Tonight, Dr. Lara Mayeux gave an overview of the findings in the psychological research on popularity. Her specific focus was on the perceptions of teens of the popular kids, and whether popular teens are more likely to engage in risky behaviors, which I'll talk more about below. First, to paraphrase Dr. Mayeux, popularity is best defined as the ability to influence one's peers. This differentiates popularity from other measures of social status, such as likability. In fact, these two measures of status tend to diverge from one another as people move into adolescence, meaning that the popular people are often not the most well-liked.
Dr. Mayeux's research methodology includes a combination of peer reporting, teacher reporting and self reporting. Peer reporting involves students identifying peers that they identify with labels like "popular", "aggressive", "people I hang out with", and others. Students are identified with unique tags, so that the researchers can statistically determine whether students being labeled as "popular" are associated to other labels. Teacher reporting is more traditional, using a Likert scale (1 to 5 or 1 to 7) to gauge how much a teacher agrees that a student fits different labels, like "popular". Dr. Mayeux was careful to point out that she never defines popularity, but rather looks at how the students define popularity through the associations present in the data.
From this experimental setup, Dr. Mayeux pointed to a number of associations:
- Overt and Relational Aggression and Bullying. Popular students are more likely to commit acts of physical and verbal (overt) and more subtle relational aggression towards peers. This association is extremely robust, and is supported by every study published on peer relations. Boys are more likely to use overt methods, while girls are more likely to use relational aggression, meaning that they attack peers through their common relationships using destructive gossip and influence.
- Low likability. The correlation between likability and popularity is actually negative for high school age girls.
- Poorer academic performance (post middle school).
- Substance use. Especially alcohol use, increases with onset of popularity. There is almost no evidence that substance use leads to increased popularity.
- Early, high-risk sexual behavior. This is emerging from more recent studies, particularly among high school age girls.
The audience was perplexed by the (lack of) association between popularity and likability, coupled with the strong association between aggression and popularity. Why would we admire people that treat us badly? Dr. Mayeux discussed the theory that popular kids tend to possess "peer valued characteristics", including being attractive, wealthy, athletic, or a sense of humor, which allow peers to look past their bad behavior. She noted that these results are robust in western nations, but that in China, academic achievement is more closely aligned with popularity.
Lest we think that all popular kids are bad seeds, Dr. Mayeux pointed out some of the positive traits correlated with popularity:
- Good leadership skills.
- Social skills.
- Confidence.
- Athletic ability.
- Increased "defending behaviors". Some popular kids use their status to assist others who are being bullied or attacked.
Hopefully this post gives a sense of the fascinating work being done on popularity. There were some counterintuitive results, and these comprised most of the vigorous discussion between Dr. Mayeux and the audience.
You can contact Dr. Lara Mayeux at her website Mayeux Research .
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