how does peer pressure affect students essay

Peer Pressure Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on peer pressure.

Peer pressure can be both negative and positive. Because if a person is a peer pressuring you for a good cause then it is motivation. Motivation is essential for the growth of a person. While peer pressure for a bad cause will always lead you to a disastrous situation.

Therefore it necessary for a person to not get influenced by the people around them. They should analyze the outcome of the deed in a strict manner. So that they no may commit anything harmful for themselves. As this world is full of bad people, so you need to be careful before trusting anybody.

Advantages of Peer Pressure

Peer pressure is advantageous in many ways. Most importantly it creates a sense of motivation in the person. Which further forces the person to cross the barrier and achieve something great. Furthermore, it boosts the confidence of a person. Because our brain considers people’s opinions and makes them a priority.

Many salesmen and Entrepreneurs use this technique to influence people to buy their products. Whenever we are in a social meet we always get various recommendations. Therefore when a person gets these recommendations the brain already starts liking it. Or it creates a better image of that thing. This forces the person to buy the product or at least consider it.

This peer pressure technique also works in creating a better character of a person. For instance, when we recommend someone for a particular job, the interviewer already gets a better image of that person. Because he is recommended by a person the interviewer trusts. Therefore there is a great chance of that person to get hired.

Above all the main advantage of peer pressure can be in youth. If a young person gets influenced by an individual or a group of people. He can achieve greater heights in his career.

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Disadvantages of Peer Pressure

There are various disadvantages of peer pressure which can harm a person in many ways. If any person is not willing to perform a task then the peer pressure can be frustrating to him.

Furthermore, peer pressure should not be in an excessive manner. Because it lands a negative impact on the person. A person should be of the mindset of listening to himself first. While considering opinions in favor of him.

Peer pressure in youth from a bad company can lead a person to a nasty situation. Furthermore, it can also hamper a student’s career and studies if not averted. Youth these days are much influenced by the glamorous life of celebrities.

And since they follow them so much, these people become their peers. Thus they do such things that they should not. Drugs and smoking are major examples of this. Moreover most shocking is that the minors are even doing these things. This can have adverse effects on their growth and career.

It is necessary to judge the outcome of a deed before getting influenced by peers. Furthermore, peer pressure should always be secondary. Your own thoughts and wants should always have the first priority.

Q1. What is peer pressure?

A1 . Peer pressure is the influence on people by their peers. As a result, people start following their opinions and lifestyle. Furthermore, it is considering a person or his opinion above all and giving him the priority.

Q2. Which sector of the society is the peer pressure adversely affecting?

A2 . Peer pressure has adverse effects on the youth of society. Some false influencers are playing with the minds of the youngsters. As a result, the youth is going in the wrong direction and ruining their career opportunities.

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Essay on Peer Pressure: 100, 200, and 450 Word Samples in English

• Updated on  
• Mar 2, 2024

Have you ever done something just because your friends or peers have done it? Say, watched a movie or TV series, visited places, consumed any substance, or academic achievement. This is a classic example of peer pressure. It means you are influenced by your peers or people around you.

Peer pressure can be both positive and negative, but mostly, it has negative effects. Peer pressure often occurs during adolescence or teenage years when individuals are more susceptible to the opinions and actions of their peers. Sometimes, peer pressure can lead to serious consequences. Therefore, we must deal with peer pressure in a civilized and positive way. 

On this page, we will provide you with some samples of how to write an essay on peer pressure. Here are essay on peer pressure in 100, 200 and 450 words.

Table of Contents

• 1 Essay on Peer Pressure in 450 Words
• 2 Essay on Peer Pressure in 200 Words
• 3 Essay on Peer Pressure in 100 Words

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Essay on Peer Pressure in 450 Words

‘Be true to who you are and proud of who you’re becoming. I have never met a critic who was doing better than me.’ – Jeff Moore

Why do we seek recognition? Why do we want to fit in? Why are we not accepting ourselves in just the way we are? The answer to these questions is almost the same; peer pressure. Peer pressure is the influence of our peers in such a way, that we wish and try to do things in the same way as others did. 

Negatives and Positive Peer Pressure

Peer pressure can have positive and negative effects. Positive peer pressure can result in better academic performance, personal growth and development, etc. We can be a source of inspiration to our friends or vice versa, which can result in better academic growth, adopting healthier lifestyles, and engaging in community service. For example, you are part of a group collaborating on a community project that demonstrates the constructive influence of peer interaction. This can encourage a sense of purpose and shared responsibility.

Negative Peer Pressure is the opposite of positive peer pressure. In such cases, we are influenced by the negative bad habits of our peers, which often result in disastrous consequences. Consider the scenario where one of your friends starts smoking simply to conform to the smoking habits of his peers, highlighting the potentially harmful consequences of succumbing to negative influences.

How to Deal With Peer Pressure?

Peer pressure can be dealt with in several ways. The first thing to do is to understand our own values and belief systems. Nobody wants to be controlled by others, and when we know what is important to us, it becomes easier to resist pressure that goes against our beliefs.

A person with self-esteem believes in his or her decisions. It creates a strong sense of self-worth and confidence. When you believe in yourself, you are more likely to make decisions based on your principles rather than succumbing to external influences.

Choosing your friends wisely can be another great way to avoid peer pressure. Positive peer influence can be a powerful tool against negative peer pressure.

Building the habit of saying ‘No’ and confidently facing pressure in uncomfortable situations can be a great way to resist peer pressure. So, it is important to assertively express your thoughts and feelings. 

Peer pressure can have different effects on our well-being. It can contribute to personal growth and development, and it can also negatively affect our mental and physical health. We can deal with peer pressure with the necessary skills, open communication, and a supportive environment. We must act and do things in responsible ways.

Also Read: Essay on Green Revolution in 100, 200 and 500 Words

Essay on Peer Pressure in 200 Words

‘A friend recently started smoking just because every guy in his class smokes, and when they hang out, he feels the pressure to conform and be accepted within the group. However, he is not aware of the potential health risks and personal consequences associated with the habit. 

This is one of the many negative examples of peer pressure. However, peer pressure can often take positive turns, resulting in better academic performance, and participation in social activities, and physical activities. 

Dealing with peer pressure requires a delicate balance and determination. Teenagers must have alternative positive options to resist negative influences. Developing a strong sense of self, understanding personal values, and building confidence are crucial components in navigating the challenges posed by peer pressure.

Learning to say ‘No’ assertively can be a great way to tackle peer pressure. You must understand your boundaries and be confident in your decisions. This way, you can resist pressure that contradicts your values. Also, having a plan in advance for potential pressure situations and seeking support from trusted friends or mentors can contribute to making informed and responsible choices.

‘It is our choice how we want to deal with peer pressure. We can make good and bad decisions, but in the end, we have to accept the fact that we were influenced by our peers and we were trying to fit in.’

Essay on Peer Pressure in 100 Words

‘Peer pressure refers to the influence of your peers. Peer pressure either be of positive or negative types. Positive peer pressure can encourage healthy habits like academic challenges, physical activities, or engaging in positive social activities. Negative peer pressure, on the other hand, can lead us to engage in risky behaviours, such as substance abuse, reckless driving, or skipping school, to fit in with our peers.’

‘There are many ways in which we can deal with peer pressure. Everyone has their personal beliefs and values. Therefore, they must believe in themselves and should not let other things distract them. When we are confident in ourselves, it becomes easier to stand up for what we believe in and make our own choices. Peer pressure can be dealt with by staying positive about yourself.’

Ans: ‘Peer pressure refers to the influence of your peers. Peer pressure either be of positive or negative types. Positive peer pressure can encourage healthy habits like academic challenges,, physical activities, or engaging in positive social activities. Negative peer pressure, on the other hand, can lead us to engage in risky behaviours, such as substance abuse, reckless driving, or skipping school, to fit in with our peers.’

Ans: Peer pressure refers to the influence of our peers or people around us. 

Ans: Peer pressure can have both positive and negative effects on school children. It can boost academic performance, encourage participation in social activities, adopt healthier lifestyles, etc. However, peer pressure often results in risky behaviours, such as substance abuse, unsafe activities, or other harmful behaviours.

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With an experience of over a year, I've developed a passion for writing blogs on wide range of topics. I am mostly inspired from topics related to social and environmental fields, where you come up with a positive outcome.

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The Effects of Peer Pressure on Students, Essay Example

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There are no simple answers to the effects of peer pressure on students.  It would be unfair to say that most peer pressure results in unwise decisions, as it is often generalized within current culture.  Peer pressure transforms a student in a unique manner.  The current analysis will examine the most dangerous effects of peer pressure on students, as well as the general negative and positive effects.

Dangerous Effects of Peer Pressure

There are a number of dangerous effects that peer pressure can have on students.  These effects are often felt within media and schools, which is where the perceived dangers of peer pressures lie, according to most.  However, they certainly cannot be disregarded due to the truth of these concerns.

Alcohol is felt within the consequences of peer pressure in students.  With regards to underage drinking, this is a significant problem within students, especially in high school and college.  The habits and commonplace of underage drinking is established in high school, which is then perpetuated to one’s college years.

Partying in general is another example of the more dangerous effects of peer pressure.  Younger students at parties are around others who are unsupervised, which makes them more susceptible to peer pressure.  Thus, items like drinking and other inappropriate behavior are accepted in one’s social circle.  Peer pressure is commonly seen at parties, which is where a number of dangerous activities occur.

Sex is also another example of the negative effects of peer pressure.  Students are having sex at a younger age, resulting in items like teenage pregnancies.  As underage and unprotected sex becomes accepted in social circles, peer pressure often has an effect on students in this way as well.

General Negative Effects

There are a number of generally negative effects that peer pressure can have on a student’s development.  Beyond the more dangerous effects, at least in regards to the more clearly defined negative effects, a number of underlying effects of peer pressure can be seen with students.  The dynamics that are presented in peer pressure in students can unfortunately be quite negative.

Peer pressure can often drown out the opinion of one.  When students are engaged in certain social circles, it is not uncommon to see the unfair treatment of individuals.  Certain individuals, whether they are not liked, ignored, or just not seen, are often unable to relate to others.

Peer pressure also removes the choices that one should be able to make.  A number of events and activities that students are involved in are done on a social level.  Such activities remove the healthy choices that enable students to seek adventure and healthy activities, instead of what is expected or on schedule.

The underlying negative dynamic of peer pressure is the ultimate undermining of individuality.  Peer pressure has the unfortunate effect of removing one’s own will and desires, in order to become accepted or liked within a social circle.  As seen in these negative examples and in the more dangerous illustrations, the individual is often casted our in peer pressure.  As a result, one is left to follow others in that of peer pressure.

General Positive Effects

Peer pressure can of course have positive effects on students.  While this is often not portrayed, it rings true for many students.  It can often push and help one to realize or perform something, to help someone thrive with the help of others.

Peer pressure can help individuals in more difficult periods.  Friends are there to help someone in tough times, and peer pressure can help someone who needs wise council.  Many students, who are involved with the right people, are able to enjoy the positive relationships when they need them the most.

Some activities driven by peer pressure can help students get involved.  Activities and functions can be great for the social development of a student.  Peer pressure, even when applied outside of one’s comfort zone, can ultimately be beneficial.

Peer pressure can also help individuals make the right choices.  When students face difficult choices in their life, they often rely on their friends.  In this manner peer pressure can help persuade one to the right decision, allowing their friend to see the positive way to react to an important choice.

It is unfortunate that peer pressure is often regarded in one dimension.  While there are certainly negative effects of peer pressure, such as those that undermine one’s individuality and encourage dangerous practices, peer pressure can help an individual develop through the difficult times as a student and a person.  Centered on surrounding oneself with positive influences, peer pressure can rise above the negative effects to institute healthy social and personal steps of one’s development.

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Social Impact Oct 2, 2018

How peer pressure can lead teens to underachieve—even in schools where it’s “cool to be smart”, new research offers lessons for administrators hoping to improve student performance..

Leonardo Bursztyn

Georgy Egorov

Robert Jensen

Peer pressure can play a huge role in the choices that students make in school, extending beyond the clothes they wear or music they listen to.

Think, for example, of a student deciding whether to participate in educational activities, such as raising their hand in class or signing up for enrichment programs. While these efforts may be good for a college application, they also could affect how classmates perceive the student. Pressure to not seem like a nerd could make kids refrain from taking part. So why, exactly, do some kids shy away from showing effort in front of their peers? In a recent study, Georgy Egorov , a professor of managerial economics and decision sciences at Kellogg, and his collaborators considered two possibilities. In some schools, perhaps kids face a social stigma for publicly making an effort to excel. The researchers called this culture “smart to be cool.” But in other schools, perhaps high achievers are popular, and students feel pressure to do well; in other words, it’s “cool to be smart.” Perhaps counterintuitively, this type of school culture could also cause kids to avoid participating if they do not view themselves as smart and don’t want to reveal their poor grasp of the material. “If social pressure rewards high performance, then they might want to shy away from engaging if they feel unprepared,” Egorov says. The researchers used a mathematical model, as well as a field experiment at three high schools, to confirm their prediction that the reason why students shy away from showing effort can differ depending on which of these two school cultures is predominant. Given that, it is important for administrators to know which culture is stronger at a particular school when designing policies, Egorov says. For example, in a cool-to-be-smart school, students might be more likely to attend an after-school program if it is called “enrichment” rather than “extra help.” But in a smart-to-be-cool school, kids might find it more socially acceptable to seek “extra help” to avoid failing a class than “enrichment,” which suggests trying to excel. Overall, the research suggests that the reasons why some students fail to take advantage of educational opportunities can differ greatly depending on the school’s overall culture. “Many schools have kids who are underperforming,” Egorov says, “but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s all the same mechanism at work.”

An Alternate Explanation

The starting point for this research was an influential 2006 paper by Harvard economist Roland Fryer. Fryer was interested in underperformance among minority students, and looked in particular at the role of peer pressure. He found that in some types of schools, African-American and Hispanic students become less popular as their grades increase, while white students become more popular as their grades go up. In situations where studying hard is stigmatized by one’s peers, Fryer concluded, underperforming students may be deliberately trying not to appear engaged in school. But what about schools that have the opposite culture, where kids are admired for being high achievers? Do students there also deliberately downplay a desire to excel? And, if they do, are they doing it for the same reasons as students in smart-to-be-cool schools? To find out, Egorov and his collaborators, Leonardo Bursztyn at the University of Chicago and Robert Jensen at the University of Pennsylvania, first created a mathematical model to represent students in a school.

The reasons why some students fail to take advantage of educational opportunities can differ greatly depending on the school’s overall culture.

The model allowed for two types of school culture, one that rewarded high achievement and one that rewarded a lack of effort. The model also allowed students to choose to sign up for an educational activity, with their choice either being made public or kept private, as well as their performance on it being made public or kept private. Importantly, the researchers also introduced a lottery to the model. Among the students who signed up, some of them would “win” the chance to participate in the activity. The team showed that when the probability of “winning” the activity changed, interesting differences emerged. In the smart-to-be-cool school, one would expect that if signing up and participating in an activity were done publicly, fewer kids would do it because they wouldn’t want to seem like they are trying hard. But what happens when the chances of winning the activity increase? In making their decision, students are weighing two types of benefits: the social perks of their classmates’ approval if they do not appear to be trying to excel vs. the economic perks of getting a better education. When the chances of winning are low, the student is socially stigmatized for signing up and probably will not even receive the educational reward. But if the chances of winning are high, the net benefits increase. While the student still faces disapproval from peers, at least she is more likely to boost her economic prospects. And, under these circumstances, the model predicts that more students would likely sign up. “You are more likely to sign up if at least you get something for that,” Egorov says. In this “public” scenario, increasing the chances of winning would have the opposite effect at a cool-to-be-smart school. Students there benefit socially from signing up: showing they want to participate makes them fit in with the high achievers. So when the probability of winning is low, students can sign up to signal that they are smart without running a big risk that they will actually have to do the activity in public, which could reveal that they are low performers. If the chances of winning—and therefore having their performance made public—are high, they are less likely to sign up. Egorov compares the situation to a teacher asking a question in class. If a low-performing student raises his hand when no one else is doing so, his chances of “winning” participation—that is, being called on by the teacher—are high. So the student is unlikely to take that risk. But if ten other kids have already raised their hands, a low-performing student might do the same to fit in with smart peers, since the teacher probably won’t call on him anyway. “Raising your hand is safe,” Egorov says. “You try to pool with the high performers at low risk.”

Striking Differences

To test these predictions, the team visited 11th-grade classrooms at three high schools in Los Angeles: one that previous research hinted would have a smart-to-be-cool culture, and two others that the team suspected might have a cool-to-be-smart culture. (A subsequent survey of students indeed confirmed that the schools had the predicted cultures.) To run their experiment, the researchers gave 511 students a form that offered the chance to enter a lottery to win a real SAT prep package, which would include a diagnostic test to identify strengths and weaknesses. Some forms said that the sign-up decision and test results would be completely anonymous; others hinted that the results might be visible to classmates. The team also varied the probability of winning the lottery for the package. Some forms said the student had a 75 percent chance, while others listed a 25 percent chance. As expected, fear of peers’ judgment seemed to drive decisions. In both types of schools, when the students’ choice and test results were private, about 80 percent signed up. But in the public scenario, that figure dropped to 53 percent. If the experiment had stopped there, the researchers might have assumed that effort and achievement were stigmatized in all the schools. But when researchers analyzed the results based on whether the probability of winning the lottery was high or low, a very different picture emerged. As their model predicted, changing the chance of winning in the public scenario revealed substantial differences between the two types of schools. In the smart-to-be-cool school, sign-up rates rose from 44 percent to 62 percent when the probability of winning the lottery increased, suggesting that students were willing to risk social stigma only when they thought they stood a good chance of accessing the SAT prep package. But in cool-to-be-smart schools, sign-up rates showed the opposite pattern, dropping from 66 percent to 40 percent.

Tailored Policy Solutions

Egorov is quick to point out that the experiment was done at only three schools, so the findings should not be generalized across schools based solely on their student demographics or other observable factors, such as school location. But, he says, the results suggest that administrators should understand their school’s culture when designing policies. For example, making class participation mandatory in a smart-to-be cool school could reduce the stigma of raising one’s hand. But in a cool-to-be-smart school, the same policy could provoke struggling students to disrupt class so they can avoid participating.

James Farley/Booz, Allen & Hamilton Research Professor; Professor of Managerial Economics & Decision Sciences

About the Writer Roberta Kwok is a freelance science writer based near Seattle.

About the Research Bursztyn, Leonardo, Georgy Egorov, and Robert Jensen. Forthcoming. “Cool to Be Smart or Smart to Be Cool? Understanding Peer Pressure in Education.” Review of Economic Studies .

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84 Peer Pressure Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best peer pressure topic ideas & essay examples, 📌 simple & easy peer pressure essay titles, 👍 good essay topics on peer pressure, ❓ questions about peer pressure.

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• Peer Pressure in Society The peer pressure of various characteristics due to the community’s contradicting desire can lead to moral decay or psychological illness in a person.
• Friends’ Influence and Peer Pressure in Adolescents The list of physical and emotional transformations happening to the young people during adolescence is universal; the processes are the same for all teenagers.
• Peer Pressure and Smoking Influence on Teenagers The study results indicate that teenagers understand the health and social implications of smoking, but peer pressure contributes to the activity’s uptake.
• Peer Pressure in High School However, the best and easy way in this tough world, or in the peer group, is to prove oneself as a rebellious teen.
• Peer Pressure Causes and Resistance If Jack does not stay in a company where everybody smokes, he will not feel the pressure to do it. If it does not help, and Jack continues to feel pressure, it is possible for […]
• How Does Peer Pressure Contribute to Adolescent Depression? Therefore, it is possible to note that peer pressure is one of the most significant factors contributing to the development of adolescent depression.
• Peer Pressure and Life Span Reduction: An Unusual Perspective on the old Problem Therefore, among the dependable variables, the temper of the victim and his/her aptitude to change under the pressure of the circumstances should be mentioned.
• Peer Pressure as One of the Main Teenagers Problem The introduction of a healthy social and psychological environment in schools is a program that will be implemented to help curb negative effects of peer pressure.
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• What Can Schools Do to Stop Peer Pressure?
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• How Much Does Peer Pressure Affect Students?
• Does Peer Pressure Have an Effect on First-Time Drug Use?
• How Do Peers Pressure Influence Learning?
• What Is Peer Pressure for Students?
• How Can Peer Pressure Lead To Crime?
• How Does Peer Pressure Affect Educational Investments?
• How Has Peer Pressure Been Popularly Blamed for Adolescent Behaviors?
• How Can Peer Pressure Impact Negatively on Teenagers?
• How Can We Stop Peer Pressure?
• Who Is Most Affected by Peer Pressure?
• Why Is Peer Pressure a Problem?
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Essay on Peer Pressure

Updated December 21, 2023

Do you know the latest trend?

In the quest to find our place within friend circles, we often engage in activities we might not truly desire. The constant need to stay in tune with our identity while also aligning with the vibes of our peers has become a crucial aspect of teenage life. If you’ve ever felt the pressure to conform, rest assured, you’re not alone. Today, we address this widespread challenge experienced by every teenager and offer practical suggestions on navigating and coping with it.

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Types of Peer Pressure

Let’s delve into the various types of peer pressure:

1. Direct Peer Pressure

Direct peer pressure involves explicit attempts by individuals to influence others to conform to specific behaviors, choices, or actions. This can manifest through direct persuasion, encouragement, or even coercion. Examples include friends urging someone to try drugs, engage in risky activities, or adopt a particular lifestyle. The impact of direct peer pressure is immediate and tangible, as individuals may feel compelled to conform to avoid social rejection or gain approval.

2. Indirect Peer Pressure

Unlike its direct counterpart, indirect peer pressure operates more subtly. It involves the influence of societal norms, trends, or expectations that indirectly shape individuals’ behaviors. In this form, individuals may feel compelled to conform without explicit suggestions from peers. Adapting one’s appearance, interests, or behavior to align with what is considered popular or socially acceptable reflects the subtlety of indirect peer pressure. It often operates on a broader societal level, shaping cultural expectations and individual choices.

3. Positive Peer Pressure

Positive peer pressure involves encouraging or influencing peers towards behaviors that have constructive outcomes. Friends may motivate one another to study harder, participate in sports, or perform community service. This peer pressure fosters personal growth and development, creating a positive and supportive social environment. It emphasizes shared goals that benefit individuals and the community, promoting a sense of collective achievement.

4. Negative Peer Pressure

Negative peer pressure, on the other hand, encourages individuals to participate in potentially dangerous actions. Friends might pressure someone to skip classes, experiment with drugs, or engage in delinquent activities. Negative peer pressure often stems from the desire for social acceptance, fear of exclusion, or misguided attempts to fit in. The consequences of succumbing to negative peer pressure can range from immediate risks to long-term adverse effects on an individual’s well-being.

5. Individual Peer Pressure

Individual peer pressure is an internalized form where individuals pressure themselves to conform to perceived expectations, even without direct external influence. This may stem from a desire to fit in, avoid standing out, or align with personal ideals. The pressure comes from within, as individuals may feel compelled to adopt certain habits or make specific choices based on their perception of social norms or expectations.

6. Relational Peer Pressure

Relational peer pressure involves the influence exerted by the dynamics within specific relationships or cliques. Individuals within a close-knit group may feel pressure to conform to maintain social harmony. This form can be particularly intense, as the desire to belong and avoid conflict within the group may lead individuals to compromise their values or adopt behaviors that align with the group’s expectations.

7. Cyber Peer Pressure

With the advent of technology, cyber peer pressure emerges through online platforms, social media, and digital interactions. Individuals may feel compelled to conform to digital trends, participate in online challenges, or adopt behaviors influenced by their peers. Cyber peer pressure adds a new dimension to social influence as the online world shapes perceptions and expectations, impacting individuals’ choices and behaviors in both virtual and real-life settings.

Factors Contributing to Peer Pressure

Many factors shape the influence of peer pressure, each playing a role in the complex dynamics of social interactions. Here are key factors contributing to peer pressure:

• Developmental Stage: Peer pressure varies across different stages of development, with adolescents being particularly susceptible. During this phase, individuals often strive for identity and acceptance, making them more prone to conforming to peer expectations.
• Social Environment: Family, school, and community settings significantly impact the nature and intensity of peer pressure. Cultural norms and societal expectations can shape the values and behaviors that peers influence.
• Media and Technology: The pervasive influence of media, including social media platforms, can amplify peer pressure. Digital trends and online behaviors can quickly become influential, setting new standards for acceptance and popularity.
• Parental Influence: Parental attitudes and expectations affect how individuals respond to peer pressure. Parenting styles that encourage open communication and provide guidance can equip individuals with the tools to resist negative influences.
• School Environment: The social dynamics within schools, including the prevalence of cliques and social hierarchies, can intensify peer pressure. Academic and extracurricular pursuits may also contribute to individual pressures.
• Individual Differences: Personal traits, such as self-esteem, confidence, and resilience, play a crucial role in how individuals respond to peer pressure. Those with a strong sense of self are often better equipped to resist negative influences.
• Desire for Acceptance: The innate human need for social acceptance can drive individuals to conform to peer expectations. Fear of rejection or exclusion can be a powerful motivator, leading to choices that align with group norms.
• Cultural Influences: Cultural values and norms shape the expectations placed on individuals within a particular society. Conforming to these expectations may be seen as fitting in and gaining social approval.
• Peer Group Dynamics: The characteristics and behaviors of a specific peer group strongly influence the type of pressure exerted. Groups with shared interests and values may exert positive pressure, while others may promote negative behaviors.
• Lack of Guidance: Inadequate advice from trusted adults or mentors might leave individuals vulnerable to peer pressure. Having supportive role models can help individuals navigate peer pressure more effectively.

Effects of Peer Pressure

• Psychological Impact: Peer pressure can exert a profound psychological toll on individuals, manifesting in heightened stress, anxiety, and emotional turmoil. The persistent drive to conform to the expectations of a peer group can lead to internal conflicts as individuals struggle with the friction between their real selves and the need for social acceptability. Rejection or isolation can weaken identity, affect mental health, and lead to inadequacy.
• Behavioral Changes: The effects of peer pressure often extend to observable changes in behavior. Individuals may find themselves engaging in activities they would otherwise avoid, succumbing to the influence of their peers. This might range from following specific fashion trends to engaging in dangerous activities or substance misuse. Behavioral changes, driven by the desire to fit in or gain approval, may have immediate consequences and, if unchecked, can lead to long-term habits that deviate from one’s true values.
• Social Conformity: One prevalent effect of peer pressure is the inclination towards social conformity, where individuals alter their actions and beliefs to align with those of their peers. While providing a sense of belonging, this conformity can erode individual autonomy and critical thinking. The fear of standing out or being perceived as different may lead individuals to compromise their values, hindering personal growth and the development of a strong, independent identity.
• Risk-Taking Behavior: Negative peer pressure is often associated with increased risk-taking behavior. Whether it involves experimenting with substances, engaging in dangerous activities, or disregarding personal safety, individuals under the influence of peer pressure may take risks they would otherwise avoid. The allure of acceptance within a group can override rational decision-making, exposing individuals to potentially harmful situations and long-term consequences.
• Impact on Academic Performance: Peer pressure can extend into the academic sphere, affecting an individual’s focus, priorities, and study habits. Pursuing social acceptance may lead some students to prioritize socializing over academic responsibilities, potentially resulting in lower grades and compromised educational outcomes. This shift in priorities can affect future opportunities and personal development.
• Strained Relationships: The influence of peer pressure can strain relationships with family and non-peer connections. Conflicting expectations between peer groups and other significant relationships may create tension and create isolation. The pressure to prioritize peer relationships over familial or personal values can strain bonds and create challenges in maintaining a healthy support system outside the immediate peer group.

Coping Strategies and Solutions

1. building resilience.

Building resilience involves developing the ability to withstand and bounce back from challenges, including peer pressure. This can be achieved by fostering a strong sense of self, cultivating a positive mindset, and embracing failures as opportunities for growth. Resilient individuals are better equipped to navigate social pressures while staying true to their values and beliefs.

Example: Encouraging individuals to reflect on past challenges, identify strengths gained from overcoming them, and framing setbacks as learning experiences enhance resilience.

2. Assertiveness and Communication Skills

Developing assertiveness and effective communication skills empowers individuals to express their thoughts, opinions, and boundaries confidently. Being able to articulate one’s values and decisions helps in resisting negative peer pressure without succumbing to the fear of social rejection.

Example: Role-playing scenarios where individuals practice assertive communication can strengthen their ability to convey their choices respectfully and confidently.

3. Support Networks

Establishing and maintaining supportive relationships can be a crucial coping strategy. Having friends, family, or mentors who understand and respect individual choices provides a strong foundation against negative peer influences. Support networks offer encouragement, guidance, and a sense of belonging.

Example: Encouraging open communication within families, fostering mentorship programs, and creating supportive peer groups help individuals build and sustain positive connections.

4. Setting Boundaries

Clearly defining personal boundaries involves recognizing one’s limits and communicating them effectively. Setting boundaries is essential to maintaining autonomy and safeguarding individual values in the face of peer pressure.

Example: Individuals can practice assertively communicating their boundaries, such as saying “no” to activities that go against their values or comfort levels, reinforcing their commitment to personal integrity.

5. Cultivating Self-Efficacy

Cultivating self-efficacy involves developing a belief in one’s ability to navigate challenges and achieve goals. Individuals with high self-efficacy are more likely to resist negative peer pressure, as they have confidence in their capacity to make independent and positive choices.

Example: Encouraging individuals to set and achieve small goals builds self-efficacy, contributing to a sense of agency and control over their lives.

6. Critical Thinking Skills

Enhancing critical thinking skills enables individuals to assess situations objectively, weigh potential consequences, and make informed decisions. This cognitive ability is crucial in resisting peer pressure by allowing individuals to evaluate the impact of their choices on their well-being and future.

Example: Engaging in discussions that encourage critical thinking, such as analyzing the motivations behind peer pressure, helps individuals develop a thoughtful and analytical approach to decision-making.

7. Positive Role Models

Positive role models provide individuals with examples of values and behaviors that align with their aspirations. Observing and learning from role models who exemplify resilience, integrity, and independence can inspire individuals to resist negative peer pressure.

Example: Encouraging mentorship programs, highlighting inspirational figures, and fostering positive role models within communities contribute to a supportive environment.

Parental and Educational Roles

1. parental guidance.

• Open Communication: Effective communication between parents and their adolescents is a cornerstone in mitigating the impact of peer pressure. Encouraging an open dialogue creates a space where adolescents feel comfortable expressing their thoughts, concerns, and experiences. Parents might get significant insights into their children’s difficulties by actively listening and providing nonjudgmental assistance.
• Setting Realistic Expectations: Parents greatly influence their children’s expectations and values. Parents can assist teens in developing a strong internal compass by setting realistic expectations and emphasizing the implications of confident choices. This entails instilling a feeling of duty and accountability in them and equipping them to make informed decisions in the face of peer pressure.

2. School-based Programs

• Peer Mentoring: Peer mentoring programs within educational institutions can provide adolescents with positive role models. Older students serving as mentors can offer guidance, share personal experiences, and create a supportive environment for younger peers. This fosters a sense of community and helps counterbalance negative peer pressure with constructive influences.
• Character Education Initiatives: Integrating character education into the curriculum can equip students with essential life skills. This includes promoting values such as integrity, resilience, and empathy. Through targeted programs, schools can create an atmosphere that encourages personal development and cultivates a strong sense of self, helping students withstand negative peer pressure.

Case Studies and Examples

1. resisting negative peer pressure in college.

Emma, a college freshman, faced pressure from her new group of friends to participate in heavy drinking at social gatherings. Despite feeling uncomfortable with excessive alcohol consumption, Emma didn’t want to be perceived as “uncool” or risk social exclusion.

Emma decided to communicate her boundaries with her friends openly. She expressed her preference not to engage in heavy drinking due to personal reasons and health concerns. Surprisingly, her friends respected her decision; some shared similar problems but hesitated to voice them. This case illustrates the power of assertiveness and open communication in resisting negative peer pressure.

2. Positive Peer Pressure Leading to Academic Success

Mark was part of a friend group prioritizing academic achievement as a high school student. Although initially hesitant, Mark was positively influenced by his friends’ dedication to their studies.

Over time, Mark’s grades improved, and he became more focused on his academic goals. The positive peer pressure from his friends helped him develop better study habits and encouraged him to set higher educational aspirations for himself. This example showcases how peer influence can contribute to constructive outcomes when aligned with personal growth.

3. Navigating Cultural Expectations

Sara, a teen from a conservative cultural background, was under pressure to conform to traditional gender norms and job expectations. Her family expected her to pursue a medical career, but she aspired to become a graphic designer.

Sara engaged in open and respectful communication with her family, explaining her passion for graphic design. With time, she educated her family on the potential success and fulfillment she could find in this field. Eventually, her family, realizing her dedication, supported her decision. This case demonstrates the importance of setting and communicating personal goals even when facing cultural or familial expectations.

4. Peer Support in Overcoming Substance Abuse

Jake struggled with substance abuse during his teenage years, influenced by a group of friends who engaged in regular drug use. Recognizing the negative impact on his life, Jake decided to seek help.

With the support of a counselor and the encouragement of a new group of friends who promoted a drug-free lifestyle, Jake successfully overcame his addiction. This example underscores the significance of positive peer support in overcoming detrimental behaviors and making positive life choices.

5. Balancing Social and Academic Commitments

Sophia, a college student, faced the challenge of balancing social activities with academic responsibilities. Her friends often encouraged her to prioritize social events over study sessions.

Sophia implemented a time-management plan that allowed her to participate in social activities while dedicating focused time to her studies. She found a balance that met her social and academic needs by communicating her academic goals to her friends and involving them in group study sessions. This case highlights the importance of effective time management and communication in navigating peer pressure.

Peer pressure is a pervasive force that significantly shapes individuals’ lives. Whether facing challenges or enjoying positive influences, navigating peer pressure requires a combination of resilience, assertiveness, and a strong sense of self. Individuals can navigate social dynamics by fostering open communication, building supportive networks, and embracing positive role models while staying true to their values. Ultimately, understanding and addressing peer pressure contribute to personal growth, empowerment, and the development of authentic, fulfilling lives.

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Cover Story

Students under pressure

College and university counseling centers are examining how best to serve the growing number of students seeking their services.

By Amy Novotney

September 2014, Vol 45, No. 8

Print version: page 36

11 min read

Nicole Stearman remembers the morning well. Around 10:30 a.m., just as her research methods class at Eastern Washington University was finishing up, she felt an abrupt sense of terror and shortness of breath. It was the start of a panic attack — not the first she'd experienced — and she knew she needed immediate help. Stearman headed straight to the university's counseling and psychological services center.

When she arrived, she learned there were no counselors available, so she left and found a corner of the building to ride out the rest of the attack. "I can't really time my panic attacks to hit only on weekdays during the center's 11 a.m.- 4 p.m. counselor walk-in hours," says Stearman, who'd been diagnosed with depression and social phobia/social anxiety disorder in high school. "While the counseling center is a great resource, it could be a lot better."

Stearman is one of an increasing number of students who struggle with getting treatment for their mental health issues in college. About one-third of U.S. college students had difficulty functioning in the last 12 months due to depression, and almost half said they felt overwhelming anxiety in the last year, according to the 2013 National College Health Assessment, which examined data from 125,000 students from more than 150 colleges and universities.

Other statistics are even more alarming: More than 30 percent of students who seek services for mental health issues report that they have seriously considered attempting suicide at some point in their lives, up from about 24 percent in 2010, says Pennsylvania State University psychologist Ben Locke, PhD, who directs the Center for Collegiate Mental Health (CCMH), an organization that gathers college mental health data from more than 263 college and university counseling or mental health centers.

"Those who have worked in counseling centers for the last decade have been consistently ringing a bell saying something is wrong, things are getting worse with regard to college student mental health," Locke says. "With this year's report, we're now able to say, ‘Yes, you're right.' These are really clear and concerning trends."

Psychologists are stepping in to help address these trends in several ways. Researchers are examining the effect of mental health on how prepared students are for learning and exploring innovative ways to expand services and work with faculty to embed mental wellness messages in the classroom, says Louise Douce, PhD, special assistant to the vice president of student life at Ohio State University.

"For students to be able to learn at their peak capacity, they need to be physically, emotionally, intellectually and spiritually well," says Douce. "Students who struggle are more likely to drop out of school, but by providing services for their anxiety, depression and relationship issues, we can help them manage these issues, focus on their academics and learn new ways to be in the world."

More students, more need

One of the biggest reasons why college and university counseling services are seeing an increase in the number of people requesting help and in the severity of their cases is simply that more people are now attending college. Enrollment in degree-granting institutions increased by 11 percent from 1991 to 2001 and another 32 percent from 2001 to 2011, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

"One of the things that seems to be going on for colleges and universities is that as access to colleges and universities continues to grow, the population of colleges and universities is moving towards the general population, especially if you combine community colleges as part of that equation. So the level of need for access and the severity of concerns is growing — just like it has been in the general population," Locke says.

In addition, students who may not have attended college previously due to mental health issues, such as depression or schizophrenia, or behavioral or developmental concerns, such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder or autism, are now able to attend thanks to better treatment approaches and new medications. Access to wraparound services and individualized education plans in primary and secondary education have also helped more students graduate high school and qualify to attend college.

But when these young people go to college, such specialized services and accommodations rarely exist. The result is more students seeking help at counseling centers. Over the last three school years, the CCMH reports a nearly 8 percent increase in the number of students seeking mental health services. And college counseling centers report that 32 percent of centers report having a waiting list at some point during the school year, according to the 2013 Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors (AUCCCD) survey .

Unfortunately, even as students want more services, many center budgets remain unchanged or have increased only slightly from years past, the same survey finds. AUCCCD survey data suggest that larger institutions have struggled to attain pre-2008 recession budget levels, reflected in fewer counseling clinicians proportionate to the student body, compared with smaller institutions. The result can be seen in lower utilization rates and large waiting lists. In fact, the AUCCCD survey finds that from 2010 to 2012, the average maximum number of students on a waiting list for institutions with more than 25,000 students nearly doubled, from 35 students to 62 students.

Healthy minds and the bottom line

One way that counseling centers are trying to get more support for mental health services is by focusing on a factor administrators understand: a return on investment.

Research led by University of Michigan economist Daniel Eisenberg, PhD, for example, suggests that investing in mental health services for college students can help keep them from dropping out ( B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy , 2009). That's good news for schools since they want to retain tuition revenue, but more important, it helps secure significantly higher lifetime earnings for the students, Eisenberg says.

"Every college and university cares a lot about its retention rate," he says. "It's one of the primary indicators of operating a successful institution — that people want to stay and that people are succeeding there."

Eisenberg has replicated these findings with samples from other colleges and universities, and in 2013, posted a formula to help counseling centers develop their own return on investment spreadsheet to present to university administrators when advocating for additional funding. Users can plug in their school's population size, departure/retention rate, and prevalence of depression to calculate the economic case for student mental health services.

"This economic case doesn't even count the most direct benefits of mental health services and programs — the boost in student well-being and the relief of suffering," Eisenberg says. Students who participate in counseling report improvements in their satisfaction with their quality of life — often a better predictor of student retention than grade point average.

Innovative treatment models

The insufficient funding for college mental health services also means inadequate access to care and treatment. Colleges and universities are addressing this challenge by developing quick screening tools and brief consultations to rapidly determine the needs of each new student who visits the counseling center. The University of Texas at Austin's Counseling and Mental Health Center, for example, created a Brief Assessment and Referral Team (BART), which replaces a lengthy initial consultation with a brief assessment with a trained counselor, who then refers the student to the appropriate level of care.

"For some students, a single session with a mental health professional is all they need, perhaps to help them problem-solve a situation or talk about a personal concern," says Chris Brownson, PhD, associate vice president for student affairs and director of UT-Austin's Counseling Center. "Other students are in need of more intermediate or even extended care. This is a way of getting students in front of a counselor more quickly and then ultimately getting them connected to the type of treatment that they need in a much faster way."

In another effort to connect students with mental health services faster, the University of Florida's Counseling and Wellness Center launched its Therapist Assisted Online (TAO) program to deliver therapy to students with anxiety disorders — all over a computer or smartphone screen. The seven-week program consists of several modules that teach students to observe their anxiety, live one day at a time and face fears. Students also have weekly 10- to 12-minute video conferences with counselors, as well as homework that they do via an app. They even get text message reminders to prompt them to complete their assignments, says Sherry Benton, PhD, the former director of the UF counseling center who led TAO's development.

The idea for TAO emerged after the center got funding to hire three more counselors, which Benton thought would help them eliminate their waiting list. Instead, it only bought them two weeks without a waiting list.

"It just seemed like every time we got an increase in funding and got more staff, we just had more students who wanted services," she recalls. The realization forced her to rethink how the center delivered care. TAO's success has been beyond Benton's expectations: When she compared the outcomes of the center's traditional face-to-face services with TAO's outcomes, the online clients' improvement in well-being and anxiety symptoms was significantly better than those receiving face-to-face therapy.

"It was phenomenal," says Benton, whose study on the results was submitted for journal publication in June. She thinks the program's success is due to how it's integrated into each student's life via smartphones — the technology allows students to do their therapy homework easily, and their counselors can monitor what students do during the week.

"Let's face it, we would all floss our teeth more often if our dentist could check up on us every few days and see if we were flossing," says Benton. She is now working with the school's office of technology and licensing to develop TAO into a commercial product and is investigating a similar prototype to treat substance abuse and depression among college students.

Education and awareness

Counseling centers are also reaching out beyond the therapist's walls in another way: working with faculty to include wellness awareness in their interactions with students.

"Certainly the bread and butter of what counseling centers do is seeing and treating individuals, but there's a significant amount of campus policy, faculty and staff training, consultation, outreach/prevention, and crisis work they provide as well," Douce says.

Data from the AUCCCD survey confirm that counseling centers are getting involved in more and more aspects of the university, says David Reetz, PhD, director of counseling services at Aurora University in the suburbs of Chicago, and one of the survey's lead authors.

The association's data show that a typical counseling center staffer spends about 65 percent of his or her time in direct clinical service, and another 20 percent to 25 percent of time on outreach initiatives, such as training students, faculty and other staff in mental health issues, as well as offering suicide, sexual violence, and drug and alcohol prevention programs, Reetz says.

At Aurora University, for example, in addition to delivering presentations to faculty on ways to detect early signs of student distress, strategies to intervene and techniques for referring them to the appropriate mental health services, Reetz instructs faculty on the best ways to increase student motivation, pulling in concepts from the psychological literature on resilience, growth mindsets and grit. "We're taking psychological concepts that we … have been using in one form or another in the clinical setting and helping faculty think about how they can … infuse these concepts into their curriculum or into creating their classroom climate," Reetz says.

Some counseling centers are beefing up their efforts to help all students understand the importance of mental health. That's essential, since 78 percent of students with mental health problems first receive counseling or support from friends, family or other nonprofessionals, suggests a 2011 study led by Eisenberg ( Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease ).

One popular alliance among counseling centers and students is Active Minds . The organization's more than 400 student-run chapters throughout the United States support efforts to remove the stigma around mental health issues. For example, the Active Minds' "Send Silence Packing" is a traveling exhibition of 1,100 donated backpacks that represent the number of college students who die by suicide each year. "The backpacks are spread out in a high-traffic area on campus, like the quad, and it's impossible to walk by without taking notice," says Sara Abelson, senior director of programs at Active Minds. "It helps students recognize the need to pay attention, because we all have a role to play in preventing suicide."

Abelson says the organization is also dedicated to championing the idea that student mental health and well-being are central to the mission, purpose and outcomes of every school — and that they need to be a priority.

"I think we're beginning to see more and more universities recognizing that creating a healthy climate and an open dialogue about mental health needs to be a priority," she says. "They're also realizing that it can't just be the responsibility of the counseling center, but that this is relevant across the university, and that everyone from the students to the administration needs to be playing a role."

Amy Novotney is a journalist in Chicago.

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What to Know About Peer Pressure

It's not as simple as just saying no

• Positive Peer Pressure

Peer Pressure vs. Parental Influence

Peer pressure beyond childhood.

Have you ever been pressured to have "one more drink," or stay out later than you said you'd be home? If so, you've been a victim of peer pressure—chances are, most of us have. Peer pressure is the process by which members of the same social group influence other members to do things that they may be resistant to, or might not otherwise choose to do.

Peers are people who are part of the same social group, so the term "peer pressure" refers to the influence that peers can have on each other. Usually, the term peer pressure is used when people are talking about behaviors that are not considered socially acceptable or desirable, such as experimentation with alcohol or drugs. According to child and adolescent psychiatrist Akeem Marsh, MD , "it’s very easy to be influenced by peer pressure as we humans are wired as social creatures."

sturti / Getty Images

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.

What Is an Example of Peer Pressure?

Peer pressure causes people to do things they would not otherwise do with the hope of fitting in or being noticed.

For adolescents, peer relationships are the most important of all thus leading to an increased susceptibility to peer pressure.

Things people may be peer pressured into doing include:

• Acting aggressively (common among men)
• Bullying others
• Doing drugs
• Dressing a certain way
• Drinking alcohol
• Engaging in vandalism or other criminal activities
• Physically fighting
• Only socializing with a certain group

Peer pressure or the desire to impress their peers can override a teen or tween's fear of taking risks, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse for Kids. Risky behavior with drugs and/or alcohol may result in the following:

• Alcohol or drug poisoning
• Asphyxiation
• Driving under the influence (of alcohol or other drugs)
• Sexually transmitted diseases

Behavioral Addiction

People can also feel an internal pressure to participate in activities and behaviors they think their peers are doing, which can put them at risk for the following behavioral addictions:

• Food addiction
• Gambling addiction
• Internet addiction
• Sex addiction
• Shopping addiction
• Video game addiction

In the case of teens, parents are rarely concerned about the peer pressure their kids may face to engage in sports or exercise, as these are typically seen as healthy social behaviors. This is OK, as long as the exercise or sport does not become an unhealthy way of coping, excessive to the point of negatively affecting their health, or dangerous (as in dangerous sports).

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.

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. This can also lead to numerous health consequences.

What Are Examples of Positive Peer Pressure?

We tend to hear more about the potentially negative effects of peer pressure. But the reality is, peer pressure can also be positive. For instance, two friends might put positive pressure on each other to go to the gym together and stay accountable for their fitness goals.

Teens who volunteer in their community can keep each other motivated to participate. This involvement can lead to exposure to role models and eventually lead to the teens becoming positive role models themselves.

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."

In turn, your friend might reconsider criticizing people based on their appearance. By simply adhering to your own values and sharing them with a friend, you can positively peer pressure them to think before making a negative comment.

Although parents worry about the influence of peers, overall, parents also can have a strong influence on whether children succumb to negative peer pressure.

Rather than worrying about the effects of their children's friendships, parents would do well to focus on creating a positive, supportive home environment. That way, even if your child is peer pressured to do something they don't want to do, they'll feel comfortable coming to you to talk about it first.

Role modeling good emotional self-regulation may also help your child stick to their own values when it comes to peer pressure. Self-regulation involves the ability to control thoughts, emotions, and behaviors in order to manage current behavior and achieve long-term goals.

This will teach your child positive ways of solving problems and coping with uncomfortable feelings , rather than trying to escape by doing things to fit into a crowd. Parents can balance the peer pressure to take potentially harmful risks by ensuring they set appropriate boundaries, provide support, and help avoid risks. A few examples:

• Pick up your child from events where alcohol or drugs may have been consumed.
• Provide balanced, truthful information on issues such as alcohol and drug use.
• Stay involved in your child's life. Believe it or not, you are one of their biggest influences and they listen when you talk.
• Urge the importance of thinking before doing. Teach teens to ask themselves questions like: Could this harm me or someone else? Will this put my health or safety at risk? Is it legal? What are the long-term consequences for my health, family, education, and future?

As parents, we must be mindful of the impact of peer pressure on ourselves as our children will be observing and take notice.

Adolescents are particularly vulnerable to peer pressure because they are at a stage of development when they are separating more from their parents' influence, but have not yet established their own values or understanding of human relationships or the consequences of their behavior.

They are also typically striving for social acceptance and are more willing to engage in behaviors against their better judgment to be accepted.

However, adults are also vulnerable to peer pressure. 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.

Being aware of, and carefully choosing the influence of peers that will lead to healthy and happy experiences is a lifelong process.

How to Deal With Peer Pressure

Dealing with peer pressure can be difficult, but below are some ways to help address it.

Take Your Time

Instead of quickly agreeing to do something you'd rather not do, pause and take a few deep breaths . If someone is waiting for you to answer them, tell them you need to take a few days and think about it. It's easier to resist the pressure when you put some time and space between yourself and the situation.

Consider Your Reasons

When you're faced with a choice, ask yourself what your reasons are for doing something. If it's because all of your friends are doing it and you're afraid they won't talk to you if you don't join them, then you may want to reconsider.

You deserve to surround yourself with supportive people who respect your decisions—not people who pressure you into doing something that doesn't feel right.

Set Boundaries

Saying "no" can be hard, but it's necessary to set healthy boundaries in relationships . If someone persistently pressures you to do something, you can try telling them how it affects you.

For instance, you might say something like, "It upsets me when you offer me a cigarette when you know I don't smoke. I won't be able to keep hanging out with you if you don't respect my answer."

Offer an Alternative

It's possible that a friend who is peer pressuring you simply wants to spend more time with you or connect with you, but they don't know how else to ask.

If they pressure you to do shots with them at the bar when you aren't drinking, for example, you might suggest that you both hit the dance floor instead. Or maybe, you make a plan to go on a hike or to the movies the next time you hang out. That way, you're fulfilling both of your needs in a mutually beneficial way.

Clark DA, Donnellan MB, Durbin CE, et al. Sex, drugs, and early emerging risk: Examining the association between sexual debut and substance use across adolescence . PLoS ONE. 2020;15(2):e0228432. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0228432

Stanaland A, Gaither S. “Be a man”: The role of social pressure in eliciting men’s aggressive cognition . Pers Soc Psychol Bull. 2021;47(11):1596-1611. doi:10.1177/0146167220984298

Sabramani V, Idris IB, Ismail H, Nadarajaw T, Zakaria E, Kamaluddin MR. Bullying and its associated individual, peer, family and school factors: Evidence from Malaysian National Secondary School students .  Int J Environ Res Public Health . 2021;18(13):7208. doi:10.3390/ijerph18137208

Kim J, Fletcher JM. The influence of classmates on adolescent criminal activities in the United States .  Deviant Behav . 2018;39(3):275-292. doi:10.1080/01639625.2016.1269563

National Institute on Drug Abuse for Teens. Why Does Peer Pressure Influence Teens To Try Drugs? .

Pamela Rackow, Urte Scholz, Rainer Hornung.  Received social support and exercising: An intervention study to test the enabling hypothesis .  British Journal of Health Psychology , 2015;20(4):763. doi:10.1111/bjhp.12139

Vogel L. Fat shaming is making people sicker and heavier .  CMAJ . 2019;191(23):E649. doi:10.1503/cmaj.109-5758

Dhull P, Beniwal RD. Dealing with peer pressure . Online International Interdisciplinary Research Journal. 2017;7.

By Elizabeth Hartney, BSc, MSc, MA, PhD Elizabeth Hartney, BSc, MSc, MA, PhD is a psychologist, professor, and Director of the Centre for Health Leadership and Research at Royal Roads University, Canada. 

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HOW DOES PEER PRESSURE AFFECT EDUCATIONAL INVESTMENTS? *

Associated data.

When effort is observable to peers, students may try to avoid social penalties by conforming to prevailing norms. To test this hypothesis, we first consider a natural experiment that introduced a performance leaderboard into computer-based high school courses. The result was a 24 percent performance decline. The decline appears to be driven by a desire to avoid the leaderboard; top performing students prior to the change, those most at risk of appearing on the leaderboard, had a 40 percent performance decline, while poor performing students improved slightly. We next consider a field experiment that offered students complimentary access to an online SAT preparatory course. Sign-up forms differed randomly across students only in whether they said the decision would be kept private from classmates. In nonhonors classes, sign-up was 11 percentage points lower when decisions were public rather than private. Honors class sign-up was unaffected. For students taking honors and nonhonors classes, the response depended on which peers they were with at the time of the offer, and thus to whom their decision would be revealed. When offered the course in a nonhonors class (where peer sign-up rates are low), they were 15 percentage points less likely to sign up if the decision was public. But when offered the course in an honors class (where peer sign-up rates are high), they were 8 percentage points more likely to sign up if the decision was public. Thus, students are highly responsive to their peers are the prevailing norm when they make decisions.

I. Introduction

It has long been suggested that students may be motivated as much by the desire to gain social approval (e.g., being popular or fitting in) or avoid social sanctions (e.g., being teased, made fun of or ostracized) as they are by the future benefits of education ( Coleman 1961 ). An important question then arises as to whether and how student effort or investments are affected by such peer social concerns or peer pressure. 1 Are students willing to deviate from what they privately believe to be the optimal scholastic effort or investment decision just because of such social concerns? In this article, we test this hypothesis using both a natural experiment and a field experiment.

Despite the perception that peer pressure is widespread, there is very little direct empirical evidence of its effects. 2 Some studies have found peer social concerns in the workplace. For example, Mas and Moretti (2009) find that the productivity of supermarket cashiers is affected by coworkers who can see them (particularly those they interact with more), but not those who can’t. Bandiera, Barankay and Rasul (2010) find that the productivity of fruit pickers is affected by those working along-side them, but only when they are friends. Adolescence is believed to be the period of greatest vulnerability to peer pressure, during which the desire to be popular or fit in is felt most acutely ( Brown 2004 ). Adolescents may be more likely to give in to such pressure and engage in behaviors that can have long-term effects. Although many studies have found peer effects in education, there are many mechanisms through which they might occur. 3

We begin by examining how the introduction of a system that revealed top classroom performers affected subsequent performance. The natural experiment we consider was applied to a computer-based learning system used in over 100 high schools located predominantly in one U.S. state. The system is primarily used for remedial English and math courses, particularly in preparation for a high-stakes, statewide high school exit exam. Prior to the change, students would answer multiple-choice questions and receive private feedback on whether their answers were correct. One month into the 2011–12 school year, without any advanced notice or explanation, the system was changed. Students were now awarded points for correct answers. Simultaneously, home screens provided tabs revealing the names of the top three scorers in the classroom, the school, and among all users of the system, as measured by cumulative points received for the past week, month, and all time. Finally, each tab showed students their own rank (in the classroom, school, and among all users, for the past week, month, and all time). There were no other changes to the system.

We find that the introduction of the leaderboard led to a 24 percent decline in performance. We also provide evidence that these results are driven by an aversion to being on the leaderboard. Because students had already been using the system for over a month before the change, they would have had some private information about their own performance, and thus their risk of showing up on the leaderboard if they continued performing at their previous level. We find that students in the top quartile of the prechange distribution of performance, those most at risk of showing up on the leaderboard, on average had a 40 percent decline in performance. This decline comes primarily through attempting fewer questions (not getting fewer questions correct), and includes reduced discretionary use of the system outside of school; both are consistent with an active choice to reduce effort. These students cut back almost immediately, with declines evident on the very first day of the change. By contrast, students at the bottom of the prechange performance distribution did slightly better following the change. The pattern across the distribution of prechange performance is monotonic; on average, the better you were performing before the leaderboard was in place (and thus the greater the risk of being in the top three), the more your performance declined afterward. In other words, it appears that at least some students were willing to work hard and do well only as long as their classmates wouldn’t know about it.

To further isolate and test for peer pressure, and to see whether these effects apply beyond remedial students, we turn to our field experiment. In four low-income Los Angeles high schools, we offered eleventh-grade students complimentary access to an online SAT preparatory course from a well-known test preparation company. Across students within classrooms, we randomly varied whether the sign-up forms emphasized that the decision to enroll would be kept private from the other students in the classroom. In particular, students were either told that their decision to enroll would be kept completely private from everyone including the other students in the room, or except those students. Notably, the sole difference between sign-up forms in our “private” and “public” treatments was a single word ( including versus except ).

We use both honors and nonhonors classes for the experiment. The prep class is an educational investment, and making it observable to peers could carry different social costs in settings where the norms on the acceptability of effort differ, such as in the two types of classes. We find that observability has a large impact on sign-up rates, and the effects differ across settings. In nonhonors classes, sign-up is 11 percentage points lower when students believe others in the class will know whether they signed up, compared with when they believed it would be kept private. In honors classes, there is no difference in sign-up rates under the two conditions.

Consistent with these results being driven by peer social concerns, in nonhonors classes, students who say it is important to be popular are less likely to sign up when the decision is public rather than private, whereas students who say it is not important are not affected at all. In honors classes, students who say that it is important to be popular are slightly more likely to sign up when the decision is public, whereas those who say it is not important are again unaffected. In both cases, students concerned with popularity move in the direction of the locally prevailing norm when the decision is public, whereas those unconcerned with popularity are unaffected.

The differential response to observability by class type could still be consistent with explanations other than peer social concerns. For example, students in honors and nonhonors classes may differ from each other in many ways, which may affect how much they care about privacy or how they respond when decisions are observable. Though this would not change the policy implication that observability affects sign-up in nonhonors classes, to test peer pressure even more cleanly we can address this selection problem and make the set of students we examine in honors and nonhonors classes more similar by focusing on students taking both types of classes. Students are free to choose whether to take an honors or nonhonors class for every subject for which both are available. To fix ideas, consider the set of students taking exactly two honors classes (hereafter “two-honors” students). Honors classes are spread throughout the day, but our team showed up for just two periods. The timing of our arrival will find some two-honors students in an honors class and others in a nonhonors class. Just as important, the timing of our visit, and therefore which type of class we find them in, will be uncorrelated with student characteristics. Thus, although this approach does not explicitly randomize peers, the set of two-honors students who happen to be sitting in one of their honors classes when we arrive and conduct our experiment should be similar in expectation to those who happen to be sitting in one of their nonhonors classes—all that will differ is whether they are at that moment sitting with their honors or nonhonors peers. Because we are not actually changing a student’s peers at all (or their teachers, schools, neighborhoods, or anything else in their environment), we can rule out most other channels through which peers may influence each other. We capture the effect of varying just to which of a student’s peers the sign-up decision will be revealed, and thus whether and how those peers punish or reward observable effort.

Examining the set of all students taking just some honors classes (“some-honors” students), we find that making the decision to enroll public rather than private decreases sign-up rates by 15 percentage points when they are in one of their nonhonors classes (where sign-up among their classmates is low). By contrast, making the decision public increases sign-up rates by 8 percentage points when they are in one of their honors classes (where sign-up rate among classmates is high). Viewed another way, when decisions are observable to peers, the sign-up rate is over 20 percentage points lower when they are with their nonhonors peers rather than their honors peers.

Both settings suggest peer social concerns affect educational investment and effort. When faced with the trade-off between the future benefits of academic effort and the present potential social costs, some students choose to reduce effort and performance (though conforming to the locally prevailing norm can also induce greater effort or investment, as observed in honors classes under the public treatment). The fact that we find similar effects in two entirely independent settings, plus the fact that many investments or efforts students may make are observable to peers (e.g., raising a hand in class, seeking extra help, or earning academic honors), suggests that such effects may be found more widely. These results are also relevant to the literature examining the role of schools and neighborhoods in the educational outcomes of poor and minority students ( Oreopoulos 2003 ; Jacob 2004 ; Kling, Liebman, and Katz 2007 ; Dobbie and Fryer 2011 ; Fryer and Katz 2013 ). Finally, the results may also carry implications for the design of school policy or practices. Changing either norms or peers is likely to be quite difficult, particularly on a large scale; but for at least some activities, changing the extent to which behavior is observable to peers is likely to be less so. 4

Because both settings we examine include primarily Hispanic students, our results are generally supportive of the “acting white” hypothesis, whereby minorities may face peer sanctions for certain behaviors ( Fordham and Ogbu 1986 ; Austen-Smith and Fryer 2005 ; Fryer 2011 ; Fryer and Torelli 2010 ). 5 More broadly, Austen-Smith and Fryer (2005) and Fryer (2007) model the trade-off between group loyalty and economic success. 6 For example, when students face a tension between investing in activities rewarded by the labor market and signaling loyalty to a group, one equilibrium involves sorting wherein high-ability individuals invest in labor market–oriented activities rather than those likely to increase acceptance by the group, and low-ability individuals choose the reverse. The differential response we observe by class type is consistent with such sorting, with social penalties only for students in nonhonors classes. The fact that we consider an SAT prep course is particularly relevant, given that such an investment signals a likelihood that the individual may leave the group and is thus the type of behavior we expect to be sanctioned under these models. Finally, our results are also relevant to other general models of social interactions ( Akerlof 1997 ; Becker and Murphy 2000 ; Durlauf and Ioannides 2010 ; Postlewaite 2011 ), including those that examine the role of culture in shaping interactions.

The remainder of this article proceeds as follows. In Section II, we discuss the natural experiment in more detail. Section III discusses the field experiment, and Section IV concludes. All appendix material is available in the Online Appendix .

II. Leaderboard Natural Experiment

Ii.a. background and policy change.

Many schools use in-class, computer-based learning materials created and operated by private companies. The company responsible for the software we consider was operating in over 200 high schools across several states (though primarily in just one). The sample of schools using the software is not random. These schools have a higher minority share and local poverty rate compared with other schools in the state where the system is most widely used.

The most widely used courses are tenth- and eleventh-grade remedial English and math, including those designed for statewide high school exit exams; we restrict our analysis to these courses. Schools require students to take these courses if they scored in the lowest proficiency levels on the previous year’s statewide standardized test or if they failed the high school exit exam. The fact that these students are low-performing is relevant for generalizability, since they might, for example, be more sensitive to peer social stigma than is the average student.

Students are given individual online accounts. When logged in, they have access to a database of questions. Questions are multiple choice, and after each question students receive private feedback on whether their answer is correct. The questions are organized into modules that typically follow in-class instruction. Students have some discretion in how many questions they answer (the database was sufficiently large that students would not run out of questions). Students can also access the system at any time from any computer or device with an Internet connection for additional, voluntary learning opportunities.

On September 20, 2011, without any prior notice or explanation, the company introduced a point system and a series of rankings and leaderboards, intended to encourage and motivate students. Students were now awarded 1,000 points for answering a question correctly on the first try, 325 points for a correct answer on the second or third tries, and no points after that. There was no penalty for incorrect answers; thus students could increase their score by getting more questions correct on the first, second, or third tries or by attempting more questions.

In addition, students could access a series of tabs showing the names of the top three scorers (based on cumulative points, starting at 0 on the day of the change) in their class, school, and among all users of that course. These leaderboards were updated in real time and were separately available for the past week, month, and all time. Finally, students could also access their own rank (again, in their class, school, and among all users, and for the past week, month, and all time). The system was otherwise unchanged during the period of our analysis. These changes were introduced at the same time for all students and across all schools.

II.B. Data and Empirical Analysis

We have data for the universe of questions answered, with each student uniquely identified by an ID code. However, we have no other data on students besides their first and last names. We exclude classrooms with fewer than five students and those not using the system before the change. This leaves us with a sample of over 5,000 students across more than 100 schools.

Because the data are click-based, if a student does not attempt any questions on a particular day, they have no data for that day. We recode such cases to zero, but only if at least two other students in their class attempted a question on that day (since there are some days where the system is not used at all by the class). The results are robust to other thresholds, or not recoding at all, since most students attempt at least one question on days when others in their class also do.

To explore the possible role of peer social concerns, we exploit the fact that the potential for being newly exposed to such sanctions by the leaderboard will be greater for some students than others. Because students had been using the system about a month before the change, they would have had some information or signal about their own performance (feedback could also have come from exams, exercises, or directly from teachers). This would likely have included some signal of relative performance as well. For example, in the extreme cases, a student who was getting most answers correct will likely perceive a higher leaderboard risk than a student who almost never got any answers correct. Therefore, students would have had an approximate sense of whether, if they continued their performance unchanged, they were likely to be among the top performers in the class and have this information revealed to others through the leaderboard. These are the students that we predict will be the most likely to reduce effort if a fear of peer sanctions is operative. We therefore construct a measure of leaderboard risk by computing the distribution of prechange performance within each classroom, based on the number of correct answers students had in the month prior to the change.

As preliminary visual evidence, Figure I plots the average number of correct answers per day, separately by quartile of the within-classroom distribution of prechange performance. We also fit linear trends for the pre- and postchange periods separately, along with 95 percent confidence bands. For previously high-performing students (quartiles 3 and 4), performance declines on the day that the leaderboard is introduced (this first-day drop is statistically significant in regressions for quartile 4 if we include just the day before and day of the change). The number of correct answers then stays lower for the remainder of the period (this persistence is confirmed by regressions that exclude the first day or first few days after the change). By contrast, there is little to no decline for students in quartiles 1 and 2 (with perhaps a slight increase for quartile 1).

Average Number of Correct Answers per Day

These figures plot, for each day in the period from 30 days before to 30 days after the introduction of the new system, the average number of correct answers per day. Each figure plots a different quartile of the within-classroom distribution of the total number of correct answers during the month prior to the introduction of the new system. There are 60 observations plotted per quartile. The figures also fit linear trends separately before and after the introduction of the new system, and the 95 percent confidence interval associated with the trends. The vertical line corresponds to the day of the introduction of the new system, September 20, 2011.

We can confirm this visual evidence with regressions exploring how performance changed on introduction of the leaderboard, again separately by quartile of prechange performance:

where Y i,t is the number of questions answered correctly by student i on day t, Post is an indicator for before versus after the policy changes, and α i are student fixed effects. We trim the post period to one month to match the approximately one month that students were using the system prior to leaderboard introduction (the results are robust to using one- or two-week intervals; see Online Appendix Tables A.I and A.II ). The results are also robust to including time trends and differential pre- and postchange trends (see Online Appendix Table A.III ). We note that comparing differential changes across quartiles also allows us to net out any changes in other factors that affect all students equally.

Table I provides the results (robust standard errors clustered by classroom in brackets). 7 Column (1) shows that the effect of the program across all students was negative. After the system is introduced, on average students answer 0.63 fewer questions correctly per day (significant at the 1 percent level). This is a 24 percent decline from the baseline of 2.6. Columns (2)–(5) provide the results for each quartile of prechange performance separately (results are similar if we pool the samples and add interactions). For students in the top quartile in column (5), the change was associated with answering 1.93 fewer questions correctly per day (significant at the 1 percent level). This represents a 40 percent decline from the prechange baseline of 4.8. 8

E ffects of the P oints and L eaderboard S ystem

Notes . This table presents OLS regressions of the number of correct answers per day on a dummy on whether the date is after the introduction of the points and leaderboard system. All columns restrict the analysis to the time window between one month before the introduction and one month after it. column (1) presents the results for the entire sample. Columns (2)–(5) present results by quartile of the within-classroom distribution of the total number of correct answers during the month prior to the introduction of the new system. All regressions include student fixed effects. Robust standard errors clustered by classroom in brackets. *** p < .01, ** p < .05, * p < .1.

As we move down from the top quartile in the prechange performance distribution, the effects on performance become less negative, and eventually for the bottom quartile turn positive (in all cases, the results are significant at the five percent level or better. We can also reject equality of the effects for each pairwise combination of quartiles). 9 Again, these results are suggestive of a role for social sanctions, since it is the students who likely perceive the greatest risk of being in the leaderboard, and thus having their high performance publicly revealed, who cut back the most. 10

So far, our analysis has examined simple before versus after comparisons around the date of the change. To explore the plausibility that the introduction of the points and leaderboard system caused these changes, we can consider the uniqueness of these results. Thus, in a series of placebo tests, we run the same regressions as before but assign the “change date” to every alternate date starting one month after the true change date and ending one month before the end of the school year. For quartile 4 on its own, none of the 218 available placebo dates yield a greater decline in performance than the −1.93 found for the true change date. None yield a point estimate greater than 1.93 either; so even in a two-sided test, no other date in our sample yields as large a change in performance for this previously top-performing group as the day of the leaderboard introduction. Figure II provides a histogram with the distribution of placebo treatment effects, and shows that the estimated decline around the true date is an out-lier in terms of sustained changes in student performance around any specific date. Such large and sustained increases or decreases in performance never occur for any other quartile either. Running the placebo tests for the other quartiles, no alternate date yields an estimated increase or decrease in performance of 1.93. 11

Distribution of Placebo Treatment Effects for Quartile 4

This histogram displays the distribution of placebo treatment effects estimated for quartile 4 of the within-classroom distribution of the total number of correct answers during the month prior to the introduction of the new system. We run the same regressions as in our main specification, but assign the introduction of the point and leaderboard system to every other date, starting one month after the true date of the change, and ending one month before the end of the school year; there are 218 such days plotted here (each of these regressions has a different number of observations). The dashed line represents our estimated treatment effect for quartile 4 (−1.93).

II.C. Alternative Mechanisms

Though we lack the cleaner experimental design explored below that can help isolate peer pressure as the underlying driving mechanism, we can provide suggestive evidence against several alternative explanations. We first consider whether the leaderboard may have created competitive pressure that adversely affected previously top-performing students. If such effects were present, we might expect students to perform worse on questions they attempted. However, estimating similar regressions as before, Online Appendix Table A.IV shows that for the full sample, the percent of questions attempted that are answered correctly actually increases slightly after the leaderboard is introduced. For the top quartile, there is a two-point decline in percent correct (from a base of 63 percent); still, over 90 percent of the total decline in questions answered correctly is attributable to attempting fewer questions, which is consistent with an active effort to avoid the leaderboard. 12

Similarly, if competitive pressure is adversely affecting performance, we might expect less of a decline when the system is used outside of school. Students working outside of school can take as long as they want to answer questions and seek assistance from other people or resources. When working from home they are not facing off against other students in real time. Thus, the system affords them a great deal of opportunity to improve their performance in a less competitive environment if they choose to (points earned at home count toward the leaderboard). However, the bottom panel of Online Appendix Table A.IV shows that performance at home responds the same as use at school. Beyond suggesting competitive pressure is not likely at play, declines in discretionary home use again suggest an active choice to answer fewer questions and avoid the leaderboard. 13

It is also possible that the information given on rank affected performance (e.g., Barankay 2012 ; Tran and Zeckhauser 2012 ; Ashraf, Bandiera, and Lee 2014 ). For example, the top-performing students may not have known before how well they were doing relative to classmates and may then decide that they don’t need to work as hard. However, since the change took place over a month into the school year, students would have already had some information on their performance from exams, assignments, or feedback from teachers. In addition, as noted, the decline for previously top-performing students occurred on the first day of the change. Since all students started at zero, during that first session there would not have been enough time for students to answer a lot of questions correctly, infer from this brief performance that they are (persistently) at the top of the class (beyond what they already knew prior to the change), and still have time to cut back enough (including overcoming their strong performance at the start) that we would see a large net decline on that first day. Similarly, it is unlikely that rank gave teachers enough new information on performance to allow them to redirect attention or resources away from students performing well and toward those needing more help on that very first day. However, we cannot completely rule out that rank plays some role in these effects.

We can rule out that the decline in performance is due to the sudden change or newness of the system. First, the decline was not common to all students, and in fact was found only for previously high-performing students, while worse performing students actually improved. Second, the effects appear to persist beyond the first day’s decline (as evidenced by Figure I and by the fact that the regression results are robust to excluding the first day or first few days after the change), whereas over time students should become more familiar with the system and improve.

Finally, mean reversion is unlikely to explain our results. Questions are drawn from the database at random, so there is no explicit design that assigns harder questions to good performers. Statistical or incidental mean reversion is unlikely to explain our results. The prechange quartile is based on over a month of performance, so any randomness or luck is likely to have balanced out. In addition, as noted, the biggest change is in the number of questions attempted, not the percent correct; this likely reflects a conscious choice of effort, whereas a student simply on a lucky (unlucky) streak would likely experience a decline (increase) in the percent answered correctly. Finally, the fact that we find no other changes this large in our placebo test around any other date suggests mean reversion is not found at any other time.

II.D. Summary of the Leaderboard Natural Experiment

Overall, the results so far suggest that students actively reduce effort and performance to avoid appearing on the leaderboard. However, we cannot completely rule out other potential channels, such as information on rank, nor can we isolate peer pressure as the reason for leaderboard aversion. There remains the question of whether such effects are found more widely or among nonremedial students. To address these questions, we turn to our field experiment.

III. Field Experiment

Iii.a. experimental design.

We conducted our experiment in the four largest public high schools in a disadvantaged area of south Los Angeles. We visited each school once, between December 2013 and April 2014. The sample was confined to eleventh-grade students, since this is when many students begin preparing for the SAT. The four schools each have around 3,000 students. In addition to being larger on average, these schools have a higher share of students eligible for free and reduced-price meals (84 percent versus 68 percent) and students of Hispanic ethnicity (96 percent versus 69 percent) compared to the average school in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). The median income in the ZIP codes around these four schools is also lower than for all schools in the district ($39,533 versus $48,898). We would therefore not want to generalize our results to other schools. However, we do note that these schools account for approximately 7 percent of all high school enrollment in the LAUSD. From a policy perspective, low-performing schools such as these are the ones where it is perhaps most important to understand the barriers to educational investments and performance. Finally, we note that despite these differences, the fraction of seniors in these four schools who take the SAT is the same as for LAUSD as a whole (51 percent).

Within each school, our visits were coordinated with principals and counselors to choose on what day we could visit and during which period(s). These considerations were typically about scheduling logistics for the schools and our research team. During the selected periods, we visited honors and nonhonors classrooms across a range of subjects. Overall, we visited 26 classrooms across the four schools, with a total of 825 students (all of whom participated in the study; we did not contact absent students). Neither students nor teachers were informed in advance about the subject of our visit or that there would be an intervention related to the SAT (principals were informed in advance, but agreed not to communicate the purpose of our visit ahead of time).

Students in the selected classrooms were offered the opportunity to sign up for free access to a commercial, online SAT preparation course. The course was created by a well-known test prep company that students in these schools are familiar with. The course includes practice exams, a library of prerecorded videos and instructional content, live online class sessions, analysis of individual performance, and test-taking strategy.

Prior to our study, no students in these schools were using the course. The company does not currently offer this software to individuals, instead selling subscriptions to schools, who then make it available to individual students (at a cost of about $200 per student). None of the schools where we conducted the study had purchased this software prior to our intervention. In a separate follow-up survey at one of our schools (conducted after the intervention), we asked students to estimate the cost of the software; on average, they estimated the value at $260. Thus, especially for these low income students, this is a valuable offer (perceived and actual) that they would be forgoing if they chose not to sign up (confirmed by the fact that sign-up rates are very high when the decision is private). Finding that observability alone is sufficient to deter sign-up would be an indication that these peer social concerns may be powerful. 14

After a brief introduction, students were given a form offering them the opportunity to sign up for the course. In particular, after asking students their name, sex and favorite subject in school, the form contained the following statement: “[Company Name] is offering a free online test preparation course for the SAT that is intended to improve your chances of being accepted and receiving financial aid at a college you like.” The forms then had one of the following two options: “Your decision to sign up for the course will be kept completely private from everyone, except the other students in the room,” which we refer to as the “public” sign-up condition; or “Your decision to sign up for the course will be kept completely private from everyone, including the other students in the room,” which we refer to as the “private” sign-up condition.

Thus, the sole difference between the two forms, shown in Figure III , was a single word: “except” or “including” (in practice, we did not reveal any sign-up decisions). We also note that the difference in expected privacy is for classmates, not teachers, administrators, or parents.

Sign-up Sheets

Students were not given any additional information and were told that all questions should be held until after all forms had been collected. When all students had completed the first form, the research team collected them and handed out a second form with additional questions (discussed below; this form can be found in Online Appendix Figure A.I ). When students had completed the second form, the research team collected it and handed out assent and consent forms for authorization to access GPA information. The entire intervention took less than 10 minutes.

The forms with the different privacy assurances were pre-sorted in an alternating pattern and handed out to students consecutively in their seats. By randomizing at the level of the student within the classroom, we ensure that students in the public and private sign-up groups were otherwise treated the same in every other way. So for example there are no differences in how the experimenters or teachers treated students with different privacy statements, no differences in encouragement to enroll or in classroom environment or characteristics. We also did not allow students to communicate with each other until all forms were returned, so there would be no contamination across groups and students would not realize that they were being given different terms of privacy (and even if they looked at each other’s desks, as noted, the forms looked identical at a glance because they only differed by one word).

Because the difference between the two forms was just a single word, the treatment was very small and subtle. This makes it less likely that students would respond to the difference, and we therefore likely underestimate the effects of peer pressure. We chose not to implement treatments that made sign-up even more explicitly public, such as by asking students to raise their hands in the class, come to the front of the room, or put their name on a public sign-up sheet in the room. First, doing so would have required a much greater number of classrooms and schools, and thus significantly higher cost, to have reasonable statistical power since treatments like this could only be implemented at the classroom level. Related, introducing variation at the classroom level could introduce more possible random variation in student, classroom or teacher attributes (or implementation of the treatment) across treatment groups that could separately influence sign-up. A second reason is that the method of signing up (i.e., having the public treatment involve raising a hand or staying after class to sign up and the private treatment involve signing up on an individual sheet of paper) could itself affect sign-up rates. Having all students sign up through the same process but varying only a single word for the two groups makes it clearer that it was just the public versus private nature of the decision that explains any difference in sign-up rates. Finally, having a more public sign-up treatment could have led to other forms of peer effects that we want to exclude, such as social learning or coordination.

As noted already, our priors (aided and confirmed by initial pilot testing) were that the social acceptability of undertaking effort or an investment could vary across settings, particularly with respect to academic performance or baseline levels of effort or investment. Therefore, we explicitly chose both honors and nonhonors classes for the experiment, yielding 560 students in nonhonors classes and 265 in honors classes.

Table II presents tests of covariate balance. As expected given that randomization was across students within classrooms, the two groups are very well balanced on all measured dimensions, including sex, age, ethnicity, number of honors classes, and grade point average. 15

B alance of C ovariates

Notes . Columns (1) and (2) report the mean level of each variable, with standard deviations in brackets, for the private and public conditions. Column (3) reports the p -value for the test that the means are equal in the two conditions.

III.B. Testing the Peer Pressure Mechanism

As noted already, any differences in the response to whether the sign-up decision is public or private across students in honors and nonhonors classes could arise for reasons other than differences in norms. For example, honors and nonhonors students may differ along many social, economic, and demographic dimensions or may have different aspirations or expectations, some of which could affect how they respond to differences in whether information is private.

To reduce this heterogeneity and create a more comparable set of students in honors and nonhonors classes, which will allow us to estimate more cleanly the effect of changing just the composition of peers to whom the sign-up decision is potentially revealed, we can exploit the fact that many students do not take exclusively honors or nonhonors classes. In our sample schools, students are free to choose the honors or nonhonors version of every subject for which both are offered. Per school policy, they cannot be denied entry into any honors class that they want to take (even if they have poor grades), nor can they be forced to take an honors class they do not want to take. Many students therefore choose to take just a few honors classes, for example, choosing a subject that they are particularly interested in or a class with a teacher they like or heard good things about.

We can therefore examine students taking just some but not all honors classes and exploit variation in the timing of those courses relative to the timing of when our research team arrived to conduct the experiment. For any given some-honors student, whether the period when we arrived and conducted our study corresponded to one of their honors classes or one of their nonhonors classes should be exogenous with respect to their attributes. The effects of making sign-up public or private in honors versus nonhonors classes for this group of students therefore more cleanly isolates how sign-up varies when essentially at random we offer it to them when they are sitting in the room with other honors students or other nonhonors students.

In practice, this strategy involves restricting our analysis to students taking between one and three honors classes. 16 We note that in implementing this strategy, we must condition on the number of honors classes being taken so that we only compare students taking the same number. To see this, note that the full set of some-honors students we find in nonhonors classes will include a greater share of students taking just one honors class relative to students taking three honors classes (setting aside differences in the size of these two groups), since the former are much more likely to be in a nonhonors class during any given period. By contrast, the set of some-honors students we find in honors classes will contain a larger share of three-honors students relative to one-honors students. Since one- and three-honors students likely differ from each other in many ways, our empirical strategy relies on comparing only among those taking the same number of honors classes, who should therefore be similar, just exploiting variation in whether we happened to arrive when they were sitting in one of their honors classes or one of their nonhonors classes.

One potential concern is class scheduling. For example, suppose in the extreme case we visited only one school and that honors classes for the various subjects are offered uniquely across periods, that is, period 1 offers honors only in English, and honors English is only offered period 1. In this setting, if we arrived first period, the some-honors students found in an honors class will all be taking honors English, while those found in a nonhonors class will be taking honors only in other subjects. If students taking honors in different subjects differ from each other, particularly in ways that affect how they respond to whether their decisions are public or private (independently of peer pressure), then we will not rule out selection. Though we have no strong priors that such students would respond differently, we believe that in practice this is not a concern for our analysis. First, because these are large schools, there are multiple honors and nonhonors sections for each subject, offered during different periods throughout the day. So visiting during one particular period will not necessarily skew the some-honors students we find in an honors class toward a particular honors subject relative to some-honors students we find in a nonhonors class. In addition, we visited each school during two separate periods. Finally, we visited different schools, each of which has different schedules (and we visited different schools during different periods).

This strategy assumes that information is to an extent localized. But a some-honors student sitting in an honors class when offered the course under the public regime may worry that peers in their nonhonors classes will learn that they signed up (especially since other students in the class are also taking a mix of honors and nonhonors classes). This would work against finding differences based on whether these students are offered the course when with their honors or nonhonors peers, and suggests we may underestimate peer pressure. 17

Overall, there are 343 some-honors students (42 percent of our sample). Online Appendix Table A.V provides means for key covariates. We note that in columns (3) and (4) of Panel A, covariates are not balanced between those we surveyed in honors and nonhonors classes (though they are balanced across the public and private treatments). As discussed already, those we find in an honors class are taking more honors classes (and have a higher average GPA) than those we find in a nonhonors class. Thus, as a demonstration, Panel B shows means for the set of students taking exactly two honors classes (we focus on two-honors students because in practice with our smaller sample sizes we find very few one-honors students in an honors class and very few three-honors students in a nonhonors class, leading to small cell sizes and noisier estimates). 18 Overall, the two groups are now very similar in terms of attributes (and covariates are again balanced across public and private treatments). 19 They are also well balanced across honors subjects; of the two total honors classes they are taking, the groups differ only by 0.08, 0.02, and 0.12 in terms of the number of math/sciences, social sciences, and humanities honors classes. Though none of the differences are statistically significant, to absorb any residual variation, in separate regressions that follow we also add controls for attributes and honors subjects taken (this does not change the estimates appreciably).

III.C. Empirical Strategy

We begin by regressing an indicator for whether individual i in classroom c chose to sign up for the prep course ( Signup ) on an indicator for whether they were offered the public or private treatment ( Public ), separately for honors and nonhonors classes (pooling and using interactions yields similar conclusions): 20

where β 1 , the estimated effect of making the sign-up decision public, is the coefficient of interest (separately for honors and nonhonors classes). In additional specifications, we add other covariates (age and dummies for sex and Hispanic) as well as surveyor and classroom fixed effects; the latter further isolate the within-classroom variation in the public versus private condition across students. These results will capture the overall effects of making sign-up public rather than private in the two types of classes, which can carry implications for school policies and practices.

To then more cleanly test the isolated peer pressure mechanism, we estimate the same regressions while limiting the sample to some-honors students, adding dummies for the number of honors classes to ensure that we only compare students taking the same number of such classes (and in additional specifications, we add controls for attributes and honors subjects).

III.D. Main Results

We begin by providing the raw sign-up rates across public and private conditions, in both honors and nonhonors classes. Figure IV displays the findings. In nonhonors classes, the private sign-up rate is 72 percent, while the public rate is 61 percent. The difference is significant at the 1 percent level. In honors classes, private and public sign-up rates are very high overall, and very similar: 92 percent of students sign up under the private treatment, while 93 percent sign up under the public one ( p = .631). These high sign-up rates suggest that students indeed valued the course being offered, consistent with their beliefs about the cost of the course. The fact that sign-up is not affected by privacy in the honors class shows that there is no general effect of privacy itself (such as students always having a strong preference for greater privacy); though it is possible that the value placed on privacy differs between students in honors and nonhonors classes or that the demand for (or value of) the course is so much higher in honors classes (since more students want to go to college) that they are willing to accept the loss of privacy in exchange for the course. We separate out this possibility below.

Sign-up Rates for Private versus Public Decisions, NonHonors versus Honors Classes

This figure presents the means and 95 percent confidence intervals of the sign-up rates for students in the private and public conditions, separately for honors and nonhonors classes. There are 560 observations for nonhonors classes and 265 for honors classes.

In Table III , we present the results in regression format. Given the possibility of common shocks and correlated errors by classroom, along with the small number of classrooms in our sample, in addition to p -values from robust standard errors we also present p -values from wild bootstrap clustered standard errors ( Cameron, Gelbach, and Miller 2008 ) and permutation tests. 21 In column (1), we present the results without controls (which replicate the sign-up rates from Figure IV ); in column (2) we add individual covariates and in column (3) we also add classroom and surveyor fixed effects. The results are very similar across specifications, suggesting that randomization was successful, and are robust to the various methods for computing standard errors. We again conclude that making sign-up public rather than private reduces sign-up rates in nonhonors classes, by a statistically significant 11–12 percentage points. But there is again no effect in honors classes. We believe these results are valuable in themselves, aside from testing for peer pressure as the driving mechanism, with important implications for school policy and practices by showing a large, negative effect of observability on investment choices in nonhonors classes.

E ffect of P ublic T reatment on S ign-up D ecision

Notes . Columns (1) to (3) restrict the sample to nonhonors classes, and columns (4) to (6) restrict to honors classes. Columns (1) and (4) present OLS regressions of a dummy variable for whether the student signed up for the SAT prep course on a public sign-up dummy. columns (2) and (5) replicate and add individual covariates (age and dummies for male and Hispanic). columns (3) and (6) further add surveyor and classroom fixed effects. Robust standard errors in brackets. *** p < .01, ** p < .05, * p < .1. See Section III.D for a description of the wild bootstrap and permutation test procedures.

This first set of results indicates that there is not a universally negative effect of making the sign-up decision public. Nevertheless, this is not yet sufficient to establish the existence of different social norms in honors versus nonhonors classes, nor that students are responding to those differences. We therefore turn to our analysis of some-honors students. Having established that there are no significant differences between such students that were offered the SAT course in an honors or a nonhonors class (once we condition on the number of honors classes being taken), we can show that by contrast, their classmates in those classes are very different. In nonhonors classes, the private sign-up rate among no-honors classmates is 65 percent, whereas in honors classes the rate among all-honors students is 100 percent (the p -value of the difference is .000). There are also dramatic differences in peers’ GPA (2.03 in nonhonors versus 3.54 in honors, with p = .000). Some-honors students fall between the two, with 86 percent private sign-up rates and a 2.67 GPA.

These results establish that the peer groups are indeed very different in honors and nonhonors classes, and in a way that helps us formulate our hypotheses on the direction of social pressure effects for students taking some-honors classes. If peer pressure pushes students towards conforming to the locally prevailing norm within the classroom, we expect public sign-up to be lower than private sign-up in nonhonors classes, and higher in nonhonors classes. 22 In Table IV , we estimate regressions using the full sample of some-honors students, separately for honors and nonhonors classes. In nonhonors classes, the effect of the public treatment is to reduce sign-up rates by a statistically significant 15–17 percentage points. In honors classes, the public treatment increases sign-up rates by 7–9 percentage points, with statistical significance at the 10 percent level in three of the four specifications. Viewed in a different way, when choices are public, sign-up rates are over 20 percentage points greater when (otherwise identical) students make them in one of their honors classes rather than one of their nonhonors classes. The results are generally robust to the alternative forms of statistical inference, losing significance in just one case (column (5), where the p -value increases from .07 to .11 when using wild bootstrap clustered standard errors).

E ffect of P ublic T Reatment On S ign-up D ecision for S tudents T aking O ne to T hree H onors C lasses

Notes . This table restricts the sample to students taking one, two, or three honors classes. Columns (1) to (4) restrict the sample to nonhonors classes, and columns (5) to (8) restrict to honors classes. Columns (1) and (5) present OLS regressions of a dummy variable for whether the student signed up for the SAT prep course on a public sign-up dummy, controlling for dummies on the number of honors classes taken by the student. Columns (2) and (6) add individual covariates (age and dummies for male and Hispanic). Columns (3) and (7) further add surveyor and classroom fixed effects. Columns (4) and (8) replicate columns (3) and (7) adding controls for the number of honors classes taken by subject categories (math/sciences and social sciences; the omitted category is humanities). Robust standard errors in brackets. *** p <.01, ** p <.05, * p <. 1. See Section III.D for a description of the wild bootstrap and permutation test procedures.

Of course, we cannot generalize the results for these some-honors students to all students (though the full sample results showing improved sign-up by making it private in nonhonors classes still holds). However, it is still valuable to document a set of students for whom the localized influence of peers can have such a dramatic effect. The set of some-honors students represents about 42 percent of the sample. Finally, these some-honors students may be the most relevant “marginal students”; those taking all honors classes are already making high levels of effort and investment, whereas those not taking any honors classes may require deeper interventions or altogether different policies to increase their effort.

III.E. Heterogeneity

Our main underlying hypothesis for why peer observability may affect choices is that students worry about what their peers will think of them. On a second form handed out to students after they had turned in the sign-up form, we asked students, “On a scale 1–5, how important do you think it is to be popular in your school? (1: not important … 5: very important).” These are of course just subjective, self-reports, but they can provide suggestive corroborating evidence of our proposed mechanism. If the effects that we observe are driven by fear of social sanctions or seeking social approval, we would expect students who are more concerned with popularity to be more responsive to whether sign-up is public or private. To assess this hypothesis, we split our sample as close as possible to half, according to the importance attributed by students to being popular (answers 1 and 2 (not important) versus 3, 4 or 5 (important)). Figures V and ​ andVI VI present the results for the raw sign-up rates. 23 Figure V shows that for students in nonhonors classes who say that it is important to be popular, the sign-up rate is 20 percentage points lower in the public condition than in the private condition ( p = .002). For those who care less about popularity, the effect of a public decision is small (4 percentage points) and not statistically significant. In Figure VI , we observe the opposite pattern for honors classes, although on a smaller scale (since the private take-up rates were already very close to 100 percent): a positive effect of public sign-up for those who care more about popularity, and no difference for those who care less. Table V presents the results in regression format, which confirm these results. Thus, we find that students who believe it is important to be popular move in the direction of locally prevailing norms (in both honors and nonhonors classes) when sign-up is public rather than private, while those who do not think it is important are unaffected by whether sign-up is public or private. 24

Sign-up Rates for Private versus Public Decisions: Importance of Being Popular (NonHonors Classes)

This figure presents the means and 95 percent confidence intervals of the sign-up rates for students in the private and public conditions in nonhonors classes, separately for students who consider important to be popular in their school and those who do not. The dummy for whether the student considers it important to be popular is constructed by collapsing the answers to the question, “How important is it to be popular in your school?” from a 1–5 scale to a dummy variable (answers 3–5 were coded as considering it important, 1–2 as not important). There are 216 observations in the “important to be popular” panel and classes and 325 in the “not important” panel.

Sign-up Rates for Private versus Public Decisions: Importance of Being Popular (Honors Classes)

This figure presents the means and 95 percent confidence intervals of the sign-up rates for students in the private and public conditions in honors classes, separately for students who consider important to be popular in their school and those who do not. The dummy for whether the student considers it important to be popular is constructed by collapsing the answers to the question, “How important is it to be popular in your school?” from a 1–5 scale to a dummy variable (answers 3–5 were coded as considering it important, 1–2 as not important). There are 92 observations in the “important to be popular” panel and classes and 170 in the “not important” panel.

E ffect of P ublic T reatment on S ign-up D ecision : B y I mportance of P opularity

Notes . Columns (1) to (3) restrict the sample to nonhonors classes, and columns (4) to (6) restrict to honors classes. The dummy for whether the student considers it important to be popular is constructed by collapsing the answers to the question, “How important is it to be popular in your school?” from a 1–5 scale to a dummy variable (answers 3–5 were coded as considering it important, 1–2 as not important). columns (1) and (4) present oLS regressions of a dummy variable for whether the student signed up for the SAT prep course on a public sign-up dummy, a dummy on whether the student considers it important to be popular in his or her school, and the interaction of the two. columns (2) and (5) add individual covariates (age and dummies for male and Hispanic). columns (3) and (6) further add surveyor and classroom fixed effects. Robust standard errors in brackets. *** p < .01, ** p < .05, * p < .1. See Section III.D for a description of the wild bootstrap and permutation test procedures.

III.F. Account Login Data

Our main objective is to test for peer pressure, for which the sign-up decision is the relevant outcome. However, we also obtained data on whether students actually logged into the system later to activate their accounts (data on intensity of usage are not available). It is worth emphasizing that in analyzing this outcome, we lose experimental control because students in the public and private treatments are likely to have communicated or coordinated with each other after our team left the classroom. In doing so, they may have changed their beliefs about whether others would learn about their decision. Such communication also provides scope for other forms of peer effects beyond peer pressure, such as social learning or consumption externalities. So the estimates from this analysis are not as useful for testing our hypothesis. In addition, our analysis was designed to detect effects on sign-up rates, and we may therefore be underpowered to detect subsequent account login rates. However, activating the account is a useful policy outcome, indicating how much you can actually change adoption of an investment just by varying whether it is public or private. Examining this outcome can also helps establish that signing up for the course was not just cheap talk, since we can see whether students at sign-up actually intended to follow through and use the course.

Overall, 81 percent of students who signed up for the course logged in to activate their account, which is a fairly high follow-through rate and again confirms that students valued the course. Overall, the unconditional mean take-up (login, conditional on being offered the course) is 61 percent. This is broadly similar to the 51 percent of students in our sample schools who take the SAT. 25 Students in honors classes had a slightly higher follow-through rate (78 percent versus 84 percent), though the difference is not statistically significant.

The results are shown in Online Appendix Figure A.III (the conclusions from regressions are similar). For the full sample of students, we find that in nonhonors classes, making the course public reduces the rate of logging in to use the system by 8.2 percentage points (from a base of 57 percent when sign-up is private; p -value = .051). In honors classes, as with the sign-up decision, there is no difference in login rates between public and private treatments (77 percent for private, 78 percent for public). 26 We also note that the follow-through rates did not differ across any of the (honors/nonhonors)×(public/private) groups. 27

III.G. Other Concerns and Interpretations

One concern for external validity is that students may not have valued the course greatly (e.g., they believed the course was not very good, or they were already taking another course), and perhaps in settings with higher stakes, students are less affected by peer pressure. 28 However, we note that sign-up is extremely high when privacy from classmates was ensured. As noted already, follow-through rates for activation were very high. Finally, students estimated the cost at $260, which is a high cost for these low-income students. Though of course it remains possible that for many students, the true value of this course was low.

With some investments that students may make in school, there is also the possibility that undertaking such efforts reveals low ability, such as the need for extra help or assistance. Of course, this is just one possible form of peer social concerns or pressure, or a micro-foundation for such behavior, and thus does not challenge our results. However, we believe that such effects are unlikely to underlie our results. SAT preparation, whether through books or classes, is very common, and not often associated with representing low ability. In our survey, students reported that they believed that on average about 43 percent (64 percent in honors classes) of their classmates were taking some other course to prepare for the SAT. In addition, honors students in our sample had very high sign-up rates (over 90 percent), suggesting that this is not a course only for the worst students.

Alternatively, students may not want to undertake efforts if final outcomes are also observable, such as due to a “fear of failure”: students who believe they have a high likelihood of failure on some observable outcome (such as getting into a good college or any college at all), may choose not to undertake effort (or even actively signal that they are not putting in effort) so that if they fail, others will believe it was because they did not try, rather than that they tried and failed. Again, we believe the asymmetric response to the public treatment makes this alternative less likely, since we would then need the effects to go different ways in different classes (i.e., some-honors students have a fear of failure in their nonhonors classes, but the reverse of the fear of failure when in their honors classes). 29

A final issue to consider is whether the effects are due to consumption externalities. Having more peers take the course (as might be expected in honors classes) may make the course more valuable because students can study together or learn from each other. The reverse would hold in nonhonors classes, where fewer peers are likely to take it. Though we cannot completely rule out this possibility, we believe it is unlikely to drive our results. Consider the some-honors students. If they believed that students in all classes would also be offered the prep course, then the full set of their friends who will be offered and take up the course, and thus the expected consumption externalities, should not differ based on whether they are sitting with their honors or nonhonors peers when they are offered the course. If these students instead believed that the course was only being offered to those in the class with them at that time, then under the private condition we should expect higher sign-up rates for those sitting in an honors class than for those sitting in a nonhonors class (since they should expect more of their honors class peers to take it). However, as noted already, these private sign-up rates do not differ significantly. Thus, though there may be consumption externalities, students do not appear to act as though there are when they make their private sign-up decisions. In addition, we note that though consumption externalities on their own could explain a difference in sign-up rates in honors and nonhonors classes, it is less clear that it should affect differential sign-up within each class based on whether sign-up is public or private. However, we cannot rule out that beliefs about consumption externalities could differ within each class based on whether a student was in the public or private sign-up regime. This could arise if students themselves share our hypothesis; in other words, students given the public sign-up sheet in an honors class believe more of their classmates will sign up than students given the private sign-up sheet (and the reverse in nonhonors classes). 30

IV. Conclusion

We find evidence that student effort and investments are highly responsive to concerns about peer observability. We also find evidence suggesting that the results are specifically driven by concerns over the possibility of facing social sanctions or gaining social approval depending on effort or investments, or at least a desire to conform to prevailing social norms among peers in the classroom. The results have potential implications for understanding the nature and impact of peer interactions in the classroom more generally.

Though we are unable to link these changes in behavior to longer run education or labor market outcomes, the fact that we find similar results in two different settings suggests that such effects may be more widespread. In identifying this potentially important mechanism, we hope future work might explore whether similar effects are found where the long-run costs to students are greater, as well as whether any policy interventions can help mitigate these effects.

Supplementary Material

Online Appendix

* We thank Nava Ashraf, Ernesto Dal Bó, Leigh Linden, Aprajit Mahajan, Torsten Persson, Bruce Sacerdote, Noam Yuchtman, numerous seminar participants, and Lawrence Katz, Andrei Shleifer, and four anonymous referees for comments and suggestions. We thank Pedro Aratanha, Andrea Di Miceli, Stefano Fiorin, Craig Jones, Vasily Korovkin, Matthew Miller, and Benjamin Smith for excellent research assistance. We are grateful to the UCLA Anderson Price Center and the California Center for Population Research for financial support. Our study was approved by the UCLA Institutional Review Board and the Los Angeles Unified School District Committee on External Research Review.

1 We define peer pressure as students taking actions that deviate from what they privately consider to be the optimal action (what they would do if others would not observe their actions) to achieve social gains or avoid social costs. Peer pressure thus doesn’t just refer to active efforts by peers to persuade others, but could also include passive effects such as not undertaking an action for fear of peer social sanctions.

2 Some studies in social psychology measure peer pressure through direct survey questions, such as by asking whether a student has faced pressure from others to undertake certain actions ( Brown 1982 ; Brown, Clasen, and Eicher 1986 ; Santor, Messervey, and Kusumakar 2000 ). However, there is some concern with using such subjective self-reports, and it is difficult to link these responses directly and causally to specific behaviors.

3 Sacerdote (2001) , Zimmerman (2003) , Carrell, Fullerton, and West (2009) , Duflo, Dupas, and Kremer (2011) and Carrel, Sacerdote, and West (2013) . See Epple and Romano (2011) for a summary. Bursztyn et al. (2014) and Cai, De Janvry, and Sadoulet (2012) examine channels of peer influence in financial settings.

4 Also, the extent to which changing peer groups can help is limited by the fact that if enough students are moved across groups, the dominant norm may change. Carrell, Sacerdote, and West (2013) show that even when you construct peer groups, students may re-sort into more homogeneous subgroups.

5 However, for both the natural and field experiments, we lack sufficient variation in ethnicity or race to test whether similar effects are found for other students or are specific to minorities.

6 These models can account for a variety of social interactions and group dynamics that have been found for several ethnic and cultural groups (e.g., Gans 1962 ; Ausubel 1977 ; Lee and Warren 1991 ; Berman 2000 ).

7 The imbalance in observations across quartiles arises because most class sizes are not perfectly divisible by 4. The standard way most software creates quartiles results in more observations being assigned to quartile 1 and fewer to quartile 4, as observed here (e.g., for the set of numbers (1,2,3,4,5) the first cut-off will be defined as 2, putting two observations in the first quartile).

8 In separate results (available on request), we find that the effects are similar for boys and girls (we estimate sex by matching first names to the Social Security Administration database of gender frequencies by name).

9 If we include time trends to capture any general trends in performance over this period, the point estimates are negative for all quartiles, though essentially zero for quartile 1, as shown in Online Appendix Table A.III .

10 If all students equally feared peer social sanctions, we might expect them all to cut back to zero. However, with heterogeneity in disutility from peer sanctions (for example, in our field experiment we show differences in effects by self-rated importance of popularity) then we will shift from a situation where top performers are the highest ability or most motivated to one where they are instead those who care the least about peer stigma (or who are perhaps less likely to actually face such stigma).

11 We also implement an alternative placebo exercise using a permutation test ( Conley and Taber 2011 ). Restricting ourselves to quartile 4 and the original period of one month before and after the introduction of the leaderboard, we assign “post-change” status to randomly selected groups of 30 days from that period. We then compare our original estimates to the placebo estimates from 1,000 randomly constructed samples. We never find placebo estimates equal to or larger in absolute value than our estimated treatment effects, so the p -value of this permutation test is .00.

12 This may even be a lower bound, as students trying to avoid the leaderboard may intentionally answer questions incorrectly. Though students may also choose to avoid competition by not answering questions or may be able to answer fewer questions under pressure, so we cannot completely dismiss such pressure.

13 Declines for use at home also suggests that our main results are not driven by distraction effects, with students spending so much time checking the leaderboard that they have less time to answer questions.

14 Though of course not all students plan to take the SAT, and it would be of little value to such students (unless they gave away or sold their online access to someone else, which we did not explicitly preclude).

15 We were able to get administrative data on honors classes and GPA for 94 percent of our sample. Missing information does not significantly correlate with treatment. Also, accessing individual GPA data requires both child assent and parental consent, which we did not receive from 16 percent of students. Therefore, we can only provide GPA data at the group level and cannot use it in our regressions. However, we also asked students to self-report grades on the survey handed out after the sign-up form was collected.

16 In our sample, taking four honors classes is effectively taking all honors (only nine students take five honors classes). Consistent with this, we find no four-honors students in any of the nonhonors classes we visited.

17 We cannot assess whether information flows across classes (or whether students believe it does). It is possible that students don’t talk much about these kinds of efforts, and it is only when it is directly observed that it is relevant. There may also be a practice among some-honors students that “what happens in honors class, stays in honors class.” For example, some-honors students may want to work hard and succeed in their honors classes, and may then worry that if they tell their nonhonors peers what another some-honors student did in an honors class, other students could in turn do the same to them.

18 We find only 13 one-honors students in an honors class, both because they don’t take many honors classes and because we visited fewer honors classes, and only 9 three-honors students in a nonhonors class, both because they don’t take many nonhonors classes and because there are fewer three-honors students.

19 One concern is that honors classes may be smaller than nonhonors classes, and peer pressure may differ by class size. However, in our sample, the difference is very small and not statistically significant.

20 We estimate separate regressions for boys and girls. There are small differences in behavior between boys and girls, but few are statistically significant.

21 For these tests, we randomly assign placebo treatment status (public sign-up) to different students and estimate placebo treatment effects. We repeat this process 1,000 times and compare the size of the true treatment effects to the distribution of placebo treatment effects.

22 Online Appendix Figure A.II shows the raw sign-up rates for two-honors students (again, for any presentation of means we must compare for a specific number of honors classes, and cell sizes for one- and three-honors students are small so the means are noisy). The figure provides striking preliminary visual evidence that the public treatment decreases sign-up in nonhonors classes dramatically, while increasing it in honors classes.

23 The results and those that follow return to the full sample, since stratifying by popularity leads to extremely small cell sizes (popularity * honors/nonhonors * public/private) for the subset of some-honors students. The results for the some-honors students do show the same qualitative pattern but are less precisely estimated.

24 We can reject equality of the two effects under robust standard errors, but not when using the wild bootstrap clustered standard errors or the permutation test.

25 The rate here is slightly higher, but there may be students in eleventh grade who still think they would like to go to college but who ultimately do not (because of performance, finances, or other factors).

26 For two-honors students (Panel B), the results are similar to those for sign-up, but less precisely estimated.

27 The follow-through rate for some-honors students in honors classes is 81 percent under the public treatment and 82 percent under the private treatment. Thus, the positive peer pressure effect observed above (increases in sign-up rates under the public treatment for some-honors students in honors classes) is unlikely to be just cheap talk, since they are just as likely to follow through and actually login and activate their account.

28 A related possibility is that students may have thought that they would have another chance to sign up later. We believe this is unlikely to account for our results. First, even if students believed they would have another chance, they would have to also believe that the later opportunity would differ on privacy. Second, since we concluded the study, no students who had not signed up communicated to our team (students took away forms with our contact information) or their teachers that they were interested in the course. Finally, we asked students from the last school we visited (after sign-up was complete) whether they believed they would have another chance to sign up, and 85 percent said no. This may even overstate the extent of such beliefs, since the act of asking the question may suggest or elicit that belief.

29 Fear of failure could differ across settings. For example, students may fear failure more around nonhonors peers, who might mock them for even trying. On the other hand, fewer of their nonhonors peers will be going to good colleges or to college at all, so failing is not as stark a contrast as it might be compared to their honors peers.

30 This will also depend on beliefs about whether the course was offered to all classes. A some-honors student in an honors class who gets the public sign-up may believe that more of their peers will sign up; but they may also think that same condition will reduce the number of peers that will sign up in their nonhonors classes (though they may be more likely to study with friends in their honors classes). So beliefs about the difference in the number of friends that will take the course may be ambiguous.

An Online Appendix for this article can be found at QJE online ( qje.oxfordjournal.org ).

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Peer Pressure in Youngsters Essay | Essay on Peer Pressure in Youngsters for Students and Children in English

February 13, 2024 by Prasanna

Peer Pressure in Youngsters Essay:  Peer pressure is a direct or indirect influence on an individual, which forces them to change their behaviours and attitude so that the influencing groups are satisfied.

During the adolescent stage of an individual, peer pressure is one of the most vital indicators in behavioural problems. Peer pressure from a lousy association during youth can lead an individual into a very horrid situation and hamper one’s whole career.

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Long and Short Essays on Peer Pressure in Youngsters for Students and Kids in English

We provide students with essay samples on a long essay of 500 words and a short essay of 150 words on the topic of Peer Pressure in Youngsters for reference.

Long Essay on Peer Pressure in Youngsters 500 Words in English

Long Essay on Peer Pressure in Youngsters is usually given to classes 7, 8, 9, and 10.

In the social and emotional development of youngsters, peers play a huge role. Their influence starts at an early stage and increases throughout their teenage years. A child needs to have an honest and healthy relationship with their friends and rely on them to grow and mature together.

There are many positive and supportive outcomes of having peers to help a child develop new skills or stimulate interests in extracurricular activities or studies. But peers can also have negative influences. They might encourage each other to cheat, steal, share inappropriate materials online, use drugs and alcohol, or even involve in other risky behaviours.

The majority of the cases of teens with substance abuse reports start using drugs or alcohol due to peer pressure. The pressure can take place either in person or through social media platforms.

The main reason a youngster gives into peer pressure is that they want to fit in and be liked by kids his age, and they face anxiety issues about being left out if they don’t go along with the group. The youngsters perform a task that he is not willing to due to the frustrating peer pressure.

Peer pressure lands a negative impact on an individual as a person must be of the mindset of listening to himself first and considering decisions favourable to himself. Peer pressure faced during an individual’s youth can hamper a student’s studies and career if not averted at the right time.

You can now access Essay Writing on Peer Pressure In Youngsters and many more topics.

As youngsters nowadays are significantly influenced by celebrities, so in a way, these people also become their peers. As a result, they do things done by the stars, smoking, and drugs in significant cases. In a way, this also hurts an individual’s growth.

Based on research, an average of 34% of teens has done drugs, and 71% of teens already have tried alcohol by the end of higher-secondary school. So from the results, we can say that most or all adolescents would try to get their hands on drugs and alcohol due to the massive peer pressure they face.

Before getting influenced by any of the peers, it is essential to judge any deed result. Moreover, one should always prioritize his thoughts and wants before getting influenced by peer pressure and should always be secondary.

Adolescence is a stage when a youngster desires adult-like treatments as they begin to look like an adult on the exterior, but the interior can be easily influenced. Taking advantage of these situations, many peers encourages criminal activities, aggression, and other antisocial behaviours.

The only way to stop these aggressive behaviours among youngsters caused by peer pressure is by teaching kids tips about saying no when required and staying away from peers who pressure them to do things that they are not comfortable doing or dangerous. They have to spend time with other kids who can say no to peer pressure and always consult any adult they trust if they have a problem resisting peer pressure. The parents and teachers should pay attention to the kids to communicate with them if they face any difficulties.

Short Essay on Peer Pressure in Youngsters 150 Words in English

Short Essay on Peer Pressure in Youngsters is usually given to classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

A genuine issue affecting many of the youngsters of the world is peer pressure. Teens often end up in the wrong directions due to the misleading advertisements offered by society. Nowadays, children face many sorts of forces, including smoking, staying past their curfew times, drinking, and even performing intercourse even if they are not ready.

Sometimes all these pressures are given by peers they trust. Either from schoolmates or friends, peer pressure forces a person to behave, act, and look at situations in a certain way. A child should always find someone with whom they can talk if they face peer pressure.

There are ways to fight peer pressure even if they seem extremely strong and irresistible. Many research types have shown how peer pressure alone can change someone’s mind from what they know is right to something very wrong. Self-confidence and inner strength to stand firm, resist, and walk away are required to halt peer pressure from taking place.

10 Lines on Peer Pressure in Youngsters Essay in English

FAQ’s on Peer Pressure in Youngsters Essay

Question 1. What are the six primary types of peer pressure?

Answer: The six-primary types of peer pressure are: a) Direct peer pressure b) Indirect peer pressure c) Negative peer pressure d) Positive peer pressure e) Spoken peer pressure f) Unspoken peer pressure.

Question 2. How can peer pressure be so assertive?

Answer: It is natural for individuals, especially youths, to compare themselves to their peers as they consider how they want to be or how they want to achieve something their peers already have. Peer influences individuals as they want to fit in and be like the peers they admire. This is why peer pressure is so powerful.

Question 3. Is peer pressure always negative?

Answer: Peer pressure is not always negative because not all peers pressure teenagers to commit crimes and engage in unhealthy behaviour. Peer pressure, in many cases, has positive effects in an adolescent’s life, and it can be considered as a reasonable force.

Question 4. How does peer pressure begin in the case of youngsters?

Answer: Peer pressure may start as wanting and forcing other children to play the game they want to play in early childhood. It generally increments through childhood and reaches its heights in the teen years.

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Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Peer Pressure — The Negative Impacts and Influence of Peer Pressure on Teenagers

The Negative Impacts and Influence of Peer Pressure on Teenagers

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Published: Oct 22, 2018

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