CHILD DEVELOPMENT PERSPECTIVES Social Context Influences on Children’s Rejection by Their Peers

Peer rejection has gained much attention in recent years, due to repeated findings that negative peer experiences in childhood predict adjustment difficulties in adolescence and adulthood. The dominant conceptualization within developmental psychology has overwhelmingly focused on deficits within rejected children that contribute to their difficulties and has neglected contextual factors in the peer group setting that may also influence peer rejection. This article reviews growing evidence that the social context in which peer interactions occur does affect children’s liking or disliking of peers and argues that a complete model of peer rejection will be obtained only through understanding influences of social contexts. Implications for improving existing peer-rejection interventions and for public policy are discussed. KEYWORDS—peer rejection; social context; reputational bias; group norms; social dominance It has been well established that peer-rejected children are more likely than accepted children to drop out of school, engage in criminality, develop substance-abuse problems, and suffer from depression and anxiety as adolescents and adults (Ollendick, Weist, Borden, & Greene, 1992; Parker & Asher, 1987). Predictive relationships between peer rejection and subsequent problems often hold after statistical control of the original childhood levels of problem behavior, suggesting that the experience of The first author would like to express appreciation to Rhona Weinstein, whose mentorship influenced the development of the views presented in this article. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Amori Yee Mikami, Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, 102 Gilmer Hall, P.O. Box 400400, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4400; email: [email protected]. a 2010, Copyright the Author(s) Journal Compilation a 2010, Society for Research in Child Development Volume 4, Number 2 rejection can initiate or exacerbate adjustment difficulties. Further, children’s peer-rejected status is relatively stable over multiple school years (Cillessen, Bukowski, & Haselager, 2000). Collectively, these findings demonstrate the urgency of understanding why some children are rejected by their peers and developing interventions to assist this population. The dominant conceptualization of peer rejection in developmental psychology has focused on the deficits within rejected children that contribute to their social difficulties (see Bierman, 2004). Such deficits include maladaptive aggressive or withdrawn behaviors (Dodge, Coie, Pettit, & Price, 1990), social information processing biases (Dodge et al., 2003), failure to assess peers’ responses to their behaviors (Ladd, 1981), inappropriate goals in peer interactions (Melnick & Hinshaw, 1996), and emotion-regulation difficulties (Southam-Gerow & Kendall, 2002) that interfere with their peer relationships. The aim of this article is not to discount the influence that deficits within rejected children may have on their peer problems; rather, it is to raise awareness that the social context in which peer interactions occur also influences rejection. Peer relationships require reciprocal exchanges that do not occur in a vacuum where only the rejected child’s behavior matters. Understanding the social context is therefore essential to developing a complete model of peer rejection. We review research from developmental and social psychology relevant to three contextual factors that may influence a child’s peer rejection: (a) deviation from peer-group norms, (b) cognitive biases held by the accepted peer group, and (c) the presence of a social dominance hierarchy of the peer group. Because a child’s status as peer-rejected or peer-accepted is typically determined in the classroom, we discuss how teachers may lessen the possibility of peer rejection through affecting these three social context factors in the classroom peer group. We conclude with suggestions for interventions and implications for public policy. Notably, the social psychology literature has long examined influences of the situation (as opposed to the person) on interpersonal relationships, yet little of this tradition has been