Peer pressure is feeling pushed by friends or classmates to think, look or act a certain way. Friends can influence what a person chooses to do, and a person can influence them too. Harvard psychologist Nancy Hill explains that peer pressure is not only an outside force. It can also be an internal force. It is spurred by a desire to belong. So a person may do something no one asked them to do. Some experts say "peer influence" is a better term than "peer pressure". It describes how teenagers' behavior is shaped by wanting to feel they belong to a group, and it is not always about doing something against your will. Hill says kids will always want to fit in with peers, so the useful question is what they are fitting into and whether it helps them or derails them.
Peer influence can be positive: it can push teens to become more assertive, try new activities or get more involved with school. Peer pressure can be a force for good, such as showing kids kind or hard-working role models. Friends can pull a person toward good things, like studying together, volunteering or playing sports. Even peers a person has never met can be role models. One example is someone the same age who competes in a sport, plays a concert or leads a community project. Prosocial behavior means actions meant to benefit others, such as volunteering, donating and sharing. Research shows adolescents also copy the prosocial behavior of their peers. Peer pressure can be a positive force: students at high schools where many classmates go on to college are more likely to go themselves.
Fitting in with friends is important during the teen years. So being influenced by others is completely normal. Sometimes people are even influenced to do good things like helping others. Social worker Emma Petree says peer pressure gets really intense around the start of middle school, when a child's social circle moves to the forefront of their decision-making. Even young children often act differently in a group without grown-ups around than their parents expect, so pressure is not only a teen thing. When people are unsure what to do in a social situation, they naturally look to others for cues about what is acceptable. Pressure can spread through a group: the people most easily influenced follow first, then others go along, thinking "everyone else is doing it, so they must know what they're doing." Many young people struggle to understand how their peers see them and worry about being rejected if they do not fit in.
Teens may be more open to peer pressure partly because they worry more about what others think of them. Unlike younger children, they can imagine at an abstract level how others see them. In 1951 psychologist Solomon Asch set up a simple test. People judged which of three lines matched a target line, and the answer was always obvious. Asch's volunteers heard other people give a wrong answer. The confederates gave the wrong answer on 12 of the 18 trials, called the critical trials. On average about one third (32 percent) of the people on the critical trials went along with the group's clearly wrong answer. In Asch's experiment about three-quarters of the people went along with the wrong answer at least once, and about a quarter never did. In Asch's control condition, there was no group pressure, and volunteers virtually never made mistakes. This shows the line task was easy and the wrong answers came from the group.
In adolescence people spend more waking hours with peers than at any other stage of life. During adolescence there is a period of social reorientation, in which young people spend less time with their parents and more time with same-age peers. Much of the similarity between friends was there before they became friends, because peers with similar interests and habits tend to gravitate toward each other. A clique differs from a group of friends. In a clique, leaders decide who is in or out. Members of a friend group are free to hang out with others. Extension specialists point out that most peers are typically not making unhealthy choices, so "everyone is doing it" is often not true. It is natural for people to compare themselves to their peers as they think about who they want to be or what they want to achieve.
Researchers say peers and parents can both support young people's positive adjustment, and peers more often reinforce family values than work against them. Adults sometimes picture peers as one united front of dangerous influence, but extension researchers call that inaccurate: more often than not, peers reinforce family values. Parents stay a big influence on kids' values and choices even when friends matter more and more. Feeling pushed by friends is a normal part of growing up, and nearly everyone has been in that spot. Experts say it helps to explain values, and not only say "don't do this", so young people can make decisions for themselves and feel independent. A family's values can guide a person who is pushed to do something they are not comfortable with.
One study of young teens divided a pool of coins between themselves and a group. Online peers gave likes, and one group liked donating while the other liked keeping coins. In that coin game, changes in generous behavior depended on which choices the peer group liked, showing that peers can both decrease and increase prosocial behavior. In one classroom study, students estimated the number of animals in an image, then saw a classmate's answer and could change their own. In that study, teens changed their answers more when the other person was a friend than when they were a distant classmate. In a risk-perception study, young adolescents were more influenced by same-age peers' opinions than by adults' opinions. Children and adults were more influenced by adults' opinions.
Developmental researchers argue that the teen brain is highly malleable and particularly oriented towards the social world. This may explain heightened susceptibility to social influence. Being in a peer group gives young people practice with social skills, like making new friends, building relationships and working out differences. The Search Institute lists positive peer influence, and the ability to resist negative peer pressure and dangerous situations, among the developmental assets that help young people. One skill that helps is weighing costs and benefits: looking at both the negative and positive sides of a decision before choosing. A person in a clique can ask whether they want to be part of the group because they want to feel accepted. They can also ask whether they actually share its values.
It helps to deal with peer pressure before it happens by talking through possible scenarios and role-playing what to say. Hill suggests practicing scenarios where a feeling might be tested and helping a young person think through a response that feels natural to them. A short, simple line like "No thanks" or "I have to go" is enough to say no. Having one friend stand with you makes it easier for both of you to say no. Often it takes just one person to speak out or do something different to change a situation, and friends may follow. A young person is more likely to ask a trusted adult for help if they know they will not get into trouble for asking. So adults are advised to praise the choice to ask. A parent or other adult can step in when peer pressure gets too hard for a kid to handle. A grown-up you trust can help.
Words to know
- clique: tight group
- prosocial: helping others
- malleable: easy to shape
- influence: power to change
