Fun Fact: Being social isn’t always the key to success.

You’re welcome to start a drinking game for each post I make in which I tell you the textbook’s incorrect, because here’s number two. Today we’re talking about the influence of a student’s peers on his or her grades and educational achievement.

So what am I nitpicking this time?

Children who have poor peer relationships, where they are either actively rejected or ignored by their peers, fail to develop competency in many areas of their lives, including academic achievement (Schneider et al., p.207).

This is practically the opening statement to Chapter 9’s subsection on the academic effects of peer interaction, and while it isn’t quite as blatant an offense as my last post pointed out, it’s still definitely worth mentioning.

It would be one thing to make the statement that positive interaction with peers is correlated strongly with academic achievement, or to say that social rejection can lead to academic failure. In fact, the text is welcome to cite a number of studies supporting this evidence – which it has. One in particular mentions that children fall into three categories:

(a) Children who demonstrated positive play behaviors also engaged in classroom learning activities, (b) children who hovered around play activities but did not interact with others very much were inattentive in class and less motivated to learn, and (c) children who were disruptive in their peer play also displayed conduct problems during classroom activities. (Schneider et al., p.207)

So there you have it, folks. You’re a social butterfly, you’re awkward and inattentive, or you’re a troublemaker. If you could please queue up in one of these three lines, that would be great.

…But it’s not quite that easy. In each class of 25 to 30 kids, there will be at least five kids who fall blatantly outside of these categories. (Note that this is a rough estimate based on my experiences in twelve years of formalized education.) You’ll have the social butterfly who can’t get good grades to save his life. You’ll have the abrasive kid who rejects everyone but aces his tests – or more commonly, the overlooked loner who maintains the highest GPA in the class. This is prevalent enough that the media has concocted stereotypes on the topic – dumb jock, loser nerd, etc.

What’s actually going on here?

I can’t even begin to fathom why the studies produced such a black-and-white outlook on this particular correlation. It’s possible that this could have been a product of the era; the studies cited by our text included two from 1988 and 1992, both older than I am. Two more were from the early 2000’s, which by now is a full fifteen years ago, hard as it is to believe. All of this is to say that it’s entirely possible that as society has developed over these last three decades, the interplay between social interaction and academic achievement may have as well. On the other hand, 80’s movies were pretty heavy-handed with the “unpopular nerd & dumb jock” stereotypes, so this doesn’t hold up too well under scrutiny.

My next thought was that it could be a product of the location in which these studies took place. I asked my roommate, an 80’s movie buff, about her take on this issue as seen through the lens of movies of the era (which is how I reached the above conclusion), and she cited location as the biggest influence coming to mind. In my school, social success and educational aptitude were almost entirely divorced concepts, but in hers, all of the popular kids were also in ASB and taking AP classes.

This tied back to the demographic in the area in which she grew up: The kids there were from affluent families with tangible social standing, and were being pressured to excel in all areas of their lives (social, academic, extracurricular). Even the delinquents were raised in an atmosphere in which intelligence and academic achievement was desirable above all other traits, and it showed. In contrast, the retirement town in which I went to middle and high school was one where the only adults (which is to say, the only parents) were either taking care of an elderly relative or were townies who never aspired to leave. This lacking level of ambition carried over pretty plainly in my peers.

All of this is to say that the location of the school in which the cited studies took place could easily be the key to unlocking this mystery. If the area was affluent like my roommate’s hometown, the studies may very well have been correct, but they lack external validity to generalize the results outside of other similar social demographics.

This seems like something the textbook might have taken into account, seeing as it taught us the concept of external validity in the first place. I feel like, in the name of taking a solid stance one way or another on the matter, our text has fallen prey to confirmation bias, in which it chooses to use as evidence studies which support the stance it’s choosing to take and similarly neglects to notice the studies which don’t.

What isn’t the textbook telling us?

There are quite a few facets of this particular social-educational interaction that the text doesn’t necessarily touch on.

  • Individuals who are “popular”/have good social skills can do very poorly in academic pursuits for a number of reasons:
    • Peer-pressure affecting the deliberate choice to succeed. This was demonstrated, for example, in a study on 11th grade students testing their willingness to sign up for an SAT prep course depending on whether or not their participation was visible to their peers. “We find that students respond dramatically to whether their decision to sign up for a complementary version of a valuable, online SAT prep course is visible to their peers, and in a way that depends greatly on who their peers are at the time they are offered the course. We also find evidence suggesting that the results are specifically driven by concerns over popularity and the possibility of facing social sanctions or gaining social approval depending on effort or investments, or at least, a desire to conform to prevailing social norms among peers in the classroom. (Bursztyn & Jensen, 2014)”

    • Prioritizing social obligations over academic ones. Speaking from experience, many adolescents are faced with a choice between peers and school and choose their peers. In class, they’d rather talk to their friends and make new social connections than pay attention to the teacher, and after school they’re found socializing rather than studying or completing their homework. This tends to come out stronger in high school, and could easily be a product of how much more difficult it is to be popular than to be good in school these days. This could tie in to the justification of effort effect (Schneider et al., 2014): Popularity would seem like the better of the two based solely on how difficult it is to obtain in comparison.

 

  • Individuals who are outcasts on a social level can do very well in academic pursuits for a number of reasons:
    • Self-motivated learning. Whether it’s a product of identified or integrated regulation or even genuinely an intrinsically-motivated desire, some students find motivation to succeed independent of the social pressures (positive or negative) coming from his or her peers. This it occurs in both social and less social individuals, but it’s much easier to notice in adolescents with fewer social skills, as academic achievement from a social butterfly tends to be taken for granted as “par for course”, despite all stereotypes to the contrary. It’s also more difficult to notice because both the self-motivated pressures and the peer pressures often point in the same direction, so it’s hard to discern one from the other.
    • Competition and defiance. While children on the receiving end of peer rejection or neglect often withdraw, human beings in general (especially at a young age) are primed to develop defense mechanisms to account for the environment they find themselves in, and defiance is often a child’s method of choice, built in from the age-old cry of “NO!” when a parent said it was time for bed (or time for basically anything else, really). If you can’t beat them, join them – but if you can’t join them, beat them. This is largely from personal experience, mine and that of a handful of people I know who shared my experiences. Essentially, we were unable to integrate socially, so we instead boosted our own self esteem in the wake of the blow delivered by our peers by becoming better than they were at any given thing, academics or sports or whatever we could come up with. Being “better than them” fortified us against being dragged down by them.
    • Failure to understand their status as outcast. This isn’t terribly common, since adolescents tend to pick up on social cues from their peers, but some – often those suffering from a mental issue which hinders understanding of social scenarios, such as those on the Autism spectrum. In this scenario, the lack of acceptance from peers may go entirely unnoticed as the student continues on as if he or she has plenty of friends but happens to not hang out with them often. In this case, academic achievement would theoretically not be affected in any way by the rejection or neglect.
    • Motivation from other social circles. For example, a social outcast who has a special rapport with his or her teachers – or has a particularly supportive family. In my case, I had no friends and a distinctly unpleasant relationship with most of my teachers throughout my grade school years, but my grandmother (who raised me) was both supportive and adamant that I succeed in school. She was my primary social connection, and she was the one who shaped my priorities aspirations, in lieu of positive social contact at school itself.

All in all, this is a broader and more varied issue than the textbook even begins to imply, and once again, the text has opted to be closed-minded for simplicity’s sake. Tune in next week for what hopefully isn’t a third argumentative post.

Crossing my fingers and signing out.

Bursztyn, L., & Jensen, R. (2014). How Does Peer Pressure Affect Educational Investments? doi:10.3386/w20714

Schneider, F.W., Grumman, J.A., & Coutts, L.M. (2012) Applied social psychology: Understanding and addressing social and practical problems. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.

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