social context influences on children’s rejection by their peers

CHILD DEVELOPMENT PERSPECTIVES

Social Context Influences on Children’s Rejectionby Their Peers

Amori Yee Mikami, Matthew D. Lerner and Janetta Lun

University of Virginia

ABSTRACT—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 conceptualiza-

tion within developmental psychology has overwhelmingly

focused on deficits within rejected children that contrib-

ute to their difficulties and has neglected contextual fac-

tors 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 inter-

ventions 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). Predic-

tive relationships between peer rejection and subsequent prob-

lems 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 RhonaWeinstein, whose mentorship influenced the development of theviews presented in this article.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressedto Amori Yee Mikami, Department of Psychology, University ofVirginia, 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 develop-

mental psychology has focused on the deficits within rejected

children that contribute to their social difficulties (see Bierman,

2004). Such deficits include maladaptive aggressive or with-

drawn behaviors (Dodge, Coie, Pettit, & Price, 1990), social

information processing biases (Dodge et al., 2003), failure to

assess peers’ responses to their behaviors (Ladd, 1981), inappro-

priate 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 interac-

tions 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 possi-

bility of peer rejection through affecting these three social con-

text factors in the classroom peer group. We conclude with

suggestions for interventions and implications for public policy.

Notably, the social psychology literature has long exam-

ined influences of the situation (as opposed to the person) on

interpersonal relationships, yet little of this tradition has been

, Pages 123–130

124 Amori Yee Mikami, Matthew D. Lerner, and Janetta Lun

incorporated into developmental psychology’s attempts to under-

stand children’s peer rejection. We suspect that differences in

research methodologies thwart the translation of findings. Social

psychology research typically involves laboratory studies that

expose college students to short experiences of experimentally

manipulated rejection. Although such research may not be con-

sidered applicable to long-term outcomes of children facing peer

rejection in naturalistic environments, relevant theories in social

psychology can broaden developmental psychologists’ conceptu-

alization of peer rejection and may lead to a fruitful integrative

approach.

DEVIANCE FROM GROUP NORMS

If a child does not conform to the behavioral or demographic

norms of the peer group, this may encourage peer rejection of

that child. The concept of forming ingroups based on the similar-

ity of peers and the rejection of those deemed deviant is well

established in social psychology (Allport, 1954), as well as in

developmental psychology’s group socialization theory (Harris,

1998). Importantly, what is considered deviant is socially con-

structed and varies across peer groups, depending on what the

prototypal behavior happens to be in a particular group (Archer,

1985).

A body of developmental research supports this notion.

Wright, Giammarino, and Parad (1986) conducted a study in a

facility where severely emotionally disturbed children resided in

groups. Although aggressive and withdrawn children were gener-

ally found to be peer-rejected, aggressive children were more

rejected in groups where withdrawn behavior was common than

in groups where aggressive behavior was common, and with-

drawn children were more rejected in groups where aggression

was common than in groups where withdrawal was common.

These findings have been replicated in lab-based interactions

(Boivin, Dodge, & Coie, 1995) and in regular education class-

rooms in North America (Sentse, Scholte, Salmivalli, & Voeten,

2007; Stormshak et al., 1999) and China (Chang, 2004; Chen,

Cen, Li, & He, 2005). Other research has documented children’s

proclivity for behavioral homophily in their friendship networks

(Cairns, Cairns, Neckerman, Gest, & Gariepy, 1988), which may

also explain why children are best accepted in groups of simi-

larly behaving peers.

Future research that considers types of aggression and with-

drawal, as well as the age and gender of the youth involved, may

advance understanding about how norms for the acceptability of

these behaviors vary across groups. Whereas peer groups of

boys, for example, may be most tolerant of physical aggression

and therefore least likely to reject a child for displaying this

behavior (Chang, 2004), girls may be most tolerant of relational

forms of aggression (Crick, 1997). In fact, there are suggestions

that enacting a gender-nonnormative form of aggression is more

strongly linked to poor adjustment than is enacting a gender-

normative form of aggression (Crick, 1997). Further, peer groups

Child Development Perspectives, Vo

may be more accepting of proactive aggression than of reactive

aggression, and this distinction may be more prominent among

older youth than among younger children (Kempes, Matthys,

de Vries, & van Engeland, 2005). Finally, because social

withdrawal becomes more infrequent as children age (Coplan

& Armer, 2007), peer groups of older youth may be more likely

to reject reticent individuals than are younger children’s peer

groups (Waas & Graczyk, 1999).

In addition to deviation from behavioral norms, a child’s

deviation from the peer group’s demographic norm may also

increase the risk for peer rejection. Social psychology research

has long suggested that individuals organize themselves into

race- and gender-based categories (Turner, Hogg, Oakes,

Reicher, & Wetherell, 1987) and like others who share their

group membership (Brewer, 2007). Developmental psychology

studies suggest that, from an early age, most children

choose friends of their same race and gender (Gifford-Smith

& Brownell, 2003). Specifically, regarding children’s selection

of same-gender friends, Maccoby (1988) has argued that

although male–female differences in play styles exist, these

differences are not sufficiently distinct to account for the inten-

sity of gender segregation observed; rather, children view

same-gender peers as their ingroup and opposite-gender peers

as an outgroup, thereby promoting rejection of peers who do

not share their gender.

This tendency to befriend demographically similar peers may

explain findings from several studies indicating that African

American children are more likely to be peer-rejected in pre-

dominantly White classrooms than they are in predominantly

Black classrooms, and that this pattern is reversed for White

children (Jackson, Barth, Powell, & Lochman, 2006; Kistner,

Metzler, Gatlin, & Risi, 1993). Further, within mixed-gender

classrooms, boys are more likely to be peer-accepted by other

boys, and girls are more likely to be peer-accepted by other girls

(Dijkstra, Lindenberg, & Veenstra, 2007), leading some develop-

mental psychology researchers to solicit sociometric nominations

from only the child’s same-gender peers when assessing rejection

(see review in Daniels-Beirness, 1989). Friendships may also be

encouraged by similarity on other demographic variables besides

race and gender, such as socioeconomic status, religion, and cul-

tural background (Aboud & Mendelson, 1996).

The interplay between demographic factors and peer relation-

ships is nuanced, with status differences beyond mere minority

standing also influencing peer rejection. For instance, White

children may be less likely to initiate friendships with cross-

race peers than are ethnic-minority children (Hallinan & Teixe-

ira, 1987). Race may interact with gender as well, but the direc-

tion of effects is unclear: Whereas one study found that being

in a minority ethnic group more strongly predicts peer rejection

for girls than for boys (Kistner et al., 1993), other work suggests

that ethnic-minority girls are more likely to have cross-race

friends than are ethnic-minority boys (Hallinan & Teixeira,

1987).

lume 4, Number 2, Pages 123–130

Context of Peer Rejection 125

Finally, a child in the demographic majority group may risk

being rejected for affiliation with a minority group. White

youth who engage in cross-race friendships, for example, may

fear rejection by same-race peers for this action (Moe, Nacoste,

& Insko, 1981). In addition, youth who deviate from the peer

group’s gender norm in friendship preferences (e.g., a child who

has an opposite-gender best friend), behavior (e.g., a boy who

plays with dolls), or sexual orientation commonly receive nega-

tive judgments by peers for these transgressions (Kovacs, Parker,

& Hoffman, 1996).

In sum, a body of literature suggests that, a child’s possible

behavior problems aside, simply deviating from the peer-group

norm may subject the child to peer rejection. One implication of

this is that a child rejected in one peer group may be accepted

by another peer group in which the child better matches the

group norm. The best empirical test of this hypothesis would be

to simultaneously compare the same child’s sociometric status in

distinct groups of unfamiliar peers, but to our knowledge, such a

study has yet to be conducted.

REPUTATIONAL BIAS

In the same way that individuals may resist altering negative ste-

reotypes about outgroup members (Hilton & von Hippel, 1996),

accepted peers may employ a cognitive style of selectively pro-

cessing a rejected child’s behavior that makes it unlikely that

they will ever change their negative opinions about the child

(see review in Hymel, Wagner, & Butler, 1990).

For instance, peers interpret the ambiguous behaviors of chil-

dren whom they dislike as hostile in intent and interpret the

ambiguous behaviors of children whom they like as benign (Peets,

Hodges, Kikas, & Salmivalli, 2007). Peers also selectively

remember disliked children’s negative behavior and forget their

positive behaviors (Flannagan & Bradley, 1999). Further, they

attribute the negative behavior of a disliked child to internal, sta-

ble traits and attribute the child’s positive behavior to situational

causes (Guerin, 1999; Hymel, 1986). Thus, peers are disposed to

give the benefit of the doubt to their friends, while interpreting

the identical actions by a disliked child in a way that maintains

that child’s peer-rejected status (Peets et al., 2007). The tenacity

of negative reputations, even in the face of disconfirming evi-

dence, is found in children as early as preschool to first grade

(Denham & Holt, 1993; Mrug & Hoza, 2007).

Although the bulk of the existing literature has focused on

ways in which accepted peers’ cognitive biases perpetuate the

rejected status of already-disliked children, we raise the possi-

bility that such biases may also have the potential to initiate

peers’ rejection and dislike of children considered to be in the

outgroup. This possibility has not been well tested in the devel-

opmental psychology literature, but the social psychology litera-

ture describes the ‘‘ultimate attribution error’’: viewing outgroup

members’ negative acts as reflecting stable traits of those mem-

bers and viewing their positive acts as exceptions (Pettigrew,

Child Development Perspectives, Vol

1979). The social psychology literature also documents the

occurrence of expectancy effects, by which individuals presume

that outgroup members will be unfriendly and therefore uncon-

sciously seek and elicit evidence that confirms this expectation

(Hilton & von Hippel, 1996).

In sum, peers may be cognitively primed to perceive the

behaviors of outgroup members in such a way as to affectively

promote the dislike and rejection of those individuals, as

opposed to merely acknowledging them as different without neg-

ative valence. In contrast, these cognitive biases may be reversed

to affectively encourage the liking of ingroup members. Finally,

we note that both social psychology (Lyons & Kashima, 2003)

and developmental psychology (Sunwolf & Leets, 2004) research

suggests that stereotypes can spread to initiate the rejection of a

child by naı̈ve peers who have never personally had a bad expe-

rience with the target child but have overheard comments about

that child’s negative reputation.

SOCIAL DOMINANCE HIERARCHY

The existence of a social dominance hierarchy in the peer group

may be a third contextual factor that influences peer rejection.

Social dominance refers to the ability of an individual to control

resources in his or her peer group (Hawley, 1999). In some peer

groups, members vary in their social dominance such that certain

individuals take more than their share of the group’s resources

and others receive less than their share. This discrepancy in

power between group members is known as a social dominance

hierarchy (Hawley, 1999).

The process by which a social dominance hierarchy encour-

ages peer rejection is distinct from those described in the previ-

ous two sections, which focus on cognitive processes within

accepted peers (perceived difference from children who deviate

from group norms and reputational biases against disliked chil-

dren). In contrast, the social dominance hierarchy is a character-

istic of the peer group and not a characteristic of any individual

accepted child per se. It affects peer rejection primarily through

the behavioral actions of the peer group rather than through cog-

nitive mechanisms, although it is possible that the peer group’s

behaviors can lead to the cognitive processes described in the

previous sections.

A child’s level of social dominance is related to, but not neces-

sarily identical to, his or her sociometric status. Youth highest in

social dominance, for example, often have controversial socio-

metric status (de Bruyn & Cillessen, 2006); that is, they are liked

by many peers and disliked by many others. However, children

low in the social dominance hierarchy are typically peer-rejected

(Hawley & Little, 1999). We propose not only that peer-rejected

status may lead to low social dominance, but also the reverse

—that low social dominance may lead to peer rejection. As dis-

cussed in the social psychology literature, individuals attribute

negative personality traits to those with few resources and

believe that shortcomings within the person are to blame for such

ume 4, Number 2, Pages 123–130


failures (Lerner & Miller, 1978). A similar process may occur for

children, such that a social dominance hierarchy results in some

children having little power in their peer group, which in turn

facilitates peers’ negative cognitive judgments and affect about

those children.

In addition, once a child has been established as being at the

bottom of the social dominance hierarchy, relational processes

may perpetuate that child’s standing. Peers with the highest

social dominance tend to marginalize, exclude, and put down

the children with the lowest social dominance (Lease, Musgrove,

& Axelrod, 2002; Pellegrini, 2001), and they may enact such

behaviors not only to express their dislike of these children but

also to solidify the existing pecking order and their position at

the top of it. Youth in the middle of the dominance hierarchy are

unlikely to intervene in these episodes, not just because they,

too, may dislike children who are low in social dominance, but

also because they fear that intervening may cause them to be rel-

egated to lower social dominance themselves (O’Connell, Pepler,

& Craig, 1999).

The process of behaviorally marginalizing children low in

social dominance also potentially communicates to newcomers

the relative standing of all group members, which may reinforce

a child’s place in the dominance hierarchy. Similar to the way in

which naı̈ve peers can adopt prevailing stereotypes about a

rejected child by hearing them from group members, naı̈ve peers

may copy the behaviors they observe on other group members

enacting toward children low in social dominance (Olson, 1992).

It is possible that peers’ recognition of a child as low in social

dominance may elicit the cognitive processes, described previ-

ously, of perceiving that child as different and making negative

attributions about the child. However, the social dominance hier-

archy may also promote rejection without the involvement of cog-

nitive mechanisms, because, as has been demonstrated in

observational learning paradigms (Bandura, Ross, & Ross,

1961), naı̈ve peers may imitate the actions that they see others

performing toward certain children without necessarily possess-

ing stereotypes about those children.

TEACHERS’ INFLUENCE ON THE CLASSROOM PEER

GROUP

The classroom is the predominant peer-group setting in which

children’s peer status is determined, particularly for youth of ele-

mentary school age (Chang, 2004). Although it is possible for

children to be peer-rejected at school but be well liked in

another environment such as church or a sports team, research

routinely uses social status in the classroom to assess peer rejec-

tion because it has better predictive power for subsequent adjust-

ment than does a child’s rejection in other settings (Parker

& Asher, 1987). Given the centrality of the classroom peer group

as a setting for rejection, it is important to foster classroom envi-

ronments that encourage peers to be more tolerant of children

who deviate from group norms, to avoid cognitive biases against


disliked children, and to minimize a social dominance hierarchy

in the of the peer group.

A crucial factor in such an effort may be the teacher’s

behavior toward students. For example, a teacher’s personally

liking a child predicts that child’s becoming better accepted by

peers over time (Hughes, Cavell, & Wilson, 2001) because the

teacher’s behavior may set a model for peers to follow. A tea-

cher’s liking of a student may mediate as well as moderate the

typical link between a child’s aggressive and withdrawn behav-

ior and peer rejection (Chang et al., 2004; Chang et al., 2007;

Gazelle, 2006) because peers take cues about whether or not

to judge a child as deviant based on the teacher’s response to

that child’s behaviors. A teacher’s sincere praise of a rejected

student may lead peers’ perceptions of the child to be more

favorable (White, Jones, & Sherman, 1998), perhaps because

the teacher is drawing attention to positive behavior that dis-

confirms negative stereotypes held by the peer group about that

child.

Teachers’ instructional strategies may also send messages to

peers about the differential value of children. For example,

focusing on the process of learning rather than on correctness

and minimizing stratification by achievement may lessen peer

rejection (Cohen & Lotan, 1995; Donohue, Perry, & Weinstein,

2003) because these strategies communicate that all students

have equal status and that students should appreciate differences

among peers instead of rejecting deviants. Although such strate-

gies primarily display a teacher’s tolerance for diversity in chil-

dren’s learning styles, they may provide a parallel message that

students should also tolerate diversity in children’s social or

behavioral styles. That elementary school children with the low-

est academic achievement in their classroom are highly likely to

also be peer-rejected (Buhs & Ladd, 2001) suggests the rele-

vance that classroom academic stratification has for social strati-

fication.

INTERVENTION RECOMMENDATIONS

Existing treatments for peer rejection largely follow the child-

focused conceptualization of social problems (Mikami & Pfiffner,

2006) and attempt to remediate deficits within rejected children.

However, reviews suggest that effectiveness of child-focused

interventions is circumscribed (Beelman, Pfingsten, & Losel,

1994; Moote, Smith, & Wodarski, 1999). Participants sometimes

demonstrate the improvement in their social behaviors but not in

their sociometric status (e.g., Hoza et al., 2005), supporting the

idea that social contextual factors surrounding the rejected child

are instrumental in determining acceptance. Yet interventions

targeting such factors remain understudied. Here, we review

promising attempts that do exist and provide recommendations

that may further improve contextual intervention approaches.

Because the classroom is the primary setting in which peer

rejection is determined, interventions that incorporate the

peer-group context have typically involved elementary school



children’s classroom peers, and the classroom may be the opti-

mal environment for future interventions of this nature.

Interventions that utilize cooperative activities between

accepted and rejected children may reduce peer rejection by

decreasing peers’ perceptions of rejected children as deviant,

dismantling cognitive biases peers hold against rejected children

and preventing a social dominance hierarchy where group mem-

bers have unequal status. Social psychology research suggests

that positive ingroup–outgroup relationships and reduced preju-

dice against ethnic minorities are encouraged by ingroup–

outgroup interaction that requires members to have equal status

contact in pursuit of superordinate goals and in which outgroup

members communicate individuating information about them-

selves that disconfirms prevailing stereotypes (Allport, 1954).

Results from interventions that, following these rules, have

arranged cooperative interaction between rejected students and

accepted classroom peers indicate that social acceptance

increases after these activities (Bierman & Furman, 1984;

Roseth, Johnson, & Johnson, 2008; Sasso & Rude, 1987). In

some cases, the classroom teacher has been trained to orches-

trate the cooperative interactions between students, in support of

an intervention model that changing the teacher’s behavior

can then influence the peer group to decrease rejection (Aronson

& Patnoe, 1997; Cohen & Lotan, 1995; Mikami, Boucher,

& Humphreys, 2005).

Another promising approach involves universal classroom

interventions that build a positive group climate through tactics

such as holding daily morning meetings, establishing a ritual of

having all children greet one another, and using consensus to

create shared group rules. Results from these interventions

suggest improved peer relationships among participating chil-

dren (Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group, 1999;

Solomon, Battistich, Watson, Schaps, & Lewis, 2000; Weissberg

& O’Brien, 2004). These procedures likely increase the cohe-

siveness and trust of the peer group, which, as found in both

social and developmental psychology literature, may lower peers’

need to reject those who deviate from group norms (Garandeau

& Cillessen, 2006; Hogg, Fielding, & Darley, 2005) and reduce

the likelihood that negative stereotypes about deviant children

will be adopted (Brewer, 2007). Such routines also encourage

peers to recognize similarities among one another and to per-

ceive rejected peers as individuals, which reduces cognitive

biases against outgroups (Hogg, 1993). Finally, these interven-

tions provide opportunity to set explicit policies that forbid

exclusion, such as a rule ‘‘You can’t say you can’t play,’’ which

may remove the tools that socially dominant youth use to rein-

force the hierarchy in a peer group (Harrist & Bradley, 2003).

We conclude that promising interventions that target the

social context in which rejection occurs do exist but that refine-

ment is necessary to enhance their efficacy. We first note that

the majority of aforementioned investigations on the effective-

ness of these interventions have relied on observational and

adult-informant ratings of social competence rather than on


sociometric assessments of peer rejection, on which change is

more valuable but is likely more difficult to achieve (Parker &

Asher, 1987). Second, to date, classroom peers and teachers

have been the targets of most interventions to change the social

context of peer rejection. Consequently, there is a lack of

knowledge about factors beyond the classroom, such as the

home environment or neighborhood (Bronfenbrenner, 1979),

which may also influence social context factors in the peer

group that relate to rejection. Finally, similar social context fac-

tors that are targets for antibullying interventions (Espelage &

Swearer, 2003) may potentially be harnessed in interventions to

reduce peer rejection. Beginning with the work of Olweus

(1992), many antibullying interventions attempt to disrupt the

peer-group ecology that supports bullying, encouraging child

bystanders to have empathy for victims and to stop victimization

that they witness (Pellegrini & Long, 2004). Social psychology

research reports that training ingroup members to take outgroup

members’ perspectives reduces negative stereotypes about out-

groups (Galinsky & Moskowitz, 2000). Interventions that

directly instruct accepted peers in empathy for disliked children

may reduce perceived differences and break down reputational

biases about rejected children.

POLICY IMPLICATIONS

This article represents a call to action for developmental psy-

chologists to attend to the understudied contextual factors that

affect peer rejection and to move beyond traditional models con-

centrated on deficits within rejected children. We also encourage

the development of interventions placing the peer group, not the

rejected child, as the target of treatment. Because consideration

of the peer group may not be feasible in clinic-based treatment,

school- or neighborhood-based interventions for peer rejection

may best address this goal.

Teacher education and certification procedures might integrate

training on how teachers can affect the peer-group social context

in their classroom to reduce the likelihood of peer rejection. For

example, teachers might learn the interpersonal and instructional

practices that discourage the peer group from rejecting children

who deviate from group norms, maintaining negative stereotypes

against disliked children, and establishing a rigid social domi-

nance hierarchy. Policies that support positive interaction

between children, such as the creation of neighborhood play

spaces and social leagues where children of diverse backgrounds

can engage in cooperative activities, may also prevent peer

rejection.

More broadly, considering social context factors that influence

peer rejection represents a shift away from an individual-focused

and stigmatizing model that blames those who do not conform

and toward a collective model that places responsibility on us as

a society to be inclusive. This shift in focus may ultimately pro-

mote public policies extending beyond children’s peer rejection

that support equitable treatment. Social psychology research



suggests that individuals and peer groups with high ‘‘social

dominance orientation’’—defined as desiring status hierarchy in

intergroup relations—are more likely to endorse ethnic and

gender prejudice, antigay sentiments, and a belief that one’s

country is superior (Poteat, Espelage, & Greene, 2007; Pratto,

Sidanius, Stallworth, & Malle, 1994). A collective philosophical

shift toward inclusiveness of outgroups may reduce discrimina-

tory practices in our society and foster harmony in a global

community.

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