About peer pressure, here I want to share an observation with you all to discuss what peer pressure is, which I would describe as copycat behaviour.
First of all, what is peer pressure? According to Wikipedia, peer pressure (also known as peer influence) is the direct or indirect influence on peers, i.e., members of social groups such as classmates or friends with similar interests, experiences, or social statuses. Members of a peer group are more likely to influence a person’s beliefs, values, and behaviour. A group or individual may be encouraged and want to follow their peers by changing their attitudes, values or behaviours to conform to those of the influencing group or individual. For the individual affected by peer pressure, this can have both a positive and negative influence on them.
I don’t know whether you have had an experience like mine when most of your classmates or even friends around you are doing the same thing, like playing an online game such as “Wild Rift”, so you will just follow them even though you are not interested in playing the game. But I did have such an experience which happened when I was just a P6 student.
I remember that when I was in Primary Six, there was a “game” that suddenly became popular in my class, in which my classmates used an art knife to cut their arms. The knife marks on their arms were marks to be proud of.
Although nowadays I would say that this is the most stupid behaviour that I have ever seen, under the “pressure” of classmates at that time, “their peers” never considered the behaviour to be wrong and ridiculous, although it is a kind of self-harm, they just followed the group of people to hurt themselves, so as to avoid being cast out.
However, is it really important for us to be the same as others? Is it really worth it to copy others’ behaviour even though we know it is wrong? These are the questions that we should think carefully about before we just blindly follow others.
So far, we have just talked about the bad points of peer influence, in fact, just like Wikipedia defines it, peer influence could also bring benefits to us, for example, by creating a learning environment, cultivating habits of being active in voluntary work, or doing exercises with a group of people who have the same interest as you.
But how? The answer is to get closer and pay close attention to the group of people who you think are reliable and could lead you on the path which is beneficial to you.
Based on my observation, those whose are top of the class academically are more likely to become good friends in school so that they can discuss what they learnt in the class and share their own opinions on a subject. When one is putting an effort into studying, others will also follow and put more effort into their studies too, which happened to my class in high school when a group of F6 students studied economics at McDonald’s after school.
Actually, studying at McDonald’s until 10 p.m. was tough, however, the grades for the economics test told me that following in my classmates’ footsteps to study harder is the best thing that I have ever done. Therefore, I put more effort into my studies, just like my peers did.
In other words, peer influence is not horrible, but the most important thing is that we need to be able to judge whether something is right or wrong, or if the group of people could influence you in a correct way or not.
Everyone is unique. Instead of blindly following the behaviour of others, we should have independent thinking to choose our right path.
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