de la Haye et al., 2011; Long et al., 2017) and body weight (Simpkins et al., 2013; Zhang et al., 2015). Over time, adolescent friends become more similar in terms of their sexual experiences (Prinstein et al., 2003; Trinh et al., 2019). Adolescent alcohol and drug use are clearly shaped by friends (Allen et al., 2020; Hiatt et al., 2017) and peer group affiliates (Burk et al., 2012; Osgood et al., 2013). Peers may play a role in the adoption of the habit (McMillan et al., 2018), but they do not determine the rate at which an adolescent smokes (DeLay et al., 2013; Mathys et al., 2013), presumably because addictive behaviors are driven by endogenous motives.
- If you’re at a party where everyone is drinking, for instance, you might feel pressured to drink even if no one asks you to.
- At each of 20 intersections, participants render a decision to either stop the vehicle (STOP) or to take a risk and run the traffic light (GO).
- Early sociological (Hughes, 1945) and social psychological (Festinger, 1954; Schachter, 1951) characterizations of small groups emphasized social comparison processes that facilitated uniformity.
- While peer influence can improve your life, peer pressure can cause problems.
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- Thus, within a domain, the onus of change is on those who are initially indifferent, as those who are passionate about an activity seek companions to share their passion and who define themselves accordingly.
- In an effort to “decompose” the peer effect, we are currently examining age differences in the influence of social cues on neural activity underlying performance on tasks specifically tapping reward processing and response inhibition.
- Similarities also increase the likelihood that social interactions will be rewarding, providing a familiar framework for conversations and activities.
- Brett Laursen is a professor of psychology at Florida Atlantic University, where his research focuses on how children and teens interact with their peers and parents.