How can Peer pressure affect us even during out adult years? And it really does. For example, the New India Express ran an article recently covering the story of a Dr. B Sandhya Rani who may have committed suicide due to peer pressure and the challenges of post grad study. Even as adults people can be affected by peer pressure as it is always prevalent within society. But now it's more challenging as peer pressure can be delivered electronically.
Delivery via social media
This type of behavior can be delivered through sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or even Snap Chat.
It can either be delivered in a group chat or from a single person. The people in the higher levels of the pecking order within the friendship group sometimes egg the lower-ranking friends on to do a certain action or other. It seems that as today there is more technology available and given to young teens this opens them up to more pressure from friends. Peer pressure of this type tends to happen more often in younger groups than adult groups.
But what exactly is peer pressure?
Many people do not even realize what peer pressure is but it can happen anywhere and anyone can be encouraged to do something when the action is made convincing enough. For example:
- A person in your group of four friends has started smoking
- This is then seen as okay by the person who has started smoking in your group of four friends.
- Your group of friends realize that this activity is new and is seen as a different way of socializing with everyone within the circle and they start to smoke too.
- However you as the non smoker are then encouraged to join in with their smoking habit (This is where the peer pressure comes in)
- But you see smoking as a bad habit and not a good thing to do. Despite your best efforts you then end up trying one out because of the peer pressure given to you by the group of four you are friends with.
This type of scenario is typical of how some cases of peer pressure can happen.
This type of pressure is delivered face to face which makes it easier to tell when you are being pressured into something because you can see and hear the human behavior. It is something you can avoid by making yourself more assertive towards the people placing you under pressure. This is a skill that most people struggle with throughout their lives unless they learn to be assertive during their younger years.
As to who may be the influencer and who may be influenced is still under investigation. Brett Laursen, PhD spoke to the American Psychological Association and pointed out that "We're still working to disentangle the notion of susceptibility from the notion of being really influential."
