Best Friends and Peers: The Guides For A Teen’s Social World

By Rebeca Funes

In everyday life, people are affected by their social environment through various factors. Whether it’s through family, social norms, or even culture, this environment influences our behavior and development. With the absence of parental figures as children transition to adolescents, teens turn toward their peers for guidance. 

The social environment refers to the immediate social settings where people interact and live. Various studies have been done on how these settings influence us. Through this, researchers have been able to discover that teens are highly susceptible to social pressures.

Thus, a study done by Florida Atlantic University (FAU) set out to find whether teens are able to distinguish between the different influences from their peers and apply it to their social life rather than blindly following the crowd. Researchers conducted a longitudinal study, a research design that observes the same individuals to track changes and identify patterns over a long period of time.

“Yes, social influences heavily affect teens. Social influences like trends from social media, like slang used or the way people dress, make people feel like they are required to behave a certain way because others do. If they don’t, they feel like they might be excluded,” stated junior Joel Sanchez.

The study consisted of 543 students ages 10 to 14, tracking five main factors: social media usage, academic performance, emotional well-being, problematic behaviors, and weight concerns. Researchers also tracked which participants’ best friends were and who they deemed popular. This study is one of the first to ever observe the differences in societal influences from best friends versus popular peer pressure and how their roles affect a teen’s social behavior.

The study’s findings revealed that the way that best friends influence their behavior and the way popular peers influence their behavior is different. These findings suggest that best friends often shape emotional well-being, including problematic behaviors and academic performance. Popular classmates shape social media usage and weight concerns as teenagers attempt to imitate them.

“I think there is a difference between these influences because with best friends, there’s more trust and intimacy through close connections between them. Whereas popular people have standards that pressure others to think they need to be a certain way to fit in,” commented sophomore Nayeli Rivero.

In other words, best friends are the primary influencers for emotional states, whether that be in a positive way with intimacy or in a negative way by amplifying struggles and academic achievements. On the other hand, popular peers primarily influence behaviors perceived by others. 

This is due to the fact that friendships are based on mutual connection and affection. Whilst peer groups often are based on conformity and hierarchy. Peer groups provide examples of cool or desirable behavior that may protect their status and position within the group. This showed that adolescents don’t actually just follow the crowd but instead have a highly specialized, societal structure they follow, applying them where they see fit. 

“Adolescents are discerning; they look within their inner circle for emotional support and to the influencers and class leaders for social cues on how to present themselves to the world,” stated Mary Page Leggett James, Ph.D, lead author and associate researcher in Gallup, while reporting the results of her dissertation at FAU.

Nevertheless,  pressure from our peers influences all of us, whether that be through best friends or popular classmates. These results may suggest that uniform solutions for those who struggle with accepting societal norms or strategies for behavior guidance may fail. However, the question lies in how these influences vary between different settings, and more importantly, how society can use this to better understand adolescents’ behaviors.