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The Effects of Involuntary Peer Pressure
- phsnewspaper.com
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
By Amanda Whitsell
Just about everyone has been affected by peer pressure, your friend telling you to take a hit of their vape, or being invited out and feeling as though you can't decline the invitation. Peer pressure is a common phenomenon that people often encounter, but did you know that there's a different form of peer pressure? Involuntary peer pressure is a form of peer pressure that can cause people, especially children, to do things that are not in their best interest. Things like trends fall under this line. The human brain associates following what everyone else is doing with safety. This stems back to the hunting-gathering days of humanity. Back then, if everyone else was doing something, that something was almost certainly keeping those individuals alive.
Involuntary peer pressure can cause dangerous behavior, and I personally have seen it cause extreme damage to school property. The F student trend is where a kid will put their pencil lead or a paperclip into one of the ports on their Chromebook so that it will smoke. This can make the Chromebook explode and set off the fire alarm. Kids would see this challenge on TikTok and repeat it, not because the creators of those TikToks told them to, so that they seemed cool like the people from TikTok. Another example is the devious lice trend from 2020, which involved a kid ripping bathroom items like the urinals, paper towel dispensers, and sinks off the wall. The objective of this trend was to take these items home as a trophy. Peer pressure is a crazy thing that every trend uses to become popular, and it's important to know what should and should not be recreated.
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