The overarching conclusion from these findings is that apparent peer influence processes may be moderated by both individual and contextual factors in the adolescent's life, particularly those related to adolescent autonomy development, and that peer influences are not always in the direction of encouraging more deviant behavior. Nor do all influences appear to reflect the behavior of disturbed and dominant peers; we find teens most likely to adopt friends' behavior when those friends are well-liked. Further, we found that an analogue measure that assessed the degree to which teens adopted less competent behaviors after simply being exposed to less competent options was also predictive of apparent susceptibility to peer influence. If these correlational findings are borne out in further research, they would suggest that interventions in adolescence might focus not simply upon helping adolescents resist overt, forceful efforts at peer pressure, but rather upon more subtle, but perhaps more pervasive modeling, support, and exposure processes. These findings also suggest that a great deal of the variance in peer influence processes can be explained without any consideration of whether a given
