“…Throughout adolescence, friends and romantic partners may influence risk behavior through mechanisms corresponding to multiple theories of behavioral influence, including differential association, social learning, and social ecological theories. Differential association theory (Sutherland, 1947) proposes that individuals learn favorable attitudes toward criminal and delinquent deviant behaviors from significant others; in turn, these attitudes become principal mechanisms for individuals' own future deviant behavior (Bruinsma, 2014;Ragan, 2014). Although there is overlap between differential association theory and social learning theory, they differ in that differential association theory necessitates attitude transference to explain behavior, whereas social learning theory emphasizes that behavior change can occur without attitude transference due to modeling and operant conditioning processes (Akers, 2017;Akers, Krohn, Lanza-Kaduce, & Radosevich, 1979).…”