Background: The schema of top peer pressure (TPP) consists of nine hierarchical cognitive taxa measured by the Top Peer Pressure Scale (TPPS): domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species and word. The TPPS taken by undergraduate university students’ (UUSs) has shown that their TPP consists of eight taxa among which four, i.e., domain, kingdom, class, and family associate negatively with their university achievement. 

Objective: To find out what taxa constitute the TPP of junior high school students (JHSSs) and which taxa associate with the JHSSs’ English and school achievement. 

Methodology: The TPPS was administered to 304 male HSSs. Following the designers of the TPPS, JHSSs’ responses were subjected to Principal Axis Factoring and Varimax with Kaiser Normalization to extract and rotate the factors underlying the TPPS. The factors represented cognitive taxa other than the domain, species and word empirically.

Results: Six rotated factors were extracted from JHSSs’ responses on the TPPS representing their cognitive taxa of kingdom, phylum, class, order, family and genus. Among these taxa the kingdom associated significantly with both English language and school achievement. The taxon of family associated significantly only with the English language achievement. 

Conclusion: The schema of TPP helps JHSSs achieve not only in English language but also in other courses offered in school at its kingdom taxon. UUSs pathologically manipulate the items comprising the schema not only at its kingdom taxon but also at the taxa of phylum, class and order to justify their low university achievement.

The word type peers represents a significant concept or schema in the minds of sapiens in general and scholars in divine religion, economics, education, psychiatry, psychology and sociology in particular [1]. Few scholars in these fields have, however, approached it scientifically. According to Best and Kahn [2], the peers would have been explored scientifically if the scholars had developed or employed a theory to explain who the peers are and then tested their influence and/or pressure on the sapiens who suffer from educational, psychiatric, psychological, or social disorders by testing the hypotheses deduced from the theory. 

Taylor [3], for example, employed systems theory in the ninth edition of her textbook entitled Health Psychology to address peers. Utilizing the theory just once in its 10-page glossary, she defined it as “The view that all levels of an organization in any entity are linked to each other hierarchically and that change in any level will bring about change in other levels”. Although Taylor employed the word type peers 24 times she did not directly relate it to systems theory anywhere in the textbook. Nor did she formulate or cite any hypothesis deduced from the theory to test the relevance of peers to health psychology. 

Referring to Broman [4] and Turbin et al. [5], Taylor [3], for example, claimed that “peer pressure often leads to smoking in adolescence but may influence people to stop smoking in adulthood”. Neither Broman nor Turbin et al, however, resorted to systems theory to explain the claim. The latter, for example, chose 1,739 adolescents in Beijing, China and 1,596 adolescents at Grades 7, 8, and 9 in the United States and administered the 36-page Adolescent Health and Development Questionnaire to them. The content of the questionnaire was developed not on systems theory but “derived from the constructs in problem-behavior theory” [5, p. 447].

Problem-behaviour theory has little, if any, to do with “all levels of an organization … linked to each other hierarchically and that change in any level will bring about change in other levels” [3, p. 250]. This is because the basic hypothesis of the theory, according to Jessor [6], attributes all sapiens’ problems only to ‘Variation in the personality system and variation in the perceived environment systems. The personality and environment “should each account for variation in problem behavior and, taken together, should provide a stronger account than either alone”.  What Taylor [3] failed to mention is that having a hierarchical organization is one of the main features of sapiens’ cognition as explained by Khodadady’s  [1] microstructural approach of schema theory (MICAST). (It will be elaborated shortly.)

Unlike Taylor [3] psychiatrists Sadock, Sadock and Ruiz [7] allocated no entry for systems theory in the 12-page glossary of their textbook entitled Kaplan & Sadock's Synopsis of Psychiatry: Behavioral Sciences/Clinical Psychiatry (11th edition). They did, however, employ it five times in its body in order to trace the conceptual trends in the history of psychosomatic medicine in four trends chronologically ordered as psychoanalysis, psychophysiology, socio-culture and systems theory. 

Tapping into systems theory as the latest trend in psychosomatic medicine, Sadock, Sadock and Ruiz [7] equated it with “communications theory, object relations theory, social role theory, ethology, and ecology”. They announced that “The core premise entails the idea of a family as a self-regulating, open system that possesses its own unique history and structure. This structure is constantly evolving as a consequence of dynamic interaction between the family's mutually interdependent systems and persons who share a complementarity of needs” (p. 1285). 

Instead of addressing the structure in the mutually interdependent systems of sapiens’ family Sadock, Sadock and Ruiz [7], however, employed peers, peer relationships, and peer groups 180 (55.6%), 46 (14.2%) and 29 (9.0%) times, respectively to include the family of other biological species of organisms. They did, for example, employ the peers for the first time in their textbook to address the family of monkeys’. They argued that when the monkey infants are isolated from their mothers from birth and kept from forming attachments they become “withdrawn, unable to relate to peers [emphasis added], unable to mate, and incapable of caring for their offspring” [8, p. 98]. 

The literature introduced above shows that modern psychiatrists and psychologists employ systems theory not to study peers within a hierarchical structure but to treat them similar to, if not the same as, “nonhuman primates and other animals” [7, p. 98] whose disorders could be studied and treated by resorting to findings in fields such as biology, economics and sociology as some relevant systems. The assumption has resulted in accepting 19 types of peers in psychiatry alone, i.e., adolescent, chronological, delinquent, deviant, dorm, less cognitively impaired, male, matched non-foster-care, neighborhood, nondelinquent, nonsmoking, normal, outgoing, popular, professional, same-age, similarly reared, specific, and verbally competent peers. 

While systems theory divides peers into categories such as delinquent and nondelinquent sapiens, the MICAST, according to Khodadady and Hesarzadeh [9], approaches each peer as a sapiens who learns a word type such as farmhand to develop a schema whose cognitive taxa change over time as s/he actualizes her/his adopted self. In terms of systems theory upon which references such as dictionaries are compiled a schema such as farmhand, for example, always denotes “someone who works on a farm” [10, p. 502]. This defintion will be of little help if grade 10 senior high school students (SHSSs) read the passage “the Funny Farmhand” in their textbook entitled English Book 1 [11].

Upon comprehensing  “The Funny Farmhand”, a grade 10 SHSS and her/his peers will modify their schema of farmhand into a nine-feature concept presented in Figure 1. Birjandi, Soheili, Nouroozi and Mahmoodi [11] presented these features in 19 sentences and five paragraphs. According to the MICAST, the readers’ cognition of the passage and the manner in which they relate its constituting features to each other depends not on systems but on the hierachical taxa into which they assign the features. The passage is understood when the readers assign the features presented as writers’ words, phrases, clauses, sentences and paragraphs to their own taxa eight of which were first identified by Linnaeus [12]. He believed that any living being or organism can be biologically studied as a species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom, and domain.Figure 1: Developing the schema “farmhand” and relating it to the schemata constituting a reading passage

Figure 1: Developing the schema “farmhand” and relating it to the schemata constituting a reading passage

Adapted from “The effect of schema-vs-translation-based teaching on learning English in high schools” by E. Khodadady & R. Hesarzadeh (2014), Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 4(1), p. 148.

Recent findings show that Linnaeus’ [12] taxonomy is not merely biological but cognitive simply because its eight constituting taxa broaden in terms of their meaning, i.e., from the fewest or narrowest to the most or broadest meaning conveyed through the disticitive features of each taxon [13, 14]. By resorting to the Wise Quran as a represenative text of divine religion, Khodadady and Dastgahian [15] expanded Linnaeus’ taxa from eight to nine (Table 1). The application of these nine taxa to research findings shows that the writers and takers of almost all scales including the Top Peer Pressure Scale (TPPS) follow either the macrostructural theory of schema (MACAST) or MICAST. The researchers usually validate the scales through statistics or psychometrics.

Adapted and expanded from “Which self-actualization associates with language and school achievement: Monotheistic or polytheistic?” by E. Khodadady & B. S. Dastgahian (2022), Journal of Psychiatry and Mental Health, 7(1), p. 4.

Table 1:The hierarchical taxa of  top peer pressure addressed in cognition, biology, divine religion and psychometrics

Organisms, for example, are studied in biology as the first or highest taxon of cognition, i.e., domain. Their 9th or lowest taxon consists of the words living beings as shown in Table 1 above. As a biologist, Linnaeus [12] added the word type wise to the living beings to develop his 8th cognitive taxon of species. It describes the species of sapiens as humans who are not only living beings but also “wise” [16, p. 7]. Similarly, the cognitive taxon of species broadens into the higher taxon of genus to represent Homo in bioglory when the species of neanderthals is added to the species of sapiens. The addition of new features continues till the highest cognitive taxon of domain is formed to represent all living beings known as organism in biology.

Since the TPPS deals only with the cognitive species representing the sapiens in biology the present researchers parsed its 27 items into their constituting words. They categorized and coded the words constituting each and all of the items to determine the features of Words as the lowest cognitive taxon of the TPPS. When they analyzed the words constituting the TPPS they found that it consists of 120 word types. The types differ from each other in terms of their meaning and frequency or token. The word type “I”, for example, meant a non-top studemt and had a token of 35. The word types in turn combine with each other in various tokens to describe non-top and top students as well as their teachers as the features constituting the cognitive taxon of species. They are collectively referred to as peers in humanistic psychology (Table 2).

Table 2: UUSs’ cognitive taxa of top peer pressure in humanistic psychology

In contrast to the MACAST which relies on specialists to explain how sapiens actualize their self, Khodadady and Zabetipour [17] resorted to the MICAST to show how UUSs actualize their self through the pressure their top peer exerts on them. Based on the pressure expressed by the UUSs they developed and administered the 27-item TPPS to 312 UUSs. When they subjected their responses to Principal Axis Factoring (PAF) and rotated the results via Varimax with Kaiser Normalization (VKN) they found that five factors underlay the TPPS. Khodadady and Zabetipour named them debilitating, motivating, marginalizing, referencing and inspiring. The present researchers, however, renamed the factors competing with the TP, debilitated by the TP, hating the TP, following the TP, and doubting becoming a TP, respectively (Table 2).

While the TPPS measures UUSs’ schema of top peer pressure as the taxon of domain in cognition, its five factors measure its taxa of kingdom, phylum, class, order and family.  The order of taxa is determined statistically because the first factor representing the taxon of kingdom, “accounts for the most variance” while “later factors”, e.g., the taxa of phylum, class, order and family, account for “less and less of the variance until they are no longer reliable” [18, p. 611]. The results presented in Table 2 above do, therefore, show that UUSs cognition of top peer pressure lacks the 7th cognitive taxon of genus represented by the 6th factor in the MICAST-based humanitistic psychology.

By recognizing sapiens as the only authority who decide how they should live, humanistic psychology neither addresses self as a cognitive domain nor specifies its constituting taxa cognitively. It does not, for example, specify how sapiens actualize their self as peers (see Table 2). It does, however, argue that peers differ from each other in the taxon of species when they are referred to as non-top students, top classmates and English teachers. In sharp contrast to humanistic psychology, divine religion regards God as the only authority who describes not only his own self as a conitive domain but also assigns the sapiens to the kingdom of practicing monotheists, phylum of polytheists and class of self-theists (Table 1). 

While divine religion specifies what practicing monotheistists, polytheists and self-theits exactly do as selves when they intereact with other sapiens as peers humanistic psychology camouflages these selves in the heterogenous factors extracted from the UUSs’ responses on the TPPS. Due to their heterogeity, the cognitive taxa represented by the psychometric factors do, therefore, relate to each other differently. UUSs’ Following the TP, for example, relates neither to competing with the TP (r=.09, ns) nor to hating the TP (r=.09, ns). Doubting becoming a TP, however, correlates significantly not only with competing with the TP (r=.47, p<.01) but also with hating the TP (r=.38, p<.01) (Table 3).

Adapted from “Top peer pressure and academic achievement within a domain controlled field” by E. Khodadady & M. Zabetipour (2013), Journal of Basic and Applied Scientific Research, 3(6), p. 1136. 

Note. TP= top peer; *p<.5, **p<.01

Table 3: Correlations between the UUSs’ TPPS, its cognitive and humanistic taxa and GPA (n=312)

In addition to relating differently to each other, the humanistic taxa of top peer pressure relate differently to UUSs’ GPAs. As shown in Table 3 above the GPAs correlated significantly but negatively not only with the TPPS (r=-.30, p<.01) as the domain of top peer pressure, but also with hating the TP (r=-.12, p<.05), competing with the TP (r=-.37, p<.05) and doubting becoming a TP (r=-.34, p<.01). These results show that the more UUSs of the English language hate their TPs, compete with them and doubt becoming a TP themselves the less they achieve academically. 

Although Khodadady and Zabetipour [17] made their TPPS public in 2013 no scholar has explored its construct validity with sapiens of different educational levels. The present study was, therefore, designed to find out whether the administration of the TPPS to JHSSs and subjecting their responses to the PAF and VKN will result in a change in the nine-taxon cognitive structure of the TPPS. The following seven hypotheses were formulated to be tested in the process

H1: The TPPS is comprehensible for Junior High School students (JHSSs)

H2: The number of factors developed by JHSSs differs from that of undergraduate university students (UUSs).

H3: The number of items constituting JHSSs’ factors differs from that of UUSs. 

H4: The TPPS correlates significantly with JHSSs’ English language achievement.

H5: The TPPS correlates significantly with JHSSs’ GPAs.

H6: The factors underlying the TPPS correlate significantly with JHSSs’ English language achievement.

H7: The factors underlying the TPPS correlate significantly with JHSSs’ school achievement.

Methodology

Participants

A total number of 304 male students registered in one private and two state junior high schools participated in this study voluntarily. The schools were run by Iranian endowments organization and ministry of education in Mashhad, Iran, respectively. The students had registered at grades 7 (n=124, 40.8%), 8 (n=103, 33.9%), and 9 (n=77, 25.3%). Their age ranged from 12 to 17 (mean=14.09, SD=0.966). Two hundred ninety eight (98.0%), two (0.7%) and one (0.3%) conversed in Persian, Turkish, and Turkamini as their mother language, respectively. The Turkish and Turkamini participants also conversed in Persian as their second language in the schools. 

Instruments

The Persian Demographic Scale (DS) and Top Peer Pressure Scale (TPPS) developed by Khodadady and Zabetipour [17] were employed in this study. The participants’ scores on the English language examination and GPAs were also employed to explore the relationship between top peer pressure, the English language and school achievement, respectively.

The DS

The Persian DS comprised two short answer questions dealing with its takers' age and the scores they obtained on their English language examination. It also required the takers to answer four multiple choice items dealing with their grade of study in school, gender and the languages they spoke as their mother tongue. 

The Persian TPPS. 

Khodadady and Zabetipour [17] developed the TPPS by attending a number of university classes offered to senior UUSs. Upon observing their performance in several sessions, they chose and interviewed the students who kept silent whenever a topic was brought up in English in the class. They were asked what they thought about their classmates who were the best in terms of their English language ability. After pooling and scrutinizing 50 answers, Khodadady and Zabetipour chose 27 to develop their five-choice items of the TPPS.

Each item on the TPPS required its takers to indicate whether they strongly disagreed, disagreed, had no idea, agreed or strongly agreed with its content. Khodadady and Zabetipour [17] administered the TPPS to 312 UUSs of the English language majoring in three tertiary education institutions. After assigning the values of 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 to the five choices, respectively, they subjected the UUSs’ responses on the TPPS to PFA and VKN and extracted five factors (see Table 1). 

In addition to having content and construct validity, the TPPS and its five underlying factors have internal consistency. The alpha reliability of TPPS (α=0.88) was, for example, “high” [19, p. 115] because its coefficient was greater than 0.80 as were the coefficients of three factors named debilitated by the TP (α= .85), competing with the TP (α= .84), hating the TP (α= .82), and doubting becoming a TP (α= .80). The reliability of fourth factor named following the TP (α=.68) was, however, “moderate” because its coefficient fell between 0.50 and 0.80.

English Language Scores. 

Based on the content of the two course books Prospect 1: Student Book [20] and Prospect 2: Student Book [21] taught to grade 7 and 8 JHSSs nationally during the school year 2021-2022, the second author developed two examinations to evaluate their listening, speaking, reading and writing abilities at the end of the school year. They consisted of three sections measuring the students’ abilities of speaking (5 scores), listening (5 scores) and reading and writing (10 scores). 

The listening ability of all grades in JHSSs was measured by short conversations recorded on the tape, reading instructions given in Persian, and choosing the correct answers from among two or three written choices. The reading and writing abilities of grades 7 and 8 were, however, measured by items 1) differentiating certain written small and capital letters and the names of certain foods and drinks from each other and writing them in specified labeled blank rows, 2) indicating the truth or falsity of some sentences describing given photos, 3) reading a paragraph and naming the photos given below it, 3) ordering certain proper names alphabetically and 5) writing the answers to questions related to the students’ personal life. 

Unlike grades 7 and 8, the listening, reading and writing abilities of grade 9 JHSSs were measured by a written test developed by the Iranian ministry of education on the English course book Prospect 3: Student Book [22].  The listening was assessed by 10 written true-false, two-choice, and fill-in-the blank items to which a value of five out of 20 was assigned. In order to answer these questions the students had to listen to three recorded short conversations.

The reading and writing abilities of grade 9 JHSSs to which a score of 10 out of 20 was allotted were assessed by 30 items: four written sentences to be matched with four drawings, one three-choice reading item, two fill-in-the blank short conversation items, three two-choice items developed on a written short conversation, and a paragraph in which four words had been deleted. They were presented along with an extra word to be chosen and inserted in four numbered blanks. The items also required finding four misspelled words in a paragraph, rewriting two sentences with two words inserted in syntactically wrong slots, answering four true-false items and three open-ended questions based on a two-paragraph passage and developing a paragraph by writing up two sentences. The topic sentence of the paragraph was given along with six words as prompts. 

Grade Point Averages (GPAs)

The JHSSs at grades 7, 8 and 9 reported their GPAs themselves. They are estimated by adding up and averaging the scores obtained out of 20 on 14 courses at grades 7 and 8: 1) Arabic, 2) culture and arts, 3) English, 4) heavenly messages, 5) Islamic sciences, 6) mathematics, 7) Persian, 8) physical education and health, 9) Quran, 10) science, 11) social studies, 12) thought and life style, 13) vacation and technology, and 14) writing. At grade 9, the three courses offered at grades 7 and 8, i.e., heavenly messages, sciences and thought and life styles, were replaced with Persian dictation, experimental sciences, and self-defense education. 

Procedure

The second researcher in this study who taught the English language to the participants contacted the principals of schools in person and secured their approval and cooperation. On agreed-dates he administered the booklet containing the DS and TPPS in a single session. Before administering it he explained the purpose behind its development and asked the participants to read the booklet and answer its questions one by one. While the students were taking the TPPS he walked along the aisles to observe their performance and answer their questions. The students handed in the booklets when they filled them out.

Following Khodadady and Bagheri [23] the English language was treated as a domain consisting of semantic, syntactic and parasyntactic kingdoms. The kingdoms were then subsumed under 12 genera in order to specify the function and tokens of word types comprising the TPPS. The specified linguistic kingdoms and genera were also coded to determine the readability level of the TPPS and run statistical analyses on the word tokens. 

Based on Dastgahian [24] and Khodadady and Mehrazmay’s [25] findings instead of the Flesch Reading Ease Score and Coh-Metrix Easability Score, Khodadady Readability Ease Score (KRES = Σ Syntactic and Parasyntactic Schema Types ÷ Σ Semantic Schema Types) was employed in this study to estimate the readability level of the TPP. The score ranges from .01 (extremely difficult) to .99 (extremely easy).

The internal reliability of the TPPS and its underlying factors were estimated by Cronbach's alpha. To extract and rotate the factors the PAF and VKN were utilized, respectively. The eigenvalues of one and higher were adopted to determine the number of factors. Based on Tabachnick and Fidell’s [26] suggestions loadings of 0.32 and higher were considered acceptable to choose the items constituting a given factor. If an item loaded acceptably on several factors, it was considered contributory to just one factor upon which it had the highest acceptable loading. Upon specifying the number of factors and their constituting items, they were correlated with the TPPS, scores on the English examinations and GPAs. All the statistical analyses were conducted via the IBM SPSS Statistics 24 to test the hypotheses formulated in the study.

Table 4 presents the tokens and types of semantic, syntactic and parasyntactic words comprising the English version of the TPPS. As can be seen, 71% of word types are semantic in kingdom. (The word types “teachers”, “I” and “in order to”, are, for example, semantic, syntactic and parasyntactic, respectively. The word “teachers” is semantic because it has a complete meaning while the syntactic and parasyntactic words “I” and “in order to” depend on semantic words to make their meaning complete.) When KRES was applied to the types, i.e., Σ Syntactic and Parasyntactic Schema Types (31+4) ÷ Σ Semantic Schema Types (85), 0.41 was obtained. This score is greater than the 0.34 obtained by Khodadady and Ghergloo [27] on Learning to Read English for Pre-University Students [28] taught to grade four senior high school students. Since the KRES of 0.41 is greater than 0.34 it confirmed the first hypothesis that the TPPS was comprehensible to JHSSs. 

Table 4: Word tokens and types constituting the linguistic kingdoms of 27-item TPPS

Table 5 presents the descriptive statistics as well as initial and extraction communalities of the TPPS. As can be seen, the mean score of 10 items, i.e., 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12, are below 2, indicating that the JHSSs have disagreed with them. Item 1, for example, shows that the majority of students disagree that they become happy whenever the TP is absent. In contrast, the mean score of nine items are above 3, i.e., 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, and 27, indicating that the majority have agreed with them. Item 21, for example, shows that the JHSSs agree that they like to get a score higher than their TPs.

NOTE. Extraction Method: Principal Axis Factoring

Table 5: Descriptive statistics, initial and extraction communalities of 27-item TPPS

Table 6 presents the variances explained by six factors extracted and rotated from JHSSs’ responses in this study. As can be seen, they explain 44% of cumulative variance in the TPPS. It is relatively lower than 48% explained by five factors Khodadady and Zabetipour [17] extracted from UUSs’ responses on the TPPS. The difference in the percentage of variance in the two groups is due to the number of factors, i.e., five and six, underlying the UUSs and JHSs’ TPPS, respectively. 

Table 6: Total variance (V) and cumulative variance (CV) explained by factors extracted from JHSSs’ responses on the TPPS

Table 7 presents the word types and factors constituting JHSSs’ cognitive domain of top peer pressure and their reliability estimates. As can be seen, the reliability of the domain measured by the TPPS (α=0.83) and its kingdom taxa revealing the JHSSs’ competition with the TP (α=0.83) are high because of being in 0.80s. The reliability of the remaining five cognitive taxa are, however, moderate ranging from 0.77 (debilitated by the TP) to 0.67 (hating the TP).

Table 7: The cognitive taxa of the JHSSs’ TPPS, their constituting word tokens (WK) and word types (WP) and alpha reliability coefficients

Table 8 presents the 27 items of JHSSs’ TPPS and their acceptable loadings on six factors named 1) competing with the TP, 2) debilitated by the TP, 3) envying the TP, 4) hating the TP, 5) following the TP, and 6) doubting becoming a TP. As can be seen, the factors differ from each other in terms of their constituting items. While six items, i.e., 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, and 26, for example, loaded acceptably on factor 1, seven items, i.e., 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, and 14, contributed to factor 2. Factor six represented doubting becoming a TP with just two items, i.e., 16 and 17.

Table 8: The cognitive genera represented by the 27 items of JHSSs’ TPPS and their acceptable loadings (L) on six factors (F) extracted from 304 JHS students’ responses

As can be seen in Table 8 above, the number of factors extracted from JHSSs’ TPPS, i.e., six, is more than the five factors extracted from UUSs’ TPPS (Table 2). They do, therefore, confirm the second hypothesis that the number of factors underlying the JHSSs’ TPPS differs from that of UUSs. The difference shows that the UUSs decrease or simplify their taxa of top peer pressure as they move from secondary to tertiary education. 

The results reported in Table 8 above also confirm the third hypothesis that the number of items which constitute five out of six factors underlying JHSSs’ top peer pressure differs from that of UUSs. Although the sixth factor named doubting becoming a TP consists of the same two items for both JHSSs and UUSs, it represents the genus taxon for the former but the family taxon for latter cognitively. These findings show that through humanistic psychology UUSs manipulate their own cognition in order to blame others for their academically low achievement.

Table 8 presents correlations of the HSSSs’ TPPS and its underlying factors with their ESs and GPAs. They disconfirm the fourth hypothesis that the TPPS correlates significantly with the ESs (r=-.07, ns). They also disconfirm the fifth hypothesis that the TPPS correlates significantly with the GPAs (r=-.08, ns). These findings are in sharp contrast to those of Khodadady and Zabetipour [17] who reported a significant but negative correlation between UUSs’ TPPS and their GPAs (r=-.30, p<.01).

Note. *p<.5, **p<.01

The results presented in Table 9 above, however, confirm the sixth hypothesis because JHSSs’ six factors underlying their TPPS correlate significantly with their ESs, i.e., competing with the TP (r=.28, p<.01), following the TP (r=.12, p<.05), debilitated by the TP (r=-.35, p<.01), doubting becoming a TP (r=-.16, p<.01), hating the TP (r=-.13, p<.05) and envying the TP (r=-.12, p<.05), represented by factors 2, 6, 4 and 3, respectively.

Table 9: Correlations between the JHSSs’ English scores (ESs), GPA, and the taxa of top peer pressure

Finally, the results presented in Table 8 above confirm the seventh hypothesis partially because JHSSs’ school achievement represented by their GPAs correlate significantly with three out of six factors representing the humanistic taxa of competing with the TP (r=.18, p<.01), debilitated by the TP (r=-.26, p<.01) and doubting becoming a TP (r=-.18, p<.01). These findings are in sharp contrast to that of Khodadady and Zabetipour [17] because out of five factors underlying the UUSs’ TPPS, their   GPAs correlated significantly with only one factor representing the humanistic taxon of competing with the TP (r=-.12, p<.05).

Various definitions of peer pressure have been offered in literature. For Clasen and Brown [29], for example, it involves the “pressure to think or behave along certain peer-prescribed guidelines”. It takes place "when people your own age encourage or urge you to do something or to keep from doing something else, no matter if you personally want to or not”. For Bursztyn and Jensen [30], however, peer pressure refers to the students who take actions “that deviate from what they privately consider to be the optimal action (i.e., what they would do if others would not observe their actions) in order to achieve social gains or avoid social costs from peers. Peer pressure therefore need not just refer to active efforts or encouragements by peers to persuade others to undertake an action, but could also include passive effects such as not undertaking an action for fear of peer social sanctions or to gain peer social approval”.

The definitions of peer pressure quoted above are based on the macrostructural approach of schema theory (MACAST) where an authority such as a specialist in fields such as economy and psychology specifies what cognitive taxa a given schema dealing with sapiens consists of. In spite of the apparent differences in their definitions specialists treat all sapiens as passive peers who have no choice but to comply with “peer-prescribed guidelines” in order to gain “social approval”. The MICAST, however, assigns an active role to the sapiens as peers because they either prescribe or approve a set of guidelines in order to actualize their self collectively.

The items of MACAST-based scales are usually developed by authorities. The 53-item Peer Pressure Inventory (PPI) was, for example, developed by Brown and Clasen [31] by resorting to Erikson's [32] theory of identity. The introductory clause for all the items asks its takers to specify “how strong is the pressure from their friends to”, for example, study hard or do their homework by choosing 3) lot, 2) somewhat, or 1) little, 0) no pressure or by not to study or not to do their homework by choosing -1) little, -2) somewhat or -3) lot. Al items of the PPI are thus authoritative because through the word “pressure” they force its takers to accept that they have no choice but to put up with various pressures brought up in the items.

In addition to developing the items, the MACAST designers of PPI specify what items constitute which cognitive taxa. Clasen and Brown [29], for example, analyzed the content of their PPI and concluded that its 53 items clustered in five areas, i.e., “peer involvement …, involvement in school …, involvement with family, conformity to peer norms …, and misconduct”. Since these areas or taxa comprise the domain of peer pressure, each and all items comprising the domain must relate to at least one of the five areas. An analysis of the statistics reported by Clasen and Brown does not, however, support the existence of such a relationship for all items.

The item “How strong is the pressure from your friends to excel, be really good at something (sports, grades, slamming beers, whatever)”, does not, for example, associate with any of Clasen and Brown’s [29] five areas. In sharp contrast to the PPI, each and all items constituting the TPPS describe what the classmates themselves say they do when they have a top peer among themselves. Furthermore, there is no item on the TPPS which does not contribute to the cognitive taxa of the JHSSs’ TPPS represented by its six underlying factors, i.e., competing with the TP, debilitated by the TP, envying the TP, hating the TP, following the TP, and doubting becoming a TP.

The MACAST-based designers of peer pressure scales such as Clasen and Brown [29] do, therefore, not only leave the peers themselves out when they develop their scales but also specify what features its constituting cognitive taxa must have. This approach has resulted in ignoring the importance and influence of academic variables whose attainment does exert pressure on students as peers. The most important of these variables, i.e., the ability some students gain through learning a specific course such as the English language as well as all other courses taught at schools and universities, does produce a specific pressure on other students as they try to attain the same ability. It is this very pressure that the TPPS brings up in its ninth cognitive taxon consisting of 120 word types. They describe the three selves who undergo, tackle and contribute to this pressure as the 8th cognitive taxon of species, i.e., non-top students, their top classmates and teachers, respectively.

The JHSSs and UUSs’ humanistic taxon of doubting becoming a TP which is represented by the two different cognitive taxa of genus and family, respectively, does, for example, show that both JHSSs and UUSs’ non-top peers doubt their ability to become the top student of their class because of two main reasons: 1) they are not respected and praised as much as their TPs are, and 2) they cannot speak and participate in class activities as much as the TPs do. The more the JHSSs doubt their ability to become a TP, the less they achieve in their English language (r= -.16, p<.01) and all courses taught in school (r= -.18, p<.01). UUSs who doubt becoming a TP achieve lesser than the JHSSs in courses offered in university because their correlation coefficient between doubting becoming a TP and their GPAs is greater than that of the JHSSs’, i.e., r= -.34, p<.01.

While doubting becoming a TP is represented by JHSSs’ 7th cognitive taxon of genus, their 6th cognitive taxon of family represents following the TP comprising items 23, “I ask her/him for help whenever I face problems”, 24, “I follow her/him as a model and try to be like her/him” and 27, “Her/his attempts and motivation have made me study more”. The UUSs, however, narrow down the scope of their following the TP, from 26 word types and three items to 18 word types and two items, i.e., 23, and 24. This cognitive reduction may partly explain the reason for finding no significant relationship between UUSs’ GPAs and their 5th order taxon of following the TP (r= -.08, ns).

In contrast to their 3-item following the TP, UUSs’ hating the TP correlates significantly with their GPAs (r= -.12, p<.01) because it consists of five items, i.e., 6, 10, 11, 12, and 13. The same number of items constitutes JHSSs’ hating the TP, i.e., five (1, 6, 7, 15, and 18). The two sets of items do, however, differ from each other in terms of their constituting word types, acceptable loadings and the factors upon which they load. Item 11, “I become jealous whenever teachers pay attention only to her/him”, for example, has the highest loading of 0.79 on factor three, representing UUSs’ humanistic taxon of hating the TP.

Among items 1, 7, 15 and 18 which are exclusive to JHSSs’ hating the TP, item 18, “I hate her/him and I wish s/he were a normal student”, however, loads the highest (0.58) on factor five representing the same humanistic taxon. Although JHSSs’ hating the TP does not correlate significantly with their GPAs (r=-.09, ns), it relates significantly but negatively to their ESs (r= -.13, p<.01). These findings indicate that the more the JHSSs hate their TPs, the less they achieve in their English language but not in all the courses offered in the school.

Four out of five items constituting UUSs’ hating the TP, i.e., 10, 11, 12, and 13, loaded acceptably on factor three representing JHSSs’ exclusive and humanistic taxon of envying the TP. Among the four items, item 11, “I become jealous whenever teachers pay attention only to her/him”, had the highest loading of 0.72. It is followed by item 12, “Teachers' exclusive attention to her/him bothers me”, having a loading of 0.66. Similar to their hating the TP, JHSSs’ envying the TP correlates significantly with their ESs (r= -.12, p<.01) but not with their GPAs (r=-.03, ns), indicating that the more the JHSSs envy their TPs, the less they achieve in their English language but not in all the courses offered in the school.

The first factor representing the second cognitive taxon of kingdom for both UUSs and JHSSs reveals itself as one of the unique findings of this study. Humanistic psychology refers to this taxon as competing with the TP. For UUSs it consists of 11 items, i.e., 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 14, 15, and 18. Among these items, only seven, i.e., 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, and 14 constitute the same taxon for JHSSs. Further analysis of UUSs’ 11-item competing with the TP shows that its four items, i.e., 1, 7, 15 and 18, contribute not to the JHSSs’ 7-item competing with the TP but to 5-tiem hating the TP. 

The differences in the items comprising UUSs and JHSSs’ taxon of competing with the TP does, therefore, explain why the taxon correlates with UUSs and JHSSs’ GPAs negatively (r= -.37, p<.01) and positively (r= .18, p<.01), respectively. UUSs do not study hard enough and do therefore acknowledge that indirectly in item 8, “I believe that I can never become the top student of the class”. They do, therefore, not only “hate her/him” and “wish s/he were a normal student” as stated in item 18 but also offer the top peer as an excuse for not studying as stated in Item 15, “because of her/him, I don't try to study as much as I can”. In other words, UUSs defend their inability to compete with the TP through displacement and thus “release their pent-up anger” [33, p. 64] by blaming the TP.

In contrast to UUSs, JHSSs’ 6-item taxon of competing with the TP shows that JHSSs do their best in order to “achieve optimal adaptation in the handling of” the TPs through “self-observation” [34, p. 752]. According to item 22 loading the highest on the taxon, i.e., 0.71, non-top students “know that their TPs are better than them, they do, therefore, study hard and learn all courses offered in school (r= .18, p<.01) in general and the English language (r= .28, p<.01) in particular. 

The TPPS provides a theoretically sound and empirically valid measure of top peer pressure (TPP) in nine cognitive taxa for JHSSs (Table 10). The 120 word types constitute the TPP as a schema at its 9th cognitive taxon called word. These types present the distinctive features of the cognitive taxa higher than the word in 27 items. The JHSSs with their top peers and English teachers, for example, constitute the features of the TPP at its 8th cognitive taxon of species. 

Table 10: Cognitive taxa (CT), JHSSs’ and UUSs’ humanistic taxa and their constituting items and word tokens (WTs) constituting items

Among the 27 items constituting the TPPS, items 16 and 17 form the 7th cognitive taxon of genus for JHSSs, providing a humanistic context called doubting becoming a TP. Items 16 and 17, however, describe UUSs’ doubting becoming a TP at the 6th cognitive taxon of family, without assigning any of the remaining 25 items to their 7th cognitive taxon of genus. This finding shows that the UUSs have narrowed the TPP. The Quran (Q) calls cognitive taxa as the proper context in which God expresses the truth as words for practicing monotheists.

UUSs change not only the number of cognitive taxa of TPP from nine to eight but also the number of items which constitute the taxa. So doing they become cognitively disordered and religiously polytheistic. In other words, they change the context of words in order to suite their personal objectives (Q4:46, Q5:13). 

JHSSs’ 6th cognitive family of following the TP, for example, consists of three items, i.e., 23 (I ask her/him for help whenever I face problems), 24 (I follow her/him as a model and try to be like her/him) and 27 (Her/his attempts and motivation has made me study more). The UUSs do, however, assign item 27 to their 3rd cognitive taxon of phylum humanistically referred to as debilitated by the TP. This assignment is pathological in psychiatry and polytheistic in divine religion because instead of committing their selves to learning courses offered in tertiary education institutions the UUSs blame the TPs for their low achievement.

Blaming others for their cognitive, psychiatric or psychological disorders as evidenced in the cognitive taxa of TPP is exacerbated by teachers and educational authorities not only in universities but also in senior high schools. Research findings do, for example, show that because of being largely self-theistic educational authorities in Iran have rendered “students’ English language learning polytheistic” [35, p. 8]. More research projects are, however, required to corroborate the findings of this study in general and by resorting to divine and humanistic religions in particular [36]. Replicating this study with female JHSSs may also shed more light on the cognitive taxa of TPP.

Acknowledgements: We are grateful to the principals, teachers and students of the junior high schools in which this project was conducted. Without their cooperation and participation its findings would not present themselves to humanity. 
Conflict of interest: None 
Funding: None