Effects of friendship influence and normative pressure on adolescent attitudes and behaviors

Peers are assumed to be crucial in shaping adolescents’ attitudes and behaviors in schools; what peers yield social influence over adolescents is less clear. We disentangled two mechanisms of peer influence: friendship influence and normative pressure. Friendship influence refers to the impact of friends’ attitudes and behaviors, while normative pressure stems from the influence of peers from the same social group, such as gender group. We adopted a network perspective, recognizing that peer influence can be shaped by changing relationships among peers. We investigated friendship influence and normative pressure based on sharing the same gender and ethnicity in shaping academic drive, prejudice, and religiosity. We analyzed a sample of German school grades (N = 2,838; 29 school grades) using stochastic actor-oriented modeling. Adolescents influenced each other via both friendship influence and normative pressure. These findings improve our understanding of who influences whom in schools and open new research avenues.