Peer pressure is the push to do what your friends are doing. Give in to peer pressure, resist peer pressure, peer pressure at school.
It rarely looks like pressure at all, which is what makes it work: nobody is told to do anything, and the wish not to be the odd one out does the rest. The term dates from research on teenagers in the 1950s.
1nounpeer pressureThe push to do what your friends are doing.
“He only started smoking because of peer pressure from his friends at school.”
peer pressure is a pressure.
Peer plus pressure, first used in educational research in the late 1950s.
From peer + pressure. First use appears c. 1957 in the publications of Ruth Strang.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Big Ideas, Moods & Relationships