CHILD DEVELOPMENT PERSPECTIVES
Social Context Influences on Children’s Rejection
by 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 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
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
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Amori Yee Mikami, Matthew D. Lerner, and Janetta Lun
incorporated into developmental psychology’s attempts to understand 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 considered applicable to long-term outcomes of children facing peer
rejection in naturalistic environments, relevant theories in social
psychology can broaden developmental psychologists’ conceptualization 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 similarity 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 constructed 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 generally 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 withdrawn 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 classrooms 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 similarly behaving peers.
Future research that considers types of aggression and withdrawal, 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 gendernormative form of aggression (Crick, 1997). Further, peer groups
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 intensity 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 predominantly 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 developmental 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 cultural background (Aboud & Mendelson, 1996).
The interplay between demographic factors and peer relationships 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 crossrace peers than are ethnic-minority children (Hallinan & Teixeira, 1987). Race may interact with gender as well, but the direction 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).
Child Development Perspectives, Volume 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 negative 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.
1979). The social psychology literature also documents the
occurrence of expectancy effects, by which individuals presume
that outgroup members will be unfriendly and therefore unconsciously 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 negative 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 experience with the target child but have overheard comments about
that child’s negative reputation.
REPUTATIONAL BIAS
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 encourages peer rejection is distinct from those described in the previous two sections, which focus on cognitive processes within
accepted peers (perceived difference from children who deviate
from group norms and reputational biases against disliked children). In contrast, the social dominance hierarchy is a characteristic 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 cognitive 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 necessarily identical to, his or her sociometric status. Youth highest in
social dominance, for example, often have controversial sociometric 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 discussed 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
In the same way that individuals may resist altering negative stereotypes about outgroup members (Hilton & von Hippel, 1996),
accepted peers may employ a cognitive style of selectively processing 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 children 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, stable 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 evidence, 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 possibility 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 developmental psychology literature, but the social psychology literature describes the ‘‘ultimate attribution error’’: viewing outgroup
members’ negative acts as reflecting stable traits of those members and viewing their positive acts as exceptions (Pettigrew,
SOCIAL DOMINANCE HIERARCHY
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Amori Yee Mikami, Matthew D. Lerner, and Janetta Lun
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 relegated 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 previously, of perceiving that child as different and making negative
attributions about the child. However, the social dominance hierarchy may also promote rejection without the involvement of cognitive 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 possessing 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 elementary 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 rejection because it has better predictive power for subsequent adjustment 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 environments 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 teacher’s liking of a student may mediate as well as moderate the
typical link between a child’s aggressive and withdrawn behavior 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 disconfirms 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 strategies primarily display a teacher’s tolerance for diversity in children’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 lowest academic achievement in their classroom are highly likely to
also be peer-rejected (Buhs & Ladd, 2001) suggests the relevance that classroom academic stratification has for social stratification.
INTERVENTION RECOMMENDATIONS
Existing treatments for peer rejection largely follow the childfocused 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
Child Development Perspectives, Volume 4, Number 2, Pages 123–130
Context of Peer Rejection
children’s classroom peers, and the classroom may be the optimal 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 members have unequal status. Social psychology research suggests
that positive ingroup–outgroup relationships and reduced prejudice 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 themselves 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 orchestrate 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 children (Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group, 1999;
Solomon, Battistich, Watson, Schaps, & Lewis, 2000; Weissberg
& O’Brien, 2004). These procedures likely increase the cohesiveness 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 perceive rejected peers as individuals, which reduces cognitive
biases against outgroups (Hogg, 1993). Finally, these interventions 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 reinforce 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 refinement is necessary to enhance their efficacy. We first note that
the majority of aforementioned investigations on the effectiveness of these interventions have relied on observational and
adult-informant ratings of social competence rather than on
127
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 factors 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 outgroups (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 psychologists to attend to the understudied contextual factors that
affect peer rejection and to move beyond traditional models concentrated 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 dominance 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 promote public policies extending beyond children’s peer rejection
that support equitable treatment. Social psychology research
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Amori Yee Mikami, Matthew D. Lerner, and Janetta Lun
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 discriminatory practices in our society and foster harmony in a global
community.
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