Do Best Friends or Popular Kids Have the Strongest Influence on Teens and Tweens? It's Complicated

When it comes to adolescents, friendships tend to matter above almost all else. But also important — at least according to pop-culture depictions of teens and tweens — is fitting in with popular peers. But who’s more important? And who are we talking about when we talk about “peer pressure”?

Those were questions researchers at Florida Atlantic University sought to answer by following middle-school students through an entire semester, tracking everything from academic performance and emotional wellbeing to social media use and concerns about weight.

Results of the longitudinal study, published last month in the journal Development and Psychopathology and announced by FAU on Monday, show that peer influence does not come from a single source. Instead, researchers found, different types of peers have difference roles when it comes to influence.

This was the first study of its kind to simultaneously compare the relative impact of best friends versus popular students driving classroom norms. What it found was that while best friends primarily shape a child’s “internal emotional state and academic behavior,” notes a press release, “popular peers set the standard for public image and social media engagement.”

In other words, said lead author Mary Page Leggett-James in a press release, “in the social economy of a middle schooler, best friends deal in the ‘private currency’ of emotions and adjustment, while popular peers control the ‘public market’ of social media and appearance.”

For the investigation, FAU researchers collaborated with those at Mykolas Romeris University in Lithuania, following 543 students ages 10 to 14 for a semester. Participants checked in on a variety of topics, from academics to emotional state, while also identifying their best friends and classmates they considered popular. 

“This is the first study to put best friends and popular peers in the same model and ask, ‘Who matters more, and for what?,’” said Brett Laursen, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at FAU’s Charles E. Schmidt College of Science. 

Despite the students in the study being in Lithuania, Laursen told SheKnows, the results can easily be applied to American teens. “I have no reservations about generalizing from the Lithuanian sample to U.S. youth,” he said. “Indeed, we have published many studies that compare this sample to a representative sample of Florida children and adolescents, and we find virtually no differences in variable correlates and outcomes.”

The findings revealed the following pattern: Best friends primarily shaped a child’s internal emotional states and academic practices, while popular peers set the standard for public image. “Specifically,” the release explains, “best friends were the primary influencers for behaviors reflecting internal dysfunction and maladjustment, including emotional problems, lack of emotional clarity, problem behaviors, and low school achievement. Popular peers, by contrast, shape behaviors performed in view of others,” with teens emulating high-status classmates in regard to social media use and weight concerns.