Peer Pressure, Peer Prevention

The Role of Friends in Crime and Conformity

Barbara J. Costello, Trina L. Hope

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317359951
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Criminological research has largely neglected the possibility that positive peer influence is a potentially powerful source of social control. Quantitative methods tease out cause, effect, and spuriousness in the relationship between peer delinquency and personal delinquency, but these methods do little or nothing to reveal how and why peers might influence each other toward--or away from--deviance.

Costello and Hope take a first step toward uncovering the mechanisms of peer influence, drawing on quantitative and qualitative data collected from two convenience samples of university students. Their quantitative analyses showed that positive peer influence occurs most frequently among those who associate with the most deviant peers and self-report the most deviance, contrary to predictions drawn from social learning theories. Their qualitative data revealed a variety of methods of negative influence, including encouraging deviant behavior for others' amusement, a motive for peer influence never before reported in the literature.

1
Introduction

The Study of Peers and Deviant Behavior

Sometimes kids get into trouble. Kids get into more trouble when they’re around their friends than when they’re alone. Parents often react to kids getting into trouble with friends by forbidding them to hang around with those friends, arguing that they’re a “bad influence.” But are they? And if so, exactly how does that influence happen? If we knew the answer to these questions, we’d be in a much better position to try to prevent delinquent, deviant, or criminal behavior before it happens.

On the other hand, kids can keep each other out of trouble. We’re all familiar with the catch phrase, “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk.” Do they, or don’t they? Surprisingly, we know very little about “positive peer pressure,” including how often it happens, when it happens, who does it, and whether or not it works. If we knew the answer to these questions, we would be in a better position to encourage peer interference with deviant behaviors, and to encourage peers to influence each other towards a range of positive, productive behaviors.

These two issues are the focus of this book. Social scientists have known for decades what parents have known for thousands of years—that kids get into more trouble when they’re with other kids. But we have not done a very good job of finding out why. We know that there is a lot of truth to the adage, “Birds of a feather flock together,” or the idea that people who are alike in some important respect tend to come together and become friends. This is the process of self-selection, which explains that friendship groups do not form randomly, but rather that people with similar preferences tend to get together. But beyond that, we know very little about exactly what happens in the context of friendship groups that seems to promote bad behavior. The number of possible explanations for the correlation between having deviant friends and engaging in delinquent or criminal behavior is large, and includes the following possibilities, which we refer to throughout the book as causal mechanisms that can explain the correlation:

Friends can:

• Teach norms and values that promote deviant behavior
• Reward deviant behavior by providing an appreciative audience
• Make suggestions for deviant acts or provide opportunities for deviance, such as offering/ supplying drugs or alcohol
• Model deviant behavior that can be imitated by their friends
• Teach friends how to engage in deviant behavior
• Ridicule others who are reluctant to engage in deviant or risky behavior
• Dare friends to engage in deviant or risky behavior
• Minimize individual responsibility by sharing in the activity
• Make the activity more fun, because doing things with friends is more fun than doing things alone
• Repeatedly ask or “badger” friends into engaging in deviance
• Convince reluctant friends they won’t get caught
• Threaten to end a friendship if a friend won’t engage in deviance with them
• Act as “lookouts” or accomplices to make deviant behavior easier, more rewarding, or easier to get away with
• Act as buyers for stolen goods or drugs

All of these possibilities, and more, have been suggested in the literature on peers and delinquency. We simply do not know which of these is most common or most important, in part because existing data sets do not allow us to determine why we see commonalities in friends’ behavior, and why delinquency tends to occur in groups. To address this gap in the literature, we simply asked young people to tell us what happens when they’re with their friends. This straightforward approach has revealed some important insights into peer influence on deviant behavior, which we present in Chapter 3.

Our other major focus in this book is on the process of positive peer influence, which can be of two types. Friends can prevent each other from engaging in deviant or criminal behavior, as when someone stops a drunk person from driving. They can also encourage positive behaviors, such as studying, beginning an exercise program, or eating more healthfully. The field of criminology has for too long focused on how peers can cause delinquent or deviant behavior, and has largely overlooked the possibility that peers can also have positive influences on each other’s behavior. In addition to asking our respondents how their friends influence their deviant behavior, then, we also asked them to tell us how they and their friends prevent deviance or promote positive behaviors in one another. We present our analysis of their descriptions of these events in Chapter 4.

In Chapter 5 we move from qualitative data to a quantitative analysis of the factors that predict how often peers try to influence each other’s behavior in a positive direction, which types of individuals are most likely to engage in such attempts at positive influence, and when they are likely to be successful. We present our analysis of several hypotheses derived from control theories of crime (Gottfredson and Hirschi 1990; Hirschi 1969), focusing on how social control and self-control processes can operate in peer groups to prevent deviant behavior. While some of our findings were consistent with what we expected, some were surprising, and perhaps even more interesting.

We begin in Chapter 2 by presenting an overview of existing theory and research on peer influence. We review a number of different bodies of literature, including theory and research on learning theories of crime, control theories of crime, research on children’s friendships that has primarily been conducted by psychologists, social network analysis, and research in criminology that has studied the nature of friendships among delinquent or deviant individuals compared to non-deviant people. Our focus in this chapter is on alternatives to learning theories, which have dominated the literature on peers and delinquency. We show that despite good evidence that peer influence does not work primarily through peers teaching each other that crime is okay (Warr 2002), the literature often simply assumes that peer influence operates through learning processes. This has led criminologists to neglect other possibilities, which we explore throughout the book.

We know that the questions we seek to answer are important, and that they have not been systematically addressed by prior research in the field of criminology. While taking on new questions is an exciting prospect, it also comes with challenges—namely, how do we actually answer these crucial questions? What kind of data should we collect, and what questions should we ask? We decided to start with the simple, inexpensive, and obvious, using respondents we know well and have access to—our students. We began our data collection by simply asking students at the University of Rhode Island (URI) to write about incidents they participated in that involved peer influence toward both positive or conforming behavior and negative or deviant behavior. Later, we conducted surveys at URI and at the University of Oklahoma (UO) that asked students about a wide range of peer influence attempts, in addition to their demographic characteristics, a range of attitudes, and their own behavior, with a particular focus on attempts at positive peer pressure.

Thanks to the willingness of our students to participate, we were able to collect data from over 800 respondents. Although our sampling technique was not meant to produce a representative sample of American undergraduate students, it does closely resemble the undergraduate populations of URI and OU, as discussed further in Chapter 5. Compared to American college students as a whole, our sample is less racially diverse (30% of our sample chose at least one non-white racial category, while non-whites comprise about 40% of U.S. undergraduates), and a bit younger (75% of our sample is 21 or younger, vs. 54% of U.S. undergrads). Similar to the population of undergraduates as a whole, however, 59% of our sample is female (vs. 57% for undergrads nationally).

Our sample has both strengths and weaknesses. One important limitation of our sample is that it cannot be assumed to be representative of young people or of college students in general. We cannot know whether our results will be replicated in studies on other college or university campuses, and we also cannot know whether the patterns we have found will be similar among a non-student sample of the same age. The second major limitation of our sample is that we would expect a college student sample to be less deviant than samples of either younger people as a whole or those who do not attend college. Persistence in education is not a typical characteristic of serious offenders, and commitment to educational goals is consistently found to be associated with lower levels of delinquency/crime (Gottfredson and Hirschi 1990; Hirschi 1969). Thus, it is possible that our results are different than they would be for more serious or higher-rate offenders.

On the other hand, there is no lack of deviant or criminal behavior among college students. Alcohol and drug abuse on college campuses has been of great concern to both social researchers and the public for many years. A recent search on Google Scholar using the terms “alcohol” and “college student” turned up over 171,000 studies published in the last ten years (Google Scholar website, July 21, 2015). Sexual assault on college campuses has also become a serious concern, with nearly 29,000 scholarly publications in the past ten years (Google Scholar website, July 21, 2015). In January 2014, President Obama created the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault (www.notalone.gov/), further demonstrating the importance of the problem in this population. In terms of overall crime victimization, one study of college student victimization found that about one-quarter of students reported being the victim of a crime on campus in one academic year (Fisher, Sloan, Cullen, and Lu 1998).

In addition, for most students, the college years are the first experience youths have away from their parents’ home, and for many of them it is a time of experimentation with a variety of new behaviors. Freedom from the daily supervision of parents, in combination with a social environment comprised almost entirely of other youths of the same age, presents great opportunity for initiating a variety of new behaviors, both conforming and deviant.

Although our sample has weaknesses in terms of generalizability, in some ways college students are an ideal population to study to learn more about peer influence. They are away from parental supervision for probably the first time in their lives, they are surrounded by peers of the same age and life stage, and they are known to engage in and be victimized by a variety of deviant and criminal behaviors. Because our study is a first step in learning more about the mechanisms of peer influence, we believe the flaws in our sample are outweighed by the insights we’ve gained from our study.

2
Theory and Research on Peers and Deviance

The Peer Delinquency/Delinquency Connection

The focus on delinquent peers as a possible cause of delinquent behavior has its roots in two empirical facts: delinquent youth tend to have delinquent friends, and much delinquent behavior occurs in groups. From the very beginnings of the sociological study of delinquency (Shaw 1931; Shaw and McKay 1942; Sutherland 1947), the group nature of delinquency and the tendency for delinquency to cluster in certain neighborhoods has been posited as important in delinquency causation. Empirical research has continued to find that delinquency is largely a group phenomenon, with some deviant behaviors such as drug use and vandalism occurring almost exclusively in groups (Warr 2002).

Despite decades of research on this issue, there are two major questions that have yet to be answered. First, what are the mechanisms by which peers influence each other’s behavior toward crime and deviance? That is, if peers do have a causal influence on each other’s behavior, exactly how does that happen? As Warr (2002: 134) notes in his book Companions in Crime, a mere correlation between peer and individual deviance “… says nothing about the process or mechanism of influence that gave rise to it, and the number of possibilities is large …” There has been no research that explicitly examines those processes by simply asking people to report on exactly what happens in peer interactions preceding deviance. That is the approach we take in this work.

The second major question that has not yet been answered in the criminological literature, or really even addressed in any significant way, is whether and to what extent peers can have a positive influence on each other’s behavior. The field of criminology has long considered the question, “What causes crime?” to be more important than “What causes conformity?” However, from our perspective, it is possible and likely that peers exert “positive peer pressure” on each other just as they may exert pressure or other forms of influence toward deviance. Working from a control theory perspective (Gottfredson and Hirschi 1990; Hirschi [1969] 2002), we investigate the extent to which peers influence each other’s behavior in a prosocial direction, and the methods they use to do so.

The literature on peers and deviance has been dominated by learning theories of crime, with the major alternative explanation of the correlation between individual and peer delinquency being self-selection, the argument favored by control theorists. We describe these two perspectives below.

Learning Theories

The vast majority of explanations of delinquency focusing on delinquent peers draw on the idea that crime and delinquency are learned from others. This idea is an old one, and can be traced back at least as far as the Greek dramatist Thais, who in around 300 bc wrote, “bad company corrupts good character” (also translated as “evil companionships corrupt good morals,” as cited in Burt 1925: 123). It is not surprising, then, that some of the earliest works on the causes of crime also draw on this idea. Even Cesare Lombroso, most closely associated with the idea that crime has biological roots, thought that some crimes were the result of imitation, and that a “depraved environment, which counsels or even insists on wrongdoing, and the bad example of parents or relatives” are “sinister” influences on children (Lombroso-Ferrero 1911: 144). Shaw and McKay argued that socially disorganized communities allow delinquent traditions to flourish, stating that delinquency is “part of the culture and tradition which is transmitted through the medium of social contact” in high crime neighborhoods (Shaw 1931: 18). However, the notion that crime is learned is most closely associated with the work of Edwin Sutherland (1947), who argued that crime is learned through association with others who teach “definitions favorable to violation of law,” or in other words, norms that promote criminal behavior (Sutherland, Cressey, and Luckenbill 1992: 89). Later, Burgess and Akers (1966) explicitly incorporated the language of learning theory into Sutherland’s theory, arguing that deviant behavior is learned through the process of reinforcement for deviant behavior and deviant verbalizations.

Sutherland’s differential association theory and Akers’s differential association-reinforcement theory are based on the idea that everyone has some contact with deviant and conforming others; those of us who have more contact with deviant others will be exposed to “an excess of definitions favorable to violation of law” (Sutherland, Cressey, and Luckenbill 1992: 89), or will experience greater reinforcement for deviant behavior than for non-deviant behavior (Burgess and Akers 1966). These theories hold that the dominant culture in a society may condemn crime, but at the same time there are deviant subcultures that have their own values in opposition to those of the dominant culture. Although Sutherland noted that some of what’s learned in the process of learning criminal behavior is techniques for committing crime, the emphasis in both his and Akers’s theory is on learning norms or definitions that support criminal behavior. As Kornhauser (1978) summarized it, criminal behavior for cultural deviance theories such as Sutherland’s and Akers’s is normal learned behavior—people do not violate the norms of their own subculture, they only violate norms of the dominant culture.

For learning theories, then, crime and deviance are social. They have social causes in that they are learned from others in the process of social interaction, and the strength of our ties to others affects the learning process. Sutherland held that associations that are greater in “frequency, duration, priority, and intensity” will be more likely to affect norms and behavior. In other words, people we come into contact with more often, for longer periods of time, earlier in life, and those with whom we have closer relationships will have a greater impact on our behavior. For Akers, these aspects of associations are important because they can affect the likelihood that we will experience reinforcement for deviant behavior (Akers 1998). Given their focus on the social causes of crime, it seems only natural that learning theories have dominated the literature on the peer–delinquency connection. However, this perspective has been challenged, often from theorists working in the control theory tradition (Costello 1997; Hirschi 1969; Kornhauser 1978). Control theories hold that the causes of crime are asocial, simply the result of people’s desires to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. For control theories, social ties prevent crime rather than cause it, and thus the peer group is not seen as an important cause of crime. We summarize the key issues in the debate between learning and control theories below.

Self-Selection and Control Theories versus Learning Theories

Despite the dominance of cultural deviance or learning theories in the explanation of the peer delinquency/delinquency connection, critiques of these explanations are almost as old as the explanations themselves. As Burt (1925: 123–4) stated:

Of all the explanations offered to the investigator for the wrongdoing of a particular child, the commonest is the influence of bad companions. This, naturally, is the preferred suggestion of the pained and anxious parent: each boy’s mother blames some other mother’s son. It is an excuse which, just because its working seems so clear and so intelligible, should never be too hastily accepted as the sole and self-sufficient reason for an offense.

The most commonly cited alternative to learning explanations of the peer delinquency/delinquency connection is self-selection, or the idea that the correlation between peer delinquency and delinquency is spurious, and not a causal relationship at all. First popularized in criminology by the Gluecks (Glueck and Glueck 1950), the phrase “birds of a feather flock together” neatly summarizes the idea that people with similar tendencies or interests will tend to seek each other out, a process often referred to as homophily¹. The Gluecks referred to the process of selection as a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Frontmatter
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction The Study of Peers and Deviant Behavior
• 2 Theory and Research on Peers and Deviance
• 3 Qualitative Accounts of Negative Peer Influence
• 4 Mechanisms of Positive Influence
• 5 Explaining Peer Informal Social Control
• 6 Conclusions and Recommendations for Future Research and Policy
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• References
• Index