Kira Peterman
WST 4415
Professor Meredith Tweed
9 February 2012
Campus Engagement
As my first Women’s Studies Campus Engagement event, I attended a presentation by the Global Perspectives office here on campus. The speaker was Tina Rosenburg, and she was talking about “How Peer Pressure Can Change the World.” Ms. Rosenburg emphasized how peer pressure, though often thought of as only a negative influence, can also work for the good of society, and frequently does.
To support her point, she gave several examples. The first was of a well-known program; Alcoholics Anonymous. Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) uses peer pressure in a positive way by placing individuals with alcohol problems in a supportive group of people who are going through the same problems and will work to keep everyone on track with their individual goals. The program is successful, and widespread. While AA is perhaps the most heard of example, Ms. Rosenburg also gave others. The two that stood out to me most were of a program called Emerging Scholars that is implemented at many institutions of higher learning, and the case of microcredit collateral.
The Emerging Scholars program was created for minority students studying math. There was a college who realized that the failure rate for African American students in a certain math class greatly exceeded the failure rates for white and Asian American students in the same math class. The failure rates were not correlated in anyway with math SAT scores, or grades in previous math classes. An individual at the university sought to understand why this was happening, and studied one math class to see what differences he could find among the groups. He found that the African American students most often studied alone, while the rest of the class tended to study in groups. He then reasoned that the other students were surrounded by math friends, and so could go to those friends if they needed help and were supported in their math endeavors. To test this theory of his, he started the Emerging Scholars program. In this program, students were made to study in groups, and after the usual lesson was taught, the groups were given a harder problem to attempt to solve. This was in no way a remedial program. It was found that the program greatly increased the passing rates for individuals involved with it, purportedly because of the influence of positive peer pressure.
Another example was in the case of microcredit given to people in small, low-income communities. People initially did not want to give microcredit, according to Ms. Rosenburg, because the women in the villages had nothing to use as collateral. An idea to solve this problem was to form those seeking microcredit into small groups. Each member of the group took out a loan, but none were able to get another one until every member of the group paid back their initial loan. They were, in essence, using their social standing as collateral. Positive peer pressure worked to make sure the loans were paid back, as women would be ostracized from the community if the money was not paid back.
The above examples illustrate the ways that positive peer pressure can effect society. It is clear that we must harness the power of such a method in efforts for social change.
