Editing Peer pressure (section)

=== Children ===
Imitation plays a large role in children's lives; in order to pick up skills and techniques that they use in their own life, children are always searching for behaviors and attitudes around them that they can co-opt. In other words, children are influenced by people that are important in their lives, such as friends, parents, celebrities (including YouTubers), singers, dancers, etc. This may explain why children with parents who eat unhealthy or don't live active lifestyles can conform to creating habits just like their parents as young adults, and why children try to walk when very young. Children are aware of their position in the social hierarchy from a young age: their instinct is to defer to adults' judgements and majority opinions.<ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Corriveau|first1=Kathleen H.|last2=Harris|first2=Paul L.|date=2010-03-01|title=Preschoolers (sometimes) defer to the majority in making simple perceptual judgments.|journal=Developmental Psychology|volume=46|issue=2|pages=437–445|doi=10.1037/a0017553|issn=1939-0599|pmid=20210502}}</ref> Similar to the [[Asch conformity experiments]], a study done on groups of preschool children showed that they were influenced by groups of their peers to change their opinion to a demonstrably wrong one.<ref name="HaunTomasello2011">{{cite journal|last1=Haun|first1=Daniel B. M.|last2=Tomasello|first2=Michael|author2-link=Michael Tomasello|title=Conformity to Peer Pressure in Preschool Children|journal=Child Development|volume=82|issue=6|year=2011|pages=1759–1767|issn=0009-3920|doi=10.1111/j.1467-8624.2011.01666.x|pmid=22023172|hdl=11858/00-001M-0000-0012-C434-2|s2cid=3218812|url=http://www.eva.mpg.de/documents/Wiley-Blackwell/Haun_Conformity_ChildDev_2011_1552445.pdf|hdl-access=free|access-date=September 1, 2019|archive-date=August 9, 2017|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170809025737/http://www.eva.mpg.de/documents/Wiley-Blackwell/Haun_Conformity_ChildDev_2011_1552445.pdf|url-status=live}}</ref> Each child was handed a book with two sets of images on each page, with a groups of differently sized animals on the left hand page and one animal on the right hand, and each child was asked to indicate the size of the lone animal. All the books appeared the same, but the last child would sometimes get a book that was different. The children reported their size judgements in turn, and the child being tested was asked last. Before the child was to be tested, however, there was a group of children working in conjunction with the researchers. Sometimes, the children who answered before the test subject all gave an incorrect answer. When asked in the presence of the other children, the last child's response was often the same as his or her peers. However, when allowed to privately share their responses with a researcher, the children proved much more resistant to their peers' pressure, illustrating the importance of the physical presence of their peers in shaping their opinions.<ref name="HaunTomasello2011"/>

An observation is that children can monitor and intervene in their peers' behavior through pressure. A study conducted in a remedial kindergarten class, in the Edna A. Hill Child Development Laboratory at the University of Kansas, was designed to measure how children could ease disruptive behavior in their peers through a two-part system. After describing a series of tasks to their classroom that included going to the bathroom, cleaning up, and general classroom behavior, teachers and researchers would observe children's performance on the tasks. The study focused on three children who were clearly identified as being more disruptive than their peers. They looked at their responses to potential techniques. They utilized the two-part system: first, each student would be given points by their teachers for correctly completing tasks with little disruption (e.g. sitting down on a mat for reading time), and if a student reached three points by the end of the day they would receive a prize. The second part brought in peer interaction, where students who reached three points were appointed "peer monitors" whose role was to lead their small groups and assign points at the end of the day. The results were clear-cut, showing that the monitored students' disruption level dropped when teachers started the points system and monitored them, but when peer monitors were introduced the target students' disruption dropped to average rates of 1% for student C1, 8% for student C2, and 11% for student C3 (down from 36%, 62%, and 59%, respectively). Even small children, then, are susceptible to pressure from their peers, and that pressure can be used to effect positive change in academic and social environments.<ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Carden Smith|first1=L. K.|last2=Fowler|first2=S. A.|date= 1984|title=Positive peer pressure: the effects of peer monitoring on children's disruptive behavior|journal=Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis|volume=17|issue=2|pages=213–227|doi=10.1901/jaba.1984.17-213|issn=0021-8855|pmc=1307935|pmid=6735953}}</ref>