Under (Peer) Pressure

Hey all!  Long time, no write...  Of course, I happen to say that a lot now hahaha.  Anyways, school finished a week ago so I was pretty tired of writing papers...  I ended up writing about twenty pages in two weeks or so, which isn't that bad.  But still, I guess my brain is just fried from what seemed like a very long year...

Anyways!  For those of you that have gleamed over previous posts, you may have noticed that I like to write quite a bit about conformity.  It's so interesting to see what affects people's behavior, even if we like to think we're objective masters of observation and actions...

When I think of a school setting, one of the first things that comes to mind is peer pressure, which is something that we all can probably relate to.  The common idea is that there is something a group of others are doing and they start to pressure someone to do it.  Before you know it, the person gives in and starts doing whatever the other people were pressuring.    Ok, very generic, but you get the idea!  The idea is, peer pressure is a very clear-cut and everything, right?

Wellll, how about this...  Let's say that there's a group of people doing something, such as drinking, as per a typical party session.  Now, there are those that choose not to drink, due to things such as age or other factors.  While there may be some direct peer pressure from those drinking to get others to drink, there are still a lot of people who drink who accept that others don't want to drink.  So, let's say there is a group of eight people drinking and there is one person with them who is not.  Since they're not telling him to drink, it's not peer pressure, right?

In this type of situation, I would have to disagree and argue that this is peer pressure.  You see, there are two general types of peer pressure: explicit and implicit.  Explicit peer pressure is the kind of peer pressure that everyone knows and is the first example from above.  Implicit peer pressure is when everyone around a person is doing something, even if they aren't forcing the person to do it as well.

The danger of implicit peer pressure is that it is, well, implicit...  For explicit peer pressure, one may be able to point to the others as pressuring them and thus prevent anything from happening.  But for implicit, it's almost something that functions under the radar...  I don't know the literature on this topic that well unfortunately, so take everything I say with a grain of salt, but I believe that implicit pressure isn't something we really register as happening.  In other words, one may commit the action (in the previous case, drinking) in order to feel as if they fit in better with the group.  Yet, to attribute their behavior due to the group's pressure would be somewhat incorrect due to the group not directly pressuring the person to do so.  So, even if the pressure is implicit and does exist, people may not see it that way, leading to potentially negative situations...

I guess it's a rather basic message and what not, but important, nonetheless!  The main idea is that both types of peer pressure may exist in any form of group setting...  In other words, if there's any group where some common trait is shared/required, such as attending an elite school where being smart is normal, people may be pressured to have/get that trait.  Yet, if they are unable to do so, they may feel socially ostracized, leading to many more problems in itself...  Again, though, part of the problem with implicit peer pressure is that it is rather difficult to detect.  So, I guess ending message of the night is just to be aware of what kind of situations you really put yourself in...  Even if you don't directly see it, there might be some negative peer pressure existing somewhere...  So yeah, really general, but aren't you glad that this post is a lot shorter than most of my other ones?!