New Study Looks at Peer Pressure and Implications for Preventing

The above article is from HealthNewsDigest.com. The article points out that “friends’ substance use is one of the most powerful influences that lead adolescents to use themselves.” However a three-year Weill Cornell Medical College study found that students with “competence skills had a long-term effect in reducing the impact of friends’ substance use.” Just for clarification, competence skills are defined as “high-refusal-assertiveness” and “good decision-making skills” which were learned about the students by conducting the study over a three years.

When someone succumbs to peer pressure, he is making a decision based on other people’s decisions. Therefore, this article and study can be analyzed using our information cascade theory. We can say that the decision is either accepting or rejecting substances. Now, where this study fits in is when we talk about the distribution of signals. Since doing drugs has a negative payoff, we can say that there is a probability of q > 1/2 that a student will receive a low signal in order to reject the substance use. According to the study, if we can instill these competence skills into our children, then we can increase the value of q and thus increase the probability that a student will reject drugs. Still, as we can see in real life, information cascade is still a possible result and hence social groups in students are still susceptible to drug use.