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Come on--Everybody's doing it. That whispered message, half invitation and halfforcing,is what most of us think of when we hear the words peer pressure. Itusually leads to no good--drinking, drugs and casual sex, But in her new bookJoin the Club, Tina Rosenberg contends that peer pressure can also be apositive force through what she calls the social cure, in which organizationsand officials use the power of group dynamics to help individuals improve theirlives and possibly the world.
Rosenberg,the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, offers a host of examples of the social curein action: In South Carolina, a state-sponsored antismoking program called RageAgainst the Haze sets out to make cigarettes uncool. In South Africa, an HIV-preventioninitiative known as LoveLife recruits young people to promote safe sex amongtheir peers.
The ideaseems promising, and Rosenberg is a perceptive observer. Her critique of the lamenessof many public-health campaigns is spot-on: they fail to mobilize peer pressurefor healthy habits, and they demonstrate a seriously flawed understanding ofpsychology. "Dare to be different,please don't smoke!" pleads onebillboard campaign aimed at reducing smoking among teenagers--teenagers, whodesire nothing more than fitting in. Rosenberg argues convincingly thatpublic-health advocates ought to take a page from advertisers, so skilled atapplying peer pressure.
But onthe general effectiveness of the social cure, Rosenberg is less persuasive.Join the Club is filled with too much irrelevant details and not enoughexploration of the social and biological factors that make peer pressure sopowerful. The most glaring flaw of the social cure as its presented here isthat it doesn't work very well for very long. Rage Against the Haze failed oncestate funding was cut. Evidence that the LoveLife program produces lastingchanges is limited and mixed.
There'sno doubt that our peer groups exert enormous influence on our behavior. An emergingbody of research shows that positive health habits--as well as negativeones--spread through networks of friends via social communication. This is asubtle form of peer pressure: we unconsciously imitate the behavior we seeevery day.
Far lesscertain, however, is how successfully experts and bureaucrats can select ourpeer groups and steer their activities in virtuous directions. It's like theteacher who breaks up the troublemakers in the back row by pairing them withbetter-behaved classmates. The tactic never really works. And that's theproblem with a social cure engineered from the outside: in the real world, asin school, we insist on choosing our own friends.