Supporting healthy friendships, modeling responsible behavior and keeping an open, judgment-free family dialogue are three key components of maintaining positive parental influence on a teenager. Peer pressure, or influence, comes in several forms, and these types of peer pressure can have a tremendous impact on a young person’s behavior. Research shows the most impressionable age for peer influence seems to be the middle school years. This is when a child is forming new friendships and choosing an identity among those friends.
This can lead teens to compare the true reality of their lives to the “picture-perfect” portrayal of others’ lives and feel pressure to keep up. Additionally, the absence of in-person feedback can enable an environment in which people share harmful content or abusive comments that they would not otherwise say in person. This phenomenon (called trolling) is an incredibly pervasive form of negative peer pressure found on social media. There have also been examples of harmful online challenges that have the potential to negatively impact a child’s health. The consensus dynamic modeling assumes that the actors only interact with their directly connected neighbors to cooperatively achieve an agreement in the system31.
What are the Six Types of Peer Pressure?
Many people see peer pressure as having negative effects, such as encouraging someone to smoke. However, it is important to note that peer pressure can also sometimes be positive. It is also important to talk openly and honestly with teens about what peer pressure is and how it can lead to positive or negative outcomes.
Have you ever done something that you wouldn’t do in a billion years just because you’re the only one in your friend group who hasn’t done it before? According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), teen substance use affects brain development and can contribute to adult health problems, including heart disease, high blood pressure, and sleep disorders. Peer pressure to use substances like alcohol and cannabis can unfold into problems with substance abuse.
Types of peer pressure
Teenagers are people still struggling to find their true identity and meaning in life. They are too young to know that one should stand up for what they believe in, ranging from the tiniest of things like which ice cream flavour is the best one, to serious world issues such as political controversies. It is hard to say no to peer pressure because teenagers are always a little desperate to fit in. In this post you’ll learn more about the different types of peer pressure, and also the psychology behind it. The emergence of leaders is analyzed according to randomness (Rnd), betweenness (BC), closeness (CC), degree (DC), eigenvector (EC) and subgraph (SC) centrality. The peer pressure is modeled by Δd ~ dα, with α equal to −1.5 and −2.0.
- However, this goes both ways and so they are also more likely to participate in negative behaviors.
- Peer influence is also defined as a feeling that one must do the same things as the people in our social circle and age group to be accepted as a part of that group.
- Although PP is an elusive concept, it can be considered a decreasing function of a given individual’s socio-cultural distance from the group.
- Unspoken peer pressure, on the other hand, is when no one verbally tries to influence you.
Being pressured by peers can be a stressful experience, whether it happens in person or online. It may shake your sense of identity and self-confidence and may contribute to excessive worry. In addition, prolonged exposure to this type of stress and tension may be a factor in mental health concerns such as anxiety and depression. This can affect anyone at any given age, but it takes a tool mostly in adolescents because as they try to develop friendships and fit in, they end up falling prey to social pressure.
How Peer Pressure Affects All Ages
We hear much more about explicit peer pressure, as it is easier to detect and recognize as problematic. It sounds like someone telling you to stop worrying, start having fun and which of the following is a type of indirect peer pressure? be part of the group by participating in something you don’t feel comfortable with. It may also be a threat, such as, “You can’t hang out with us if you’re not going to drink.”
To seek social acceptance they end up imitating behaviors of the same social group, i.e wearing the same clothes as their friends, listening to the same music, and watching the same tv shows. Many adults are susceptible to drinking too much because their friends are doing it, or putting work before family because they’re competing with other people in their office for a promotion. As the name suggests, spoken peer pressure is when someone verbally influences another person to do something. For instance, a teenager might influence their friend to smoke a cigarette by saying, “Come on, one cigarette won’t hurt.” Though peer pressure is not usually used to describe socially desirable behaviors, such as exercising or studying, peer pressure can have positive effects in some cases. Being subject to peer rejection can be very painful, and a person who feels unable to tolerate rejection may find it very difficult to resist using drugs and alcohol if their peers do so.
Social psychological explanation
It can lead you to adopt a lifestyle beyond your means or change the way you think. In the 1940s, Nazi Germany , led by Adolf Hitler, began a systematic purge against the Jewish people living in Europe, killing around six million Jews by the end of World War II. When bringing the concept of peer pressure into the Holocaust, German culpability is even harder to decide. Where L is a linear operator (Laplacian matrix) capturing the topology of the social network9.
What starts out as positive peer pressure may become negative pressure if it leads a person to over-identify with sports, for example, putting exercise and competition above all else. A person may be especially vulnerable to peer pressure if they say that peer acceptance is important to them, or if they are sensitive to rejection. The perception that alcohol or drug use is expected may also act as a form of peer pressure. In this article, we look at peer pressure and how it relates to drug use in more detail. We explain how peer pressure works, why it has the potential to lead to substance use disorders, and how people can resist peer pressure to use recreational drugs.