Remember being left out by peers as a teenager? If you're like most people, of course you do.
"We all have some baggage from our upbringings, but there's something about popularity that sticks with us," says Mitch Prinstein, PhD, professor of psychology and director of clinical psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Popularity in adolescence is "emotionally powerful in a way that not everything from our adolescence is," he says. "And we're starting to learn why."
For 20 years, Prinstein has conducted research on popularity and peer relations, first at Yale University and then at UNC–Chapel Hill. He's brought together the latest findings from his own research and across the field in a new book, "Popular: The Power of Likability in a Status-Obsessed World."
He spoke to the Monitor about how popularity can affect us long after we've left the schoolyard.
Early in the book, you explain that there are two distinct types of popularity. Can you tell us about them?
The first kind of popularity is likability. This is evident and important from as early as age 3. People who are more likable are generally kind and are able to listen to others. They know how to become a part of the group and attend to the group's needs. They engage in behavior that helps others, rather than attempting to dominate or overpower them. Likability is the kind of popularity that can make us flourish and lead to positive outcomes throughout our lives.
The second type of popularity is a reflection of status—whether someone is well-known and widely emulated, and is able to bend others to his or her will. This is the "cool kids" kind of popularity we remember from high school, and is more focused on power, influence and visibility. It's no accident that this emerges at the transition of adolescence, when we are biologically primed to seek and care about social rewards. The ventral striatum is among the first parts of the brain to change at puberty, and it becomes especially activated when we experience social rewards.
Some of us grow out of this, but some continue to feel that our self-esteem is wrapped up in how much other people think of us, rather than being more intrinsically derived, and thus continue to seek that type of status for the rest of our lives.
What is research revealing about the long-term outcomes of childhood popularity?
It's remarkable how powerfully something that many of us dispense as schoolyard ancient history continues to affect us. Those who are likable tend to have benefits that last for the rest of their lives. Long-term longitudinal studies have found that adults who are accepted in childhood are the most likely to report that their marriages are happier and their work relationships stronger. Other research has shown that decades later they tend to make more money, be more satisfied in their careers, and have better health outcomes. In contrast, those who experienced unpopularity are at a great risk for depression, anxiety, substance abuse, obesity, physical health problems and even suicide.
It's not that those who were rejected had other problems that are the true cause of those outcomes. There's something about being unpopular that changes everyday social interactions in a way that creates a vicious cycle of rejection and disappointment that can continue into adulthood.
For example, each time a child is invited to a social gathering, he or she has the opportunity to learn more nuanced social skills, such as how to negotiate complex interactions. Each time a child is denied such an invitation, they're losing out on building those skills. When these denied opportunities accumulate over time, it's like a child missing an entire year of classes on a particular topic. You can imagine how the social deficits that are caused by unpopularity can compound and change the course of one's life. This transaction model is supported by research such as Jennifer Lansford's study at Duke University, where a group of 585 children were assessed at 12 time points from kindergarten through third grade. They found that peer rejection had direct effects on subsequent social information processing biases and aggression.
What have you discovered about popularity that would surprise your fellow psychologists?
It's fascinating that we're beginning to learn how much our experiences with popularity have biological effects, not only for mental health but also for physical health. University of California, Los Angeles, neuroscientist Naomi Eisenberger found that some regions of the brain experience unpopularity in the same way they respond to physical distress, in a phenomenon she refers to as social pain. George Slavich and Steve Cole's work at UCLA has shown how DNA is sensitive to social rejection, which can activate genes that lead to a systemic inflammatory response.
For psychologists who have often thought about peer relationships as being merely a demonstration of one's social adjustment, it's an exciting insight to see how much those peer experiences have remarkably profound effects on the human body. I don't think this had been fully appreciated in the literature until the past half-decade.
What questions are you curious to explore next?
I'm interested in looking more at the biological effects of social stress and social exclusion, and trying to understand why some people have more dramatic responses than others.
I'd also like to look further at social media. It's creating new types of behaviors and ways of interacting that no one's studied because they weren't even possible before, such as the pursuit of more "likes," followers and retweets, which can provide an illusion of genuine social connection.
Social media is not inherently a bad thing, it can be a powerful and wonderful vehicle for communication. But it could potentially be problematic if used excessively and without understanding the two different kinds of popularity. Everything we thought we knew about peer relations is changing, so in some ways we have to start over and think about these new kinds of peer interactions that many of us at our adult ages don't understand.
