Abstract
Prior work has shown that popular peers can set a powerful norm for the valence and salience of aggression in adolescent classrooms, which enhances aggressive friendship processes (selection, maintenance, influence). It is unknown, however, whether popular peers also set a norm for prosocial behavior that can buffer against aggressive friendship processes and stimulate prosocial friendship processes. This study examined the role of prosocial and aggressive popularity norm combinations in prosocial and aggressive friendship processes. Three waves of peer-nominated data were collected in the first- and second year of secondary school (N = 1816 students; 81 classrooms; Mage = 13.06; 50.5% girl). Longitudinal social network analyses indicate that prosocial popularity norms have most power to affect both prosocial and aggressive friendship processes when aggressive popularity norms are non-present. In prosocial classrooms (low aggressive and high prosocial popularity norms), friendship maintenance based on prosocial behavior is enhanced, whereas aggressive friendship processes are largely mitigated. Instead, when aggressive popularity norms are equally strong as prosocial norms (mixed classrooms) or even stronger than prosocial norms (aggressive classrooms), aggression is more important for friendship processes than prosocial behavior. These findings show that the prosocial behavior of popular peers may only buffer against aggressive friendship processes and stimulate prosocial friendship processes if these popular peers (or other popular peers in the classroom) abstain from aggression.
Highlights
Adolescents spend a large part of the day in their classroom, and the proliferation of prosocial and aggressive behavior in classrooms is vital to adolescents’ social-emotional and academic adjustment (Jones et al 2010)
The prosocial popularity norm varied from −0.14 to 0.93 across classrooms (M = 0.48; SD = 0.23; 95% range = 0.06–0.85) and the aggressive popularity norm varied from −0.52 to 0.81 across classrooms (M = 0.33; SD = 0.30; 95% range = −0.35–0.70)
The potential protective role of prosocial behaviors of popular peers has not been considered to date, and research did not consider the coexistence and interplay of multiple norms and friendship processes
Summary
Adolescents spend a large part of the day in their classroom, and the proliferation of prosocial and aggressive behavior in classrooms is vital to adolescents’ social-emotional and academic adjustment (Jones et al 2010). Aggressive and prosocial behavior may proliferate through a dynamic interplay of peer selection, maintenance, and influence processes (Dishion and Tipsord 2011). Adolescents may become similar to their friends via influence processes, due to social pressure or imitation. Only two studies examined popularity norms’ role in friendship processes. They showed that friendship selection and influence related to aggression (Laninga-Wijnen et al 2017), and friendship influence on risk attitudes (Rambaran et al 2013) were
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