Exit, cohesion, and consensus: social psychological moderators of consensus among adolescent peer groups.

ABSTRACT: Virtually all social diffusion work relies on a common formal basis, which predicts that consensus will develop among a connected population as the result of diffusion. In spite of the popularity of social diffusion models that predict consensus, few empirical studies examine consensus, or a clustering of attitudes, directly. Those that do either focus on the coordinating role of strict hierarchies, or on the results of online experiments, and do not consider how consensus occurs among groups in situ. This study uses longitudinal data on adolescent social networks to show how meso-level social structures, such as informal peer groups, moderate the process of consensus formation. Using a novel method for controlling for selection into a group, I find that centralized peer groups, mea

SUBMITTER: Fisher JC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5766436 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature