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Children
Children learn from imitation, and the earliest form of pressure that they experience can be seen in their emulation of adult role models in order to pick up skills and techniques that they use in their own life. Children are aware of their position in the social hierarchy from a young age: their instinct is to defer to adults' judgements and majority opinions. A study done on groups of preschool children showed that they were influenced by groups of their peers to change their opinion to a demonstrably wrong one. Each child was handed a book with two sets of images on each page, with a groups of differently sized animals on the left hand page and one animal on the right hand, and each child was asked to indicate the size of the lone animal. All the books were the same, but the last child would sometimes get a book that was different. The children were asked in turn, and the child being studied was asked last. Before him or her, however, were a group of children working in conjunction with the researchers. When asked in the presence of the other children, the last child's response was often the same as his or her peers. However, when allowed to privately share their responses with a researcher the children proved much more resistant to their peers' pressure, illustrating the importance of the physical presence of their peers in shaping their opinions.

Adolescence
Adolescence when a person is most susceptible to peer pressure because peers become an important influence on behavior during adolescence, and peer pressure has been called a hallmark of adolescent experience. Children entering this period in life become aware for the first time of Peer conformity in young people is most pronounced with respect to style, taste, appearance, ideology, and values. Peer pressure is commonly associated with episodes of adolescent risk taking because these activities commonly occur in the company of peers. Affiliation with friends who engage in risk behaviors has been shown to be a strong predictor of an adolescent's own behavior. Peer pressure can also have positive effects when youth are pressured by their peers toward positive behavior, such as volunteering for charity or excelling in academics. The importance of peers declines upon entering adulthood.

Social acceptance acts as a mild stimulant in increasing risk factors, given the norms surrounding the groups at hand. Groups of popular children showed a propensity to increase risky, drug-related and delinquent behavior when it was likely to receive approval in their groups. This is likely more noticed among popular children because those are the children most attuned to the judgements of their peers, making them more susceptible to group pressures. Gender also has a clear effect on the amount of peer pressure an adolescent experiences: girls report significantly higher pressures to conform to their groups in the form of clothing choices or speech patterns - additionally, girls and boys reported facing differing amounts of pressures in different areas of their lives, perhaps reflecting a different set of values and priorities for each gender.

Drugs
Peer pressure is widely recognized as a major contributor to the initiation of substance use, particularly in adolescence. This has been shown for a variety of substances, including nicotine and alcohol. While this link is well established, mediating factors do exist. For example, parental monitoring is negatively associated with substance use; yet when there is little monitoring, adolescents are more likely to succumb to peer coercion during initiation to substance use, but not during the transition from experimental to regular use. Caldwell and colleagues extended this work by finding that peer pressure was a factor leading to heightened risk in the context of social gatherings, little parental monitoring, and if the individual reported themselves as vulnerable to peer pressure. Conversely, some research has observed that peer pressure can be a protective factor against substance use.

Peer pressure produces a wide array of negative outcomes. Allen and colleagues showed that susceptibility to peer pressure in 13- and 14-year-olds was predictive of not only future response to peer pressure, but also a wider array of functioning. For example, greater depression symptomatology, decreasing popularity, more sexual behavior, and externalizing behavior were greater for more susceptible teens. Of note, substance use was also predicted by peer pressure susceptibility such that greater susceptibility was predictive of greater alcohol and drug use.

Smoking
Substance use is likely not attributed to peer pressure alone. Evidence of genetic predispositions for substance use exists and some have begun to examine gene x environment interactions for peer influence. In a nationally representative sample, adolescents who had genetic predisposition were more likely to have good friends who were heavy substance users and were furthermore, more likely to be vulnerable to the adverse influence of these friends. Results from specific candidate gene studies have been mixed. For instance, in a study of nicotine use Johnson and colleagues found that peer smoking had a lower effect on nicotine dependence for those with the high risk allele (CHRNA5). This suggests that social contexts do not play the significant role in substance use initiation and maintenance as it may for others and that interventions for these individuals should be developed with this consideration.

Drinking
Though the impact of peer influence in adolescence has been well established, it was unclear at what age this effect begins to diminish. It is accepted that such peer pressure to use alcohol or illicit substances is less likely to exist in elementary school and very young adolescents given the limited access and exposure. Using the Resistance to Peer Influence Scale, Sumter and colleagues found that resistance to peer pressure grew as age increased in a large study of 10- to 18-year-olds. This study also found that girls were generally more resistant to peer influence than boys, particularly at mid-adolescence (i.e. ages 13–15). The higher vulnerability to peer pressure for teenage boys makes sense given the higher rates of substance use in male teens. For girls, increased and positive parental behaviors (e.g. parental social support, consistent discipline) has been shown to be an important contributor to the ability to resist peer pressure to use substances.

Prevention
Substance use prevention and intervention programs have utilized multiple techniques in order to combat the impact of peer pressure. One major technique is, naturally, peer influence resistance skills. The known correlational relationship between substance use and relationships with others that use makes resistance skills a natural treatment target. This type of training is meant to help individuals refuse participation with substance use while maintaining their membership in the peer group. Other interventions include normative education approaches (interventions designed to teach students about the true prevalence rates and acceptability of substance use), education interventions that raise awareness of potential dangers of substance use, alcohol awareness training and classroom behavior management. The literature regarding the efficacy of these approaches, however, is mixed. A study in Los Angeles and Orange Counties that established conservative norms and attempted to correct children's beliefs about substance abuse among their peers showed a statistically significant decrease in alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana use but other studies that systematically reviewed school-based attempts to prevent alcohol misuse in children found "no easily discernible pattern" in both successful and failed programs.

In a non-substance context, however, research has showed that decision-making training can produce concrete gains in risk perception and decision-making ability among autistic children. When administered the training in several short sessions that taught the children how to recognize risk from peers and react accordingly, the children showed through post-training assessments that they were able to identify potential threats and sources of pressure from peers and deflect them far better than normal adolescents in a control group.

Peer pressure and sexual intercourse
There is evidence supporting that parental attitudes disapproving sex tends to lead toward lower levels of adolescent unplanned pregnancy. These disparities are not due solely to parental disposition but also on communication.

A study completed in Cape Town, South Africa looked at students at four secondary schools in the region. They found a number of unhealthy practices derived from peer pressure: condoms are derided, threats of ridicule for abstinence, and engaging in sexual activity with multiple partners as part of a status symbol (especially for males.) The students colloquially call others who choose abstinence as "umqwayito", which means dried fruit/meat. An important solution for these problems is communication with adults, which the study found to be extremely lacking within adolescent social groups.

Additionally, studies have found a link between self-regulation and likeliness to engage in sexual behavior.(citation) The more trouble a subject had with self-regulation and self-control growing up, the more they were likely to fall prey to peer pressure that would led them to engage in risky sexual acts. Based on these findings, it may be a good idea to prevent these through either a decision-making program or by targeting adolescents' ability to self-regulate against possible risks.

Category:Group processes Category:Management Category:Youth Category:Influence (social and political)