This is going to sound wild at first, but hear me out. There’s a huge difference between peer pressure and targeted bullying. They may look similar in a snapshot, but they should not be conflated. The former can have positive effects, but often has negative ones and bullying always has negative consequences. The biggest difference is that peer pressure focuses on something you can change, and stops when you do (obviously that change can be good or bad, and that’s why it’s not uniformly better than bullying).
Positive peer pressure includes things like people expressing disgust when someone doesn’t wash their hands after using the bathroom or the theater audience booing when someone’s phone rings during a stage play. Most examples people think about are negative, but there are a huge number of things that young children learn mostly through peer pressure (things like how to treat friends, basic hygiene, cultural norms, etc.). I suspect we think about peer pressure as negative mostly because the positive examples don’t cause you any real internal conflict, so you make the change and don’t think about it further.
