A UK-style national newspaper would report that a study of Ontario high school students finds adolescents can gain social power through coercion, but also through cooperation, admired traits, friendships and alliances. The research, published in Evolutionary Psychological Science, sets out to examine how different paths to influence are connected to distinct forms of power among teenagers.
The study notes that power becomes especially salient in adolescence, a period when peer status, dating opportunities, access to resources, protection from victimisation and influence within the group carry tangible social value. It highlights that power is not one-dimensional; some youths may gain control through dominance and intimidation, while others build influence through prestige, cooperative acts, admired qualities or supportive relationships.
Tristan Chaderton Bowman and colleagues sought to determine whether cooperative strategies can yield influence that benefits both the individual and the peer group, beyond the more widely studied coercive or competitive routes to power such as bullying and dominance.
The researchers recruited 458 adolescents aged 14 to 18 from a single high school in southern Ontario. Participants were in years 9 to 12, with an average age of 15.9 years, and 48% were girls. The work formed part of the sixth wave of a larger project on peer relationships, with research assistants visiting classrooms and students completing tasks on electronic tablets.
The study used peer-nomination measures, allowing students to identify up to seven classmates for each description. The researchers measured three “power-enhancing processes”: coercive strategies, cooperative strategies, and peer-valued characteristics. Coercion was assessed by asking who forces, threatens or tricks others to get their way, while cooperation was gauged by items about helping, cooperating, leading fairly and being kind.
Alongside these, four “power-holding features” were measured: dominance, prestige, friendship nominations and alliances. Dominance captured who gets what they want and influences others; prestige identified those who are admired, respected and followed; friendships referred to closest-friend nominations; alliances captured who people tend to side with during group conflict.
The findings show that different strategies align with distinct forms of power. Coercive strategies were strongly linked to dominance, meaning youths perceived as threatening or forcing others to yield were also more likely to be regarded as getting their way and exercising influence. The analysis also found a moderate link between coercion and alliances and a weaker association with prestige, suggesting that coercive adolescents may occasionally gain support, possibly because they are seen as useful allies or difficult to oppose.
Cooperation emerged as an important route to power as well. Teens viewed as kind, helpful, cooperative and fairly led were more likely to receive friendship and alliance nominations and were more likely to be seen as prestigious. Peer-valued characteristics—traits such as being academically successful, funny or physically capable—were linked to both prestige and dominance, indicating that admired traits can bolster multiple forms of social influence.
The study also revealed a nuanced interaction: cooperation correlated more strongly with friendship nominations when adolescents possessed more peer-valued characteristics. Cooperation correlated more with alliances when coercion was lower, suggesting that cooperative and coercive strategies do not simply combine to create a superior “best of both worlds” path to alliance-building.
Researchers caution that the study was cross-sectional, so it cannot determine whether these strategies cause changes in social power over time. They also note that the findings may not generalise to other cultures, regions or age groups.
Nevertheless, the authors argue that the results point to cooperation as a socially beneficial route to power for adolescents, with potential implications for anti-bullying programmes seeking to replace coercive power-seeking with meaningful, prosocial roles.
The study, entitled “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.
