Friend Influence on Prosocial Behavior: The Role of Motivational ...

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motivation to be helpful and cooperative when the individual has
a strong, positive bond with that friend.
Significant moderating effects also were found for the frequency
of interactions between friends. In this case, at T1, a friend’s
observed behavior was related positively to an individual’s goal
pursuit only when the individual interacted infrequently with the
friend. However, over time, a friend’s prosocial behavior was
related positively to an individual’s goal pursuit when interaction
with that friend was frequent. This latter finding would be expected
on the basis of tenets of observational learning; behavior is
likely to be modeled if an individual has more frequent and stable
exposure to it over time. In contrast, the moderating effect at T1
might suggest that over the short term, modeling effects are not as
strong. One alternative explanation is that individuals who interact
with their best friends infrequently might expend greater effort to
behave prosocially simply to establish and maintain these friendships.
Although suggestive, our findings cannot support causal conclusions
concerning the effects of friendship qualities on an individual’s
prosocial goal pursuit. Indeed, it is possible that these
interaction effects may reflect perceived similarity, such that perceiving
high levels of prosocial behavior in a friend to whom one
is emotionally attached might lead to perceptions of one’s self as
behaving in similar ways and, thus, reporting high frequencies of
goal pursuit. However, some adolescents reported high levels of
prosocial goal pursuit even when their friends did not display
correspondingly high levels of prosocial behavior (e.g., the high
interaction-frequency group in Figure 3), suggesting that an explanation
based on similarity of friends does not hold for all cases.
Other factors beyond the friendship dyad might also be important
for understanding the link between a friend’s behavior and an
individual’s goal pursuit. For instance, cognitive processes described
by Bandura (1986)—such as how observations of prosocial
behavior are interpreted and stored in memory—and strategy
knowledge concerning how to actually produce prosocial behavior
might be particularly critical processes to examine in this regard.
Moreover, other motivational constructs, such as an individual’s
attributional style (Weiner, 1985) and perceived efficacy for prosocial
behavior (Bandura, 1994), and affective factors such as empathy
(Eisenberg, Wolchik, Goldberg, & Engel, 2002) should be
considered to understand more fully the circumstances under
which a target individual’s perception of a friend’s behavior might
influence an individual’s goal pursuit.
Methodological Issues
Several methodological aspects of our study also are important
to note. First, our measure of friendship placed restrictions on who
could be nominated as a friend: same-grade and same-sex individuals
who attended the same public high school. In reality, adolescents
often have friends who are of the opposite sex or are in a
different grade or school than they are. It is important to note,
however, that all of the study’s participants, even those without
reciprocated friendships, were able to list at least one best friend
who met our criteria. In addition, a limit of three best-friend
nominations was established. Although it is possible that students
had more than three best friends, it is highly unlikely that a
significant portion of students had more than three reciprocated
best friendships (only 15% of the study participants had three
reciprocated best friendships at T1). In general, however, our
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findings must be tempered with the reality that restrictions on
friendship nominations might result in identification of reciprocated
friendships that do not represent the best friendships or the
friendships of greatest quality for all participants.
In addition, our measure of interaction frequency did not include
interactions that take place via e-mail, instant messaging, text
messaging, or other venues that do not require physical proximity.
Indeed, these forms of interaction are becoming increasingly common
among adolescents (Bonebrake, 2002; Coffey & Stipp, 1997;
Odell, Korgen, Schumacher, & Delucchi, 2000). As a result, the
extent to which interaction frequency might influence how a
friend’s prosocial behavior is related to an individual’s motivation
is likely to be underreported in this study, especially given the high
socioeconomic status (SES) of the sample and the participants’
likely access to these technologies. Finally, a friend’s prosocial
behavior and a target’s prosocial-behavior scores were assessed on
the basis of information from the same individual. Although this
practice likely inflated the relation between these two variables,
our model was based on the assumption that an adolescent’s
observations of his or her friend’s behavior (rather than observations
made by the larger peer group) had the most proximal
influence on his or her subsequent behavior.
Sampling issues also are important to note, in that these friendships
occurred in fairly affluent and predominantly European
American communities. The preponderance of upper-middle-class
European American students in our sample allows for conclusions
about this population. However, the current investigation does not
further the understanding of friendship influence among ethnic
minority populations or students from lower SES communities. A
small literature suggests that friendships differ as a function of
ethnicity. For instance, African Americans tend to report denser
networks of neighborhood friends but talk to few friends during
school (DuBois & Hirsch, 1990). Moreover, Asian American
adolescents are more likely to have friends of the same race than
are both Latino and African American adolescents; however, African
Americans report greater close friendship support than do
Asian Americans (Way & Chen, 2000). Prosocial behavior also
varies as a function of ethnicity, such that Mexican American
adolescents tend to prefer cooperative to competitive behaviors
(see Knight, Bernal, & Carlo, 1995) more than do European
Americans. Further, cross-cultural research has documented variations
in prosocial behavior (for a review, see Carlo, Fabes, Laible,
& Kupanoff, 1999). Therefore, research that uses more ethnically
diverse samples is needed to investigate the generalizability of the
influence processes suggested by our findings to other groups of
non-Caucasian adolescent students.
Although our sample was limited, our findings indicate that
compared with almost 80% of European American students who
had reciprocated friendships, only 58% of the ethnic minority
students in the sample had a reciprocated friend. It is possible that
these students were more likely to have friendships outside of the
school context. However, the majority of the Asian American
students (the largest ethnic minority group in the school studied)
reported having either a same-race (25%) or cross-race (50%)
friendship (with the remaining 25% reporting no reciprocated
friendship). Therefore, adolescents in at least one minority group
appeared to be integrated into the social culture of the school to a
greater extent than were other ethnic minority adolescents. These
differences in friendship formation as a function of ethnicity