Friends Can Help to Aim High: Peer Influence and Selection Effects on Academic Ambitions and Achievement

During early adolescence, the influence of friends becomes more pronounced. This study models the effect of friends’ academic ambitions on adolescents’ ambitions while controlling for friends’ academic achievement and disentangling social influence from friendship selection using random coefficient multilevel stochastic actor-oriented models (SAOM) on a longitudinal sample of 19 school classes (N = 407) in grades six through eight. The findings indicate that adolescents adjust their academic ambitions to align with their friends’ ambitions and their achievement to match their friends’ achievement. However, their ambitions are unaffected by their friends’ achievement, and vice versa. These results highlight friends’ influence while demonstrating that complex social influence across these outcomes is not evident despite the interdependence of academic ambitions and achievement within individuals. Moreover, the mechanisms of social influence vary across subjects. In Hungarian literature, friends’ high ambitions and achievement drive similarity, whereas in mathematics, the opposite pattern underscores the domain-specific nature of ambitions.