Chunk #19 — PEER INFLUENCE MECHANISMS — Peer Influence Mechanisms: Adolescents Engage in Behaviors That Match the Social Norms of a Valued or Desired Group
Social norms are in the eye of the beholder, founded primarily on adolescents’ perceptions of one another’s values and behaviors. Empirical work before and within this decade has revealed stronger associations between adolescents’ behavior and their perception of their peers’ behavioral norms (i.e., adolescents’ own report of their peers’ behavior), compared with the peers’ actual (self-reported) behavior (see Prentice & Miller, 1996). Exploration of actual and perceptive norms, and the relevance of each for influence processes, has appeared in this decade in the form of research on misperceptions of peer behavior, such as alcohol use (Perkins, Haines, & Rice, 2005). Overestimates of behavior also have been found to mediate associations between peers’ and adolescents’ smoking behavior (Otten, Engels, & Prinstein, 2009). These findings highlight the importance of considering social norm perceptions in tandem with actual norms. From an intervention standpoint, correction of erroneous perceptions may offer a fruitful redirection of peer influence in harmful behavioral domains; however, work from the past decade has suggested that successful application of this strategy may depend on such factors as the target adolescent population
