Digital Deviancy Training

Adolescence is a critical developmental period during which peer relationships play a central role in shaping engagement in problem behaviors. Peer interactions in the digital age have shifted from occurring mostly in-person in school and through extracurricular activities to online environments mostly free from adult monitoring. Deviancy training, a well-documented microsocial mechanism of peer influence that involves the immediate action and reaction patterns in which problem behaviors are learned and amplified, has received limited empirical attention in digital spaces. Guided by key the components of social media identified by the Transformation Framework of adolescent peer relations (Nesi et al., 2018a, Nesi et al., 2018b) – asynchronicity, permanence, publicness, availability, cue absence, quantifiability, and visualness – the current review explores how deviancy training may or may not be transformed in the digital age. Conclusions highlight ways in which deviancy training may function mostly similarly in online and offline spaces, ways in which deviancy training may be amplified quantitatively (e.g., reach in digital spaces), and key examples of how deviancy training may be qualitatively transformed in online environments, with implications for future research and socially-conscious platform design.