Peer pressure against prejudice: A high school field experiment examining social network change

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Abstract

Individuals often conform to the intergroup attitudes and behaviors modeled by their peers in a given situation. To what extent does peer influence on intergroup prejudice 1) diffuse across a social network of peers and 2) affect attitudes and behavior across time? Student leaders (“Peer Trainers”) were trained to confront expressions of intergroup prejudice in five randomly assigned high schools across a period of five months; students recruited to be Peer Trainers in five control schools waited to be trained. Independent surveys of Peer Trainers' social networks reveal that treatment Peer Trainers were significantly more likely than control Trainers to be nominated by peers as students who confront prejudice. Treatment Peer Trainers' tolerant behavior spread to close friends and to acquaintances in their social network; their attitudes spread inconsistently, and only to close friends. Studying peer influence within social networks can improve understanding of social influence, prejudice reduction, and social change.

Introduction

Individuals often conform to the intergroup attitudes and behaviors modeled by their peers in a given situation. They express more tolerance of racist speech following a peer's expression of racist views, and less tolerance after a peer condemns racism (Blanchard, Crandall, Brigham, & Vaughn, 1994); they adjust to the current peer consensus on stereotyping when reporting their own racial stereotypes (Sechrist and Stangor, 2001, Stangor et al., 2001); they are more tolerant of discrimination against minorities and women after overhearing racist or sexist jokes (Ford and Ferguson, 2004, LaFrance and Woodzicka, 1998) and when they perceive prejudice against those groups to be socially acceptable (Crandall, Eshleman, & O'Brien, 2002). A signal as subtle as a peer's antiracism t-shirt can go so far as to influence an individual's unconscious, uncensored prejudice (Lun et al., 2007, Sinclair et al., 2005).

Peer influence on intergroup prejudice is not driven by blind conformity, but by basic human goals of understanding, social connection, and self-definition (Asch, 1956, Cialdini and Goldstein, 2004). For example, Social Reality Theory shows that the goal of understanding and connection drives individuals to verify their experiences with others, and to express attitudes and behaviors that are recognized and valued by others (Hardin & Conley, 2000). Group Norms Theory and related work show that the goal of connection and self-definition leads individuals to adopt the expressed attitudes and behavior of peers who represent valued group identities, as a means of socially connecting with the group (Crandall et al., 2002, Kelman, 1958, Sherif and Sherif, 1953) and of avoiding the label of social deviant (Blanton & Christie, 2003). These basic goals animate peer influence on many types of behavior, from environmental (Schultz, Nolan, Cialdini, Goldstein, & Griskevicius, 2007) to political and economic (Nowak & Vallacher, 2001).

Because peer influence is driven by fundamental human goals, and because it can shift both prosocial and antisocial attitudes and behavior, it is important to understand the extent of its reach. In particular, to what extent does peer influence spread outside of the initiating influence situation, to ongoing expressions of attitude or behavior, and to other people? Previous work in this vein suggests that understanding the long-term diffusion of peer influence grants social psychologists a window into how behavioral patterns and social norms develop, and into how social climates or cultures evolve (Latané, 2000). Such work marks the study of peer influence as central to the broader study of social stasis and change.

With few exceptions, research on prejudice and intergroup relations does not examine the spread of peer influence outside of dyadic interactions. Laboratory experiments pinpoint the mechanisms of influence transmission for a single interaction with a racist or tolerant peer (e.g., Sinclair et al., 2005). Field experiments identify the real world effects of dyadic interaction, such as a peer's commentary about intergroup relations (Blanchard et al., 1994, Liebkind and McAlister, 1999), an ingroup vs. outgroup college roommate (Duncan et al., 2003, Shook and Fazio, 2008, van Laar et al., 2005), and a discussion with a peer who espouses different intergroup beliefs (e.g., Aboud & Doyle, 1996). It is generally unknown to what extent these types of peer influence spread outside of the relationship to a social network of peers. By social network, I mean the regular patterns of relationship among individuals, patterns defined by friendship, kinship, work, common interest, or other bonds (see Wasserman & Faust, 1994).

This paper tests whether intergroup tolerance spreads across a social network of peers when individuals representing valued subgroups in the network model tolerance. Notwithstanding the recent flood of correlational studies that show social network influence to be strong and ubiquitous (Christakis & Fowler, 2009), theory and evidence from social psychology do not offer an a priori consensus on whether tolerance will spread through a network using the present strategy. Group Norms Theory (Crandall and Eshleman, 2003, Sherif and Sherif, 1953) might predict that peers in the network would become more tolerant, because intergroup attitudes and behaviors are strongly influenced by representatives of psychologically valued “reference” groups (see Smith & Louis, 2008, for a similar Social Identity Theory perspective). On the other hand, Deviance Regulation Theory (Blanton & Christie, 2003) notes that individuals often reject attitudes and behaviors of peer groups as a means of self-definition, and the Focus Theory of normative conduct demonstrates that peer influence is meaningful only when it is salient, which it may not be across various situations and time periods (Kallgren, Reno, & Cialdini, 2000). This range of perspectives demonstrates that examining the spread of tolerance throughout a network is an important theoretical as well as substantive question.

This paper also tests whether peer models are able to spread attitudes, behavior, or both. Evidence from dyadic social influence studies shows that both attitude and behavior can be influenced in the immediate situation. With respect to long-term and cross-situational change, different theories offer different predictions. For example, one classic take on social influence argues that behavioral compliance precedes attitudinal change (Kelman, 1958), while another argues that attitudinal change directs shifts in behavior (Hovland, Janis, & Kelley, 1953).

A wealth of research examines the psychological mechanisms of social influence. Mechanisms are of less interest for the present paper than the principal (and thus far unresolved) question of whether influence spreads throughout a network over time, and of what sort—attitudes, behaviors, or both. Our contribution is to demonstrate how measuring change in social networks could deepen our social psychological understanding of influence, prejudice reduction, and various types of social change.

Section snippets

Experimental context

I use a unique field experimental intervention to test whether peer influence can spread intergroup tolerance throughout a social network in the form of intergroup attitudes and behavior. The intervention aims to decrease intergroup prejudice and harassment among teenagers in U.S. high schools. Intergroup harassment, which includes teasing and other verbal abuse that is based on race, gender, religion, or appearance, is one of the most common forms of discrimination among adolescents (Aboud and

Materials and method

Fig. 1 illustrates the experimental design, a matched randomized waiting list study. Ten schools agreed to begin the Peer Training program in their school, in either the fall or the spring (the ADL identified these schools during their customary recruitment drive). We paired each school with its closest match in the sample, using a range of publically available data: number of students per teacher, percentage of students receiving reduced lunch at the school, and the ethnic and racial

Sample characteristics

We interviewed 539 students before the spring Peer Training session began: 144 Peer Trainers, 143 Friends, and 252 Peers. We reached 60% of all Peer Trainers and 30% of all named classmates. Three quarters of these students were in the 10th or 11th grade, the classes from which Peer Trainers are typically chosen. Fifty-four percent were female, and 66% described themselves as European American, 11% as coming from a mixed racial or ethnic background, 9% as Hispanic, and 7% as African American.

Awareness

Discussion

A five-month high school intervention trained students (“Peer Trainers”) from various subgroups within their school's social network to confront prejudice and harassment; at the end of five months we observed a significant and widespread pattern of effects attributable to the intervention. Peer Trainers in treatment schools were more likely than Peer Trainers in waiting list schools to be nominated by close friends and more distal peers as people likely to confront prejudice in their school.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the support and collaboration of Donald P. Green and the Institution of Social and Policy Studies at Yale University, and of Lindsay Friedman, Lorraine Tiven, and especially Bill Madden-Fuoco of the Anti-Defamation League. I received excellent research assistance, in particular from Liana Epstein, Nathan Paluck, Erin Thomas, and Neema Trivedi, and I benefited from the insightful feedback of Debbie Prentice, Hart Blanton, and the SSP lab at Princeton University.

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