You’re trying very hard to show everyone what a great person you are, and the best way to do that is if everyone else is drinking therefore they think that’s the thing to do, then you might do the same thing to prove to them that you have the same values that they do and therefore you’re okay. At the same time, the idea of peer pressure is a lot of bunk. What I heard about peer pressure all the way through school is that someone is going to walk up to me and say “Here, drink this and you’ll be cool.” It wasn’t like that at all.

As Lightfoot summed it up, “Peer pressure is less a push to conform than a desire to participate in experiences that are seen as relevant, or potentially relevant, to group identity.”24 Teenagers seldom need to be pushed to conform to the norms of their group; that got settled a long time ago, in childhood.