The Good Side of Peer Pressure
Friday 9 September 2011
Life is lived through our relationships and how we seek to balance a sense of self with being part of different groups. Understanding and self-knowledge takes a life time.
THE GOOD SIDE OF PEER PRESSURE
We hear people say, “It doesn’t make any difference to me what other people think”. We may often think that but life has some surprising lessons to teach us. We are influenced more than we realise by other people and this can be to our benefit. Peer pressure can be good.
For instance, it’s a well-known fact in sport that the home team has an advantage on their home ground. In just about every sport, they win more often than visiting teams. Why is this? Is it because of the local support? Or the stress of travelling? Neither of these reasons stands up when the statistics are examined. It seems the real reason for the home town advantage, according to researchers, is that referees and umpires don’t like being booed. The more they penalise the home team, the more the home crowd boos. This leads to a sub-conscious decision to favour the home team – enough to make the difference between the home team winning and losing.
There is a similar effect with members of a relay team. Usually swimmers in the first legs of a relay swim at about their usual individual rates. But later members of the relay team outdo their individual times. Why? Probably because the pressure of the competition grows as the relay progresses and, the later swimmers know the success of the team depends on them, so they swim faster than they ever have before when they are swimming just for themselves.
The influence of other people is important in the classroom too. It is much more effective to offer the whole class a prize than to offer the prize to individuals. The whole class prize motivates everyone to work harder because they know they will all be rewarded, not just a few individuals.
Young people have an advantage over older people when it comes to working in a group. Young people are better at reading emotions, giving everyone a turn and sharing leadership. They are also more forgiving when someone makes a mistake.
So, what lessons can we learn from all this research? First of all, it does matter what other people think. If you have your classmates on your side, you are more likely to do well in that class. If you are all working together for a common goal, you are more likely to do better than you have before. If the whole class is going to be rewarded, you will all do better. And, the best time to do your best, have a go and see what you are capable of, is when you are young as your peers will be more understanding when you trip up.
David Brooks, New York Times, 17 March, 2011
Fiona Bauer has written on presenting young adults with optimism as an underlying essence for their decision making.
Optimistic adolescents are less likely to suffer depression, new research has found. So with kids today being regularly bombarded with negative predictions for their future, how can parents help kids stay upbeat without coming across all Pollyanna?
It’s now broadly recognised that young people are experiencing higher rates of mental health problems than any other age groups and are retaining this increased risk into older age.
The Murdoch Children’s Research Institute study, which followed 5,634 Australian students aged 12 to 14, found those teens with a sunnier outlook were half as likely to report new depression symptoms a year later compared with their less positive peers.
However, researchers did acknowledge that focusing on optimism alone would be unlikely to have large impact on the rates of mental health problems among youth.
“One message from this study is that optimistic kids do better in avoiding problems during the teens, but it in no way makes them immune to setbacks,” says the study’s lead researcher, Dr George Patton.
“Looking on the bright but realistic side of things is better than being gloomy but this alone may not be enough. There are a lot of other skills and experiences that are also important in getting through life.”
A pessimistic world
The global, environmental and economic messages filtering through to kids about their future could seem quite bleak – they’re inheriting a planet arguably on the brink of environmental disaster, their chances of being overweight and obese are growing and it’s likely they’ll never own their own home.
Of course, there’s positive and inspiring news out there too but teens seem predisposed to missing that.
According to Dr Simon Cowap, a GP, who works in the area of adolescent mental health, teens can be very good at only hearing the more negative stuff.
“Adolescents go through a phase of black and white thinking everything is good or bad,” Dr Cowap says. “It’s a developmental thing and quite normal. As parents, we need to help them see shades of grey and be realistic about the world, but show them there’s also wonderful stuff happening out there.”
Message for parents
It would be a rare teen that is constantly happy and that’s not what Dr Patton thinks parents should hope for. Nor should parents think a glass-half-full teenager is immune from developing emotional problems.
“Parents engaging in realistic dialogue about bad things that happen is the best option and one most likely to prevent a young person slipping into negative views,” he says.
“Parents should encourage balanced responses to the problems of everyday life – like dealing with conflict with friends, coming to terms with who they are, what their abilities and aptitudes are and are not and generally making well thought-through decisions”.