Popular: The Power of Likability in a Status-Obsessed World

200 Pages·2017·1.49 MB·English

by  Mitch Prinstein

VIKING
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ISBN 9780399563737 (hardcover) ISBN 9780399563744 (ebook)
Version_1
To SAMARA and MAX,
and to TINA,
the loves of my life.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Author’s Note
Introduction
PART I
The Types of Popularity That Affect Us Today
CHAPTER 1
The Adult Playground: Where Popularity Still Matters
CHAPTER 2
Boorish Bully or Likable Leader: There’s More Than One Type of
Popularity
CHAPTER 3
The Problems with Popularity: What’s Wrong with What We Want?
PART II
The Surprising Ways That Some Types of Popularity Can Change Our Lives
CHAPTER 4
Herds and Headaches: How Our Bodies Are Programmed to Care About
Popularity
CHAPTER 5
The Popularity Boomerang: How We Create the World We Live In
PART III
So What Do We Do Now?
CHAPTER 6
Our High School Legacy: How We Can Conquer the Prom Queen Today
CHAPTER 7
Clicks and Cliques: What’s Not to “Like”?
CHAPTER 8
Parenting for Popularity: Can Mom and Dad Make a Difference, and
Should They?
CHAPTER 9
Most Likely to Succeed: Choosing the Type of Popularity We Want
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I began working on this book in earnest about two years prior to its completion.
But in a very real sense, my research began many years earlier. Perhaps as early
as kindergarten. I was always drawn to the study of peer relationships and to
psychological science more broadly. I recall my attempt to create an IQ test,
using tater tots, on the lunch line in grade school; I posited stage models of
adjustment to midterms while in eighth grade; and as a teenager, I developed my
own taxonomy for different levels of popularity. These examples offer two
revelations relevant to this book. First, I was always, without question, a
psychology nerd. And second, long before I imagined I would ever write
Popular, I had been collecting vignettes from people who never knew that their
experiences would become apt examples in the pages that follow. To protect
their privacy, and as is customary in the field of clinical psychology, I have thus
de-identified all stories herein by replacing names and trivial, nonessential
details. To further ensure confidentiality for some particularly sensitive
examples, the stories of Steve and Peggy represent composites based on several
similar experiences.
A few stories have not been de-identified. My star student at Yale is indeed
named Daniel Clemens. Studies and quotes from public figures and celebrities
similarly have remained unmasked. Last, details included in stories about my
own life also remain unchanged, to the best of my recollection.
INTRODUCTION
It was a cloudy day in the fall of 1977, and the sounds of screaming children on
a grassy field in Old Bethpage, New York, could be heard from blocks away.
Boys and girls at the elementary school were contracting a mysterious and
highly contagious illness at an alarming rate. With every passing minute, another
child became infected and then immediately was shunned by their peers—cast
aside by those they had called their friends just moments earlier.
Tiny pairs of plaid-covered legs were running as fast as they could to safety.
The school grounds were freckled with youth scattering in every direction. Some
hid behind trees, in the bushes, or under a set of monkey bars as they caught
their breath for a few moments, and then took off again. Most of the teachers
were nowhere to be found. The few that were outside simply watched as the
children succumbed to the outbreak one by one.
I grew up in that town, and I was on that playground on the day of the
epidemic. I remember yelling and rushing away as kids all around me were
stricken. Then, finally, came a sign of relief: Doug and Jill, two of my
classmates, announced that they had discovered a vaccine, one so effective that it
could instantly eradicate the infection in any afflicted child. The cure was swift
and powerful, but relapse rates were high. Soon another boy, David, announced
that he also had access to a cure, but few took him up on his offer. We only
sought help from Doug and Jill. By the end of recess, the Great Cooties
Epidemic of Old Bethpage had ended—at least until the following day, when it
began all over again.
I remember that day vividly, and many like it. I remember how much fun it
was to run and scream without a care in the world. But I recall even back then
my curiosity about kids like Doug and Jill. What made them so much more fun
than everyone else? Why were they always the center of our attention?
I also remember feeling sorry for David, and how difficult it was for him to
attract much interest from others. Why was he so often ignored?
The difference, of course, was that Doug and Jill were popular and would
remain popular for the rest of their lives. David was not, and on that day, his
standing in the social hierarchy became very clear to him.
There are relatively few Dougs or Jills in the world. Those people who seem
to effortlessly become popular wherever they go—there’s maybe just one or two
in every classroom, company, or social group. There are likewise a small
number of Davids. Everyone knows exactly who they are. Even at an early point
in childhood, and most certainly by first grade, the popularity hierarchy is
already established.
Most of us landed somewhere in the middle, and on some playground
somewhere in our past, our relationship with popularity was born. Either we
knew we were admired and began to worry about maintaining our special
influence over others, or we recognized that others were more popular than us
and began to yearn for more attention and positive regard from our peers.
Our positions in the social hierarchy seemed so important back then, and for
good reason: popularity is the most valuable and easily accessible currency
available to youth. It is salient to us at every age. I can still remember unpopular
kids in elementary school crying when they weren’t allowed to cut in the lunch
line, while the populars had unfettered access. As we got older, our popularity
dictated which peers were potential friends and which were strictly off-limits.
Our cliques’ seating preferences in the cafeteria were even organized along the
status hierarchy. By high school, we barely spoke to—much less dated—anyone
who was less popular than us. We would spend hours listening to adults chiding
us to focus on schoolwork or eat our vegetables, but none of that mattered as
much as whether the cool kids at school would greet us the following day.
Now, as adults, our parents’ advice makes a lot more sense. Our grades really
have affected our educations, our careers, and our financial resources, just as our
eating habits have had implications for our health and vitality decades later. But
is the same true of popularity? Did any of it really matter?
The answer is yes: it did matter then, and it matters now. It may surprise you
to learn just how much we should still care about popularity.
Our popularity affects us throughout our lives, often in ways we don’t realize.
At some level, you may already perceive that to be true. Isn’t it interesting that
when we remember who was most or least popular back in high school, it brings
up some of the same emotions today as it did back then? The mere mention of
the word “popular” has the power to transport us back to our teenage years. We
graduate high school, make new friends, find stable romantic relationships, and
get settled in our careers, but somewhere deep inside, we know that some part of
who we are today—our self-esteem, our insecurities, our career successes or
failures, and perhaps even our happiness—is still linked to how popular we were
back then. There’s something about our popularity in youth that seems to remain
a part of who we are, as if it’s become deeply embedded in our souls forever.
Maybe the enduring power of popularity can be traced to the fact that those
same dynamics are still a part of our daily lives. It may look a little different
today as compared to our youth, but we still encounter most and least popular
people in every office, every community group, and every neighborhood. The
factors that make adults popular are not much different from what seemed to
matter back in school.
We may also still care about popularity because whether we want to admit it
or not, most of us never overcame our desire to become more popular, and those
old yearnings still have lasting effects today—not just on our own lives, but on
attributes our society most values. In fact, this may be truer now than at any
previous point in our history. Networked society offers the possibility of an
interminable adolescence where, as never before, we can shine a light on those
who are popular, create ways to emulate and interact with these individuals, and
even raise our own level of popularity through new creative platforms that allow
any average person a chance to become the most popular, even if only briefly.
Our private lives are affected by these yearnings as well. Our unspoken desire to
be popular changes the decisions we make, the kinds of relationships we form,
and even how we raise our children, usually in ways we are not even aware of. If
we’re not careful, these yearnings can ultimately make us very unhappy.
Popularity is a topic that I and other social scientists have been interested in
for decades, and the results from thousands of research studies have revealed a
great deal about its origins and its significance in any number of social
interactions. What we’ve learned is that popularity is something of a paradox: it
is fundamental to human nature to desire to be more popular, but that doesn’t
mean that being popular is always good for us.
—
A
t around the same time that I was scurrying across the playground in Old
Bethpage, something very interesting was taking place in the field of
psychology. Until then the discipline had been dominated by Freudian-inspired
notions of the id, the superego, and even unconscious libidinal urges. Most roads
toward explaining our feelings and behavior eventually led to the mother and the
ways that her child-rearing shaped personalities.
But in the 1950s through the 1970s, with a large number of veterans from
World War II, Korea, and Vietnam needing psychological treatment, the US
government began to fund mental health initiatives as never before. The National