Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do Relationships and Social Understanding Develop?
Compare the review’s account of influence with the friendship study’s associations. Ask what observations would establish the timing of relationship and behavioral changes, and how beneficial and harmful effects depend on what a group values.
A question to consider. Design a follow-up to the friendship study that could distinguish selection, influence, and shared circumstances in changes in loneliness or school engagement.
Why this reading
Why might friends become more alike? This review connects peer influence with the effort to maintain compatible relationships. It broadens attention beyond risk-taking to changes that can also support learning and adjustment.
Before you read
Homophily means similarity among connected people. Selection creates ties between similar people; deselection removes ties; influence changes people within relationships. A social network describes connections among individuals. These processes can produce similar-looking groups for different reasons.
Read for
- Distinguish evidence of resemblance from evidence of influence. What must be observed over time?
- Identify the predictions of the influence–compatibility model and compare evidence concerning beneficial and harmful changes.
- Examine what the review leaves unresolved about valued similarities, tolerated differences, and influence that maintains existing behavior.
Consider afterwards
- Friends show similar changes in school engagement. How could repeated measurements of friendships, behavior, and shared circumstances help distinguish competing explanations?
Editorial context
This is a theoretical synthesis of selected research, not a single causal test of the proposed function of influence. Longitudinal network models and experiments answer different questions and retain different assumptions. The account’s descriptions of schooling and autonomy require attention to setting. Peer influence is neither uniformly harmful nor evidence that every adolescent responds in the same way.