There are myriad influences on young people during the school day, from the classroom setting and the activity they’re undertaking to the weather and whether a fly has found its way into the room.

But in terms of the people around them, who has the most influence on how well students learn and behave? Is it teachers and other adults, or do peer relationships hold the most sway?

These are the kinds of questions that Brett Laursen has spent his career exploring. His decades of research have dug deep into the complex world of adolescent relationships, both platonic and romantic, and how these shape the lives and onward journeys of the young people within them.

Laursen is a professor of psychology and director of graduate training at Florida Atlantic University, as well as a docent professor of educational psychology at the University of Helsinki.

He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Behavioral Development.

We caught up with him to find out what teachers and leaders need to know about peer influence, popularity and why the adolescent brain is wired for conformity.

What are the key things that teachers need to understand about the effects of peer influence in the classroom?

Firstly, that peer influence can be both positive and negative. For example, teachers tend to focus on the disruptive features of having friends be together at the expense of the positives.

It’s true that if you ask friends to work together, you’re going to get more happy noises and more potentially disruptive behaviours, which makes classroom management perhaps less fun. But there’s also a boatload of evidence that suggests the more you like the person you’re working with, the more you’re going to learn.

We see positive effects of working with friends in terms of skill acquisition and content acquisition, that friends tend to influence each others’ academic behaviours far more than non-friends do.

And so, I think it’s a bit counterproductive to force kids to work with people they don’t like, because then they don’t enjoy the task as much and then don’t achieve as much.

Why does it matter if they enjoy the task?

We did a study in California where they gave us control over a computer science course, and the task was to teach kids a new programming language. Nobody knew anything at the beginning, so we could measure how much knowledge students had acquired over the course of the semester.

In some classes, we let students pair up with their friends and in other classes we assigned who their partner was going to be.

We found that if students were paired with a friend, the amount they liked the friend predicted how much they learned over the course of the semester. Not only that, but the amount they liked the friend also predicted the amount the friend learned.

There’s obviously much more engagement in the material because you’re having more fun. And having fun is not necessarily the opposite of learning; you can do both at the same time. In fact, we think you might actually be learning more if you’re having fun along the way.

There’s probably also more goofing around as well but the net result is clearly that friends prefer to work together and they do better work together, whereas it can be something to slog through if you’re being forced to work with somebody that you don’t enjoy spending time with.

What about the wider dynamic of the classroom? How does peer influence affect this?

There are also group norms within a classroom and school and those are typically established by the most popular kids. By popular, we don’t mean the ones that everybody likes, we literally mean dominant, leader-type kids.

There are classrooms where the norm is to do well in school, and the popular kids emphasise academic achievement. In other cases, doing well in school is not a priority of the popular students, and so conformity norms tend towards low academic achievement.

As a teacher, in the latter instance, you may see scores drifting downwards, or students posing as not caring and hiding their grades and so on.

So, there’s the influence going on with friends and the influence going on at the classroom level, typically driven by the norm-setting behaviours of popular kids.

How far can teachers influence those norms?

There is research that suggests the culture of an entire school can be set from the top, so principals and teachers do have some say in terms of the norms that are established in the classroom.

For example, in some schools, sports are given a great deal of precedence; students may be let out of class to attend sporting rallies or sporty students are given special treatment.

And so, there are some things that teachers and principals can do in terms of structural recognition and emphasis.

There’s good, clear evidence that if leaders decide to set about changing the norms of the school that it can be done, it’s just not a very straightforward process, and it’s not one that yields immediate, rewarding results.

Within an individual classroom, for instance, you can prioritise or not prioritise giving attention to the popular kids who emphasise academics versus popular kids who emphasise other activities.

What is it that makes a child popular? How do you measure that in your research?

We use a peer nomination technique to measure popularity because it is more accurate than teacher or parent perceptions.

We give everybody in the class a roster and ask them to circle the names of all those who are popular. And then we give them another roster and tell them to circle the names of everybody they like. The number of nominations you receive as popular, that’s your popularity score, and the number of nominations you receive as being liked, that’s your score for likability.

The two measure different constructs: your popularity score is not very highly correlated with your likeability score.

Think about the film Mean Girls. The popular girls were influential and dominant, they were leaders. But they were not particularly well-liked, other people were scared of them.

And that’s what we see: you don’t want to be friends with the popular students because that’s dangerous, you want to be in the next circle of friends so you get invited to their parties and other people think that you’re popular and influential.

The popular students are not usually the best-liked students, but they are people that you recognise are important and influential - you need to stay in their good graces.

And how powerful is their influence? Can individual friendships override it?

The popular students can certainly have a big influence on classroom norms, but it can be balanced by influence from friends.

So it’s possible for friends to be pushing in a different direction than classroom norms, and it’s easier to buck norm expectations, of course, if you have a good, close friend who’s willing to support you in that domain.

For example, when you see students with a high level of academic interest who attend schools that don’t have a norm emphasising academic achievement, you might expect that those students are probably friends with others who also have high academic interest.

They’re influencing one another to stay the course over and above the classroom norms.

Presumably, that friendship influence can also have a negative effect in academic terms. Is there a risk of being “dragged down” by a friend?

The research shows that the benefits usually flow from the higher-performing child down to the lower-performing child, with a caveat that the lower-performing child has to actually care about and have some engagement in the topic.

But if they care about their performance, we see that lower-performing friends really do profit from connections with higher-performing children and there’s no apparent loss of abilities for the higher-performing child.

It’s useful for teachers and parents to get their minds around the idea that the influence within a friendship is not necessarily equally distributed.

Let’s say your child is hanging around with somebody that you don’t necessarily think all that highly of. It might be the case that your child is the influential partner in that pair, and so is not really being dragged down by that partner.

Bad things are not necessarily happening, because your child has more status or is more influential within the friendship.

It is hard for an outsider to know exactly what is going on between friends. And I would say parents have very little clue about whether their child is the more influential partner within a friendship.

Some parents may successfully disrupt a friendship, forcing a child to make a new friend, but in that new friendship, they may now be the partner with less influence, which means that they are now the one who’s conforming.

You may find that you’ve disrupted a friendship that you thought was bad, forcing the child into a friendship with a partner that you may think is better, but objectively speaking, that partner is more influential and not necessarily in a good way.

How does technology intersect with this? How do online friendships work in this landscape?

After the Covid-19 lockdowns, we saw that young people were eager to go back to face-to-face friendship activities. I’m not saying that online activities are unimportant or aren’t influential, but for most children, face-to-face activities are preferable and probably more important.

There are certainly students whose best friends are only online. Often, these friendships are of lower quality than the friendships that they might have in person. But it’s better to have at least one friend than to have no friends, even if that friend is only available online.

Children are still able to draw some of the necessary provisions from online friends that they need and want if they’re not able to get them from their in-person friends. They can be substitutes, not perhaps as good as in-person friends, but again, better than none.

And what about those kids who struggle with in-person friendships?

There’s a sort of pairing exercise that goes on in any big group. Once you leave the primary school environment, which is very adult-dominated, and move into an environment that’s more peer-dominated, students with the most attractive attributes tend to get to their first choice of friends and they pick other kids with more attractive attributes and so on down the food chain.

Once you get to the bottom of this pecking order, children with less desirable attributes are faced with the dilemma of making friends with other students who don’t have very many attractive attributes or going without friends.

It can be a really difficult dilemma because you don’t want to be in middle school without a friend. You’re much more likely to be bullied if you don’t have a friend.

Friends help provide access to parties and social acceptability activities that you can’t do without a friend. For these reasons, most students are more likely to make a friend, any friend, than go without friends.

Unfortunately, as a consequence, they put themselves in the company of others who we wouldn’t necessarily describe as optimal sources of influence.

Teachers and parents don’t really appreciate that the dangers of being friendless are, generally speaking, significant. It’s a tall order to ask a student to be friendless instead of hanging around with peers who might be a bad influence. I don’t know of a lot of adults who would choose to be friendless either.

So the shift from primary school is a very significant moment in terms of influence?

Yes, because in a primary school environment, you typically have fairly small classes that are heavily supervised by adults.

With middle school or junior high school, you transition into an environment that’s much more dominated by peers. You’re in different classes with different students and you’re suddenly exposed to three, four or five times as many peers and reduced adult oversight.

You’re essentially now navigating a kind of “Lord of the Flies” environment on your own and you certainly don’t want to do that without a mate.

It’s not just because of bullying, which is a real concern. There are many uncertainties about this new environment and you need to make your way through a potential social minefield. It’s much better to do that with somebody by your side.

And how does the importance of peer influence develop over the years?

Peer influence and conformity seem to have an inverted U-shaped curve; it rises across the late primary school years, peaks around early- to mid-adolescence and then starts to drop off towards the late adolescent years.

There are several different reasons why that’s the case. As we’ve discussed, structural changes in schools are one important reason. Another is identity: early adolescence and mid-adolescence are times of identity exploration, a time of trying on attitudes and behaviours that your peers are displaying.

There are also rapid neurological changes going on during this age period, key reward centres come online earlier than control centres.

During the early adolescent years, we are biologically trained for reward-seeking, particularly rewards provided by peers.

Peers are exciting and rewarding, and the part of our brain with the ability to rein this in and dampen risky behaviour doesn’t come online until later in adolescence.

Another important age difference concerns who we spend our time with. As we get older, of course, we become engaged in romantic relationships, which exert a new, potentially different influence. Increasingly, if there are competing influences, we tend to bow to the romantic partner rather than the friend.

We published a very interesting study about what happens to friends when an adolescent gets a girlfriend or a boyfriend; similarity with friends was replaced by similarity with the romantic partner.

Take alcohol consumption. After beginning a romantic relationship, adolescents became less similar to friends in terms of how much alcohol they drank because they changed their behaviour to become more similar to the new romantic partner.

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