A study of Ontario high school students found that adolescents can gain social power through coercion, but also through cooperation, admired traits, friendships, and alliances, according to research published in Evolutionary Psychological Science.
Social power becomes especially important during adolescence, when peer status, dating opportunities, access to resources, protection from victimization, and influence within the group can all carry real social value. But power is not one dimensional. Some adolescents might gain it through dominance, intimidation, or coercion, while others may gain it through prestige, cooperation, admired qualities, or supportive relationships.
Tristan Chaderton Bowman and colleagues examined how different routes to power are connected to different forms of power-holding among adolescents. Prior research has often focused on coercive or competitive routes to adolescent power, including bullying and dominance, but whether cooperative strategies can also help adolescents gain influence in ways that benefit both the individual and the peer group is less understood.
The researchers recruited 458 adolescents between the ages of 14 and 18 from one high school in southern Ontario. The students were in grades 9 to 12, with an average age of 15.9 years, and 48% were girls. The study was part of the sixth wave of a larger project on peer relationships. Research assistants visited classrooms, and students completed the study on electronic tablets.
The study used peer-nomination measures, meaning students identified classmates in their grade who fit different descriptions. They could nominate up to seven peers for each item. The researchers measured three “power-enhancing processes,” including coercive strategies, cooperative strategies, and peer-valued characteristics. Coercion was measured with an item asking who forces, threatens, or tricks others to get their way. Cooperation was measured with three items about helping, cooperating, leading fairly, and being kind.
Peer-valued characteristics were measured with six items assessing traits such as being good looking, good at sports, academically successful, funny, having cool possessions, and being tough in a fight. The researchers also measured four “power-holding features,” including dominance, prestige, friendship nominations, and alliances. Dominance captured who gets what they want and gets others to do what they say; prestige captured who is admired, respected, followed, and listened to; friendships captured closest-friend nominations; and alliances captured who people tend to side with during group conflict.
The researchers found that different strategies were linked to different forms of adolescent power. Coercive strategies were strongly associated with dominance, meaning adolescents who were seen as threatening, forcing, or tricking others were also more likely to be viewed as getting their way and influencing others. This supports the idea that coercion can be one pathway to dominance. Coercion was also moderately associated with alliances and weakly associated with prestige, suggesting that coercive adolescents may sometimes gain support from others, perhaps because they are seen as powerful, useful allies, or risky to oppose.
Cooperation was also an important pathway to power. Adolescents who were seen as kind, helpful, cooperative, and fair leaders received more friendship and alliance nominations, and they were also more likely to be viewed as prestigious. Peer-valued characteristics were linked to both prestige and dominance, suggesting that admired traits can support multiple kinds of social influence.
Cooperation was especially strongly related to friendship nominations when adolescents also had more peer-valued characteristics. Cooperation was also more strongly related to alliances when coercion was low, suggesting that cooperative and coercive strategies did not combine into a stronger “best of both worlds” route to alliance-building. Instead, cooperation seemed most useful for alliances when it was not paired with high coercion.
This study was cross-sectional, meaning it can not determine whether these strategies caused later changes in social power. Further, the findings may not generalize to other cultures, regions, or age groups.
This research suggests that cooperation may offer adolescents a socially beneficial route to power, with important implications for anti-bullying programs that try to replace coercive power-seeking with meaningful, prosocial roles.
The research, “Enhancing and Holding Social Power in Adolescence: An Evolutionary Perspective,” was authored by Tristan Chaderton Bowman, Andrew V. Dane, Natalie Spadafora, and Anthony A. Volk.