The role of friend selection in smoking initiation

How does your selection of friends influence your likelihood of taking up cigarette smoking? A recent study by Delay and colleagues investigated the relationship between cigarette smoking and the selection of friends. The authors suggested that the choice of friends greatly impacts one’s attitude towards smoking prior to the initiation of smoking, but once an individual has begun smoking and is addicted, the influence of friends on smoking behaviour is dramatically reduced (Delay et al., 2013).

One of the main concepts investigated was the idea of selection, a process by which people choose to establish friendships with those who are similar to themselves in attitudes and beliefs (Delay et al., 2013). As a result, those with a more positive attitude towards smoking tend to be friends, increasing the likelihood of the initiation of smoking among members of the group (Delay et al., 2013).

            

The study found that once a group of adolescents has taken up smoking, deselection (or ‘dropping’ friends because of dissimilarities in attitudes and beliefs) was more likely to occur than selection (Delay et al., 2013). This frequently occurs to non-smoking members in a group comprised predominantly of smokers, because smoking is often considered a salient behaviour within the group (Delay et al., 2013). A concern with adolescents is that in response to the fear of being ‘deselected’, some will choose to take up smoking to ‘fit in’ and avoid being rejected from the group (Delay et al., 2013).

            

Among non-smokers, selection is practiced more frequently than deselection (Delay et al., 2013). The authors suggest that the main reasons for non-smokers to avoid establishing friendships with smokers include aversion to smoking behaviour and the negative health consequences associated with exposure to second hand smoke (Delay et al., 2013). Also, it is common for non-smokers to seek avoidance of other risky behaviours associated with smoking including illicit drug use and general deviance (Delay et al., 2013).

            

The findings of this study provide important implications for the question of whether the difficulty of ignoring peer pressure to smoke is equal in all adolescents simply because it is a ‘choice’. The evidence indicates that adolescents in a predominantly smoking group are faced with much greater peer pressure in that they risk rejection if they do not take up smoking, and at the same time they are more susceptible to succumbing to peer pressure because their initial decision to establish friendships with to-be smokers generally means their attitude towards smoking is more positive relative to that of a non-smoker.

References

Delay D, Laursen B, Kiuru N, Salmela-Aro K & Nurmi J-E. (2013). Selecting and retaining friends on the basis of cigarette smoking similarity. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 23(2), 464-473.