Kaitlin Luna: Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, a bi-weekly podcast from the American Psychological Association. I'm your host Kaitlin Luna. Just a reminder before we get started, we love to hear from our listeners. You can email your comments and ideas to kluna@apa.org, that's kluna@apa.org. Also please consider rating us in iTunes, we'd really appreciate it.
Some of us recall high school as being filled with fun parties, football games and flirting, while others think back to that time with a shudder and are just glad it's over. But is it really over? Does our social status as teens follow us for the rest of our lives, and can we raise today's children and teens differently in our ever status obsessed culture?
Our guest for this episode is Dr. Mitch Prinstein, a clinical child and adolescent psychologist who is a John Van Seters distinguished professor of psychology and neuroscience and the director of clinical psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Prinstein wrote the book “Popular: Finding Happiness and Success in a World That Cares Too Much About the Wrong Kinds of Relationships.” Welcome Dr. Prinstein.
Mitch Prinstein: Thanks for having me.
Kaitlin Luna: I'm sure many adults listening to this podcast are probably being teleported back to their teenage years and are thinking about the cool kids in school, the not so popular kids and where they themselves fit into that social hierarchy. Why does thinking about popularity instantly take us back to those days of middle school and high school?
Mitch Prinstein: Yeah it might be a nightmare for some people because we do go right back there right? We kind of remember what it was like walking down the halls and who we might have had a crush on and who we wanted to be as popular as, and some people kind of try and forget it all. But there's really interesting psych research now that tells us that every day as we experience anything, any interaction that we have any kind of social opportunity, it somehow is all filtered through our memories. And the time when these adult brains were built is the transition to adolescence. What was the most important thing to us back then? It was popularity. So we are kind of viewing the world today through a filter or a lens that has a lot to do with our high school popularity.
Kaitlin Luna: Going off of what you just said, you know many of us remember wanting to be accepted in middle school in high school but maybe not understanding exactly why that was the case. And in your book you explained that it's because of brain changes that happen during puberty that make us all of a sudden worried about status. Why does that happen?
Mitch Prinstein: So we don't know exactly why but there's good evolutionary theory that tells us that it used to be that when you turn 12 or 13, you needed to start getting prepared to fend for yourself and learning autonomy. So the brain very cleverly kind of produces a bunch of neurotransmitters and receptors for oxytocin and for dopamine. So in other words, as we transition into adolescence we become really excited about social bonding with peers, and it feels really really good when we do. And that kind of combination inspired us to go out and be independent and start to think that our parents have become totally lame. Today, we kind of see the same thing. So just before you see changes in someone's body for puberty, you'll notice that they are really really invested in how their social relationships are working.
Kaitlin Luna: So it's at this age where those social relationships, friendships become much more important than the relationship between a parent and child right?
Mitch Prinstein: That's right.
Kaitlin Luna: And why does social status as teens matter when we're adults? I mean many people would think that you know, that was a long time ago who I was at 13, 14, 15, 16 is not who I am today. Why does it matter?
Mitch Prinstein: Well it's not who we are, but yet there's a little piece of us that might still be there that still is influencing us. It's what psychologists call social information processing, which is really just a fancy way of saying that what it is that we notice when we're looking out in the environment, we have hundreds and thousands of things we could be paying attention to, and how we interpret those things that we select to attend to, all of that is based on how we felt back in adolescence. So if you're somebody who was rejected, you might see rejection a little bit more now as an adult even decades later. If you're someone that was never rejected, you were always popular, you might be bad at noticing signals that suggest danger or times when you might need some critical feedback. These kinds of ways in which we see the world are very very much related to who we were back when we were in our teenage years.
Kaitlin Luna: Yeah and you wrote how popular teens and children are more likely to be happier or more successful and have better relationships as adults.
Mitch Prinstein: Well that depends. So those who are popular can be two different groups. You have some who are popular when they were young, and they would be the kind that we would call likable. But then you have a different kind of popularity that emerges in adolescents, we call that type of popularity status. And those are very different types of popularity. Likeability is good, status is pretty bad.
Kaitlin Luna: Can you describe what those two types of popularity mean a bit more, what is status and what is likability?
Mitch Prinstein: Sure, I mean likability is the kind of popularity that we have when we're really young and it used to be the kind of popularity that was important as you were an adult. It's based on how much you make other people feel happy, valued and included. And it doesn't mean that you're a pushover and you're making everyone feel better as opposed to fulfilling your own needs, in fact highly likeable people are very likely to become leaders, but they do it in a way that's welcoming and inclusive.
That's not what we all think of when we think about what popularity was like in high school. We think about what it was like to be cool, and that really translates scientifically to being known by everyone, being visible, being influential, dominant and powerful. That kind of popularity is called status, and status has pretty bad long-term outcomes because what works for us in high school does not always work for us in the adult world.
Kaitlin Luna: Yeah and just because someone has status, you said dominance, doesn't necessarily mean people like them.
Mitch Prinstein: That's right, in fact in high school if you remember which kids were kind of the coolest, that had the highest status, research says that at least half of the kids in school did not like them at all, in fact they hated them. But that didn't mean that they didn't regard them as being cool nevertheless. And the same thing happens in adulthood. We know that there are some people who have really high status, they are powerful and dominant and even aggressive, and we can acknowledge that, but that doesn't mean we necessarily find them to be making us happy, feeling valued or included. We don't like them.
Kaitlin Luna: And it seems like when you're at that age you are much more concerned about those people who do have that status, whereas as adults I think it's much easier to get away from people like that. Maybe not so much in the workplace but in other aspects of your life, it just seems like it's easier to brush that off. Is that a correct assessment, that it's more difficult when you're younger to do that?
Mitch Prinstein: Yeah it makes perfect sense, and some of the reason why is because we think that some of these changes in the brain really make us similar to a lot of other species. A lot of mammalian species are interested in kind of that power and dominance and visibility because it gets you access to more resources, food or mating partners, and our brains are acting like other mammals' brains. Even mice, when they reach their adolescent period, they're much less interested in hanging out with adult mice as they are other adolescent mice because they're really interested in kind of that biologically programmed desire to have status.
So that's cool to do in high school, that's something that, you know we're probably inevitably going to feel and we should expect our kids to feel that way when they reach adolescence, but it used to be that we would stop caring about that kind of popularity when we graduated from high school. That's not the way the world works anymore though.
Kaitlin Luna: So you're saying people, we do care more about it maybe then some people realize?
Mitch Prinstein: I think we do. In fact I think that we do now in this year than we ever did before in the history of our species because things have dramatically changed in the last 20 or 30 years in ways that now make us care about status more than we ever have before, that's scary.
Kaitlin Luna: Why do you think that is the case?
Mitch Prinstein: There's a lot of interesting theories about why. You know some people say that it started with CNN, believe it or not. That kind of 24-hour news cycle was the first time that we had to start changing the way that we talked about news and we made it a little bit more focused on people and people's individual experiences, and it suddenly changed. Our view of celebrity and fame and status was not only afforded to a very few in an inaccessible way, it suddenly became the case that almost anybody could have that moment, those 15 minutes. And some theories suggest that that was the beginning of a change in the way that we thought about popularity. A change that today is reflected in things like social media or reality TV. You know extensions of the idea that our society started to feel that we could all get a piece of status, it didn't used to be that way.
Kaitlin Luna: Do you think that translates to life being more challenging for teens today than it was 20, 30, 40 years ago?
Mitch Prinstein: Oh I'm so worried about teens today because they've lived in a world where pursuing status with a mouse click or on your phone 24/7, that's become normal. And when I worked on the book I was shocked to find how many covers of magazines for both kids and for adults are really promoting the message that we should care about our likes, and our retweets and our followers and even kids are being encouraged to say things on social media that they explicitly don't believe because if it gets them more likes or followers then it's worth it. And if you think about the message that that's sending the kids, that status is more important than actual true connections with others or integrity, that's a really really scary message.
Kaitlin Luna: And you said it at the top of your book that you want it to serve as a way for people to reconsider our culture, as you've mentioned, and it's focus on fame, popularity, power, wealth and celebrity and how it is actually making us unhappy. Can you elaborate on that a bit more?
Mitch Prinstein: Well research has looked at the effects of status. Some research has looked at those who are the highest status now. The people who hold positions in our society ,maybe due to celebrity or other kinds of positions of status, in your company or in our government. And what they find is that those people who are in the highest positions of status are at greater risk for depression. They're also more likely to engage in behaviors, especially aggressive behaviors, just to maintain or forever attempt to increase their status. It's kind of an addiction, once you have status or want status you can never have enough. No matter how high you are on the social hierarchy, you always are vying for more indicators of status.
There's also been some research that's looked at what happened to those cool kids in high school. Those kids that were the most popular in terms of status. Research like Joe Allen's research at University of Virginia, he's followed up those cool kids for decades. And what he's found is that those really cool kids as teenagers grow up to be at greater risk for addictions, anxiety, depression and they have relationship problems. They tend to have lower satisfaction in relationships, and they're more frequently broken up with.
Kaitlin Luna: So that means that children and teens who were popular, maybe due to status but not likability, but then they grew up to be more likely to be unpopular and less successful?
Mitch Prinstein: That's right. the research shows pretty clearly the likable kids, even the kids that are likable as early as kindergarten age, they have benefits that last for decades. They make more money, they're happier, they're even healthier and they live longer lives. They have better marriages and relationships at work and at home, and even their children do better. So likeability is extraordinarily powerful. Which is interesting because we don't spend a lot of time teaching likeability, but results say we should. The opposite is the case for status. Those who have high status grow up to have worse outcomes over time.
Kaitlin Luna: I think that's often reflected in some of the movies you see when you talk about what happens to the, you know the teens when they grow up. I'm thinking of “Can't Hardly Wait” if you remember that movie.
Mitch Prinstein: Oh there are so many yea.
Kaitlin Luna: That ones the one that come to mind. When they were doing like next year this is what happened to the popular jock, he was like dropped out of college and worked at the car wash or something, you know and gained 50 pounds whenever that's wherever the case was. And while the guy who was the nerd type if you will, he got the girl and he went off to college somewhere and had a great life.
So and we often hear stories about people who were rejected as teens who then flourish as adults. So can a person's popularity change over time?
Mitch Prinstein: Absolutely. So some of the ways in which we maintain our popularity is we are all caught in a vicious cycle that started when we were in high school, and most of us don't realize that we're in that cycle right now. And the way that it works is that we have these important formative experiences at the time when our brains are most sensitive to popularity, we have experiences that stick with us for decades. And whether we think about them overtly or not, they are influencing the way that we respond to every social interaction every single day. So people who felt rejected might not go to a party where they would have the opportunity to make new relationships or they might go to that party and assume that people will not like them. They might have their arms folded, or not make eye contact or not create overture when there could have been one. And without realizing it, they are perpetuating that self-fulfilling prophecy of creating a world, contributing to a world, where they get rejected again and again to mirror what their expectations were. Expectations that were built when they were adolescence. What we can do to break that is recognize that we all have a bias, a bias that was built in the halls of high school that's changing how we interact socially today. We have to recognize what our personal bias is and try and challenge it. And see if there might be ways to recognize that we are not 15 anymore, and people are not gonna relate to us the way they did back then.
Kaitlin Luna: That's absolutely fascinating that you know your life and who you were as a teen is affecting your life now. I mean does that happen unconsciously I'm assuming right?
Mitch Prinstein: It's definitely on an implicit level, but there's been really interesting research to shed some light on that. There was one study where they looked at people with and without kind of difficulties socially, and they had them watch a movie. They watched, they all watched the exact same movie but they wore special eye tracking glasses, so they could see what it is that people looked at and how long they looked at those parts of the movie. What they found was that people who had happy social lives in the past watched the movie and their eyes really focused on other happy social experiences, people smiling, and nodding, and gesturing for others to be included into social interactions. But when people with social difficulties watch the same exact movie their eyes spent almost three-quarters of the time staring at rejection cues, people that were frowning, or looking away or turning their body posture away. And it really to me just is shocking how much without realizing it we are screening out information in the world every day that confirms either our worst fears or our happiest memories. And again a lot of that has to do with the experiences that we had when we first built these adult brains at the ages of 12 to 15.
Kaitlin Luna: Do you have any tips about how to challenge those biases?
Mitch Prinstein: One thing we can do is we can really start to try and get new data, trying to get new experiences that challenge our expectations. There are actually really simple ways to do that. There's a phenomenon called social mimicry that suggests that if we walk into a room with poor eye contact and with our arms folded, other people will pick up on that, they won't understand why, but they will start feeling sad and they will immediately make assumptions about you, suggesting that maybe you are not someone that they want interact with.
Sometimes we think of it the other way, we notice someone that makes us feel happy and we have a good time, we kind of say something like they have positive energy, or you know you enjoy spending time with them, it brings out your best self, that's social mimicry. So a really good self experiment is for someone to go in and try something different, try to walk in and a little bit of a good mood maybe better than usual or say hello to a few more people you normally would or try and smile and keep your arms at your side rather than folded, and people are surprised to see how quickly they can break the cycle. Just by eliciting from others a very different response to a social interaction, and once it happens one time it starts to become, it starts to trigger more and more instances of where you can start changing those popularity dynamics in your life.
Kaitlin Luna: And going back to teenage years, in your book you identified five distinct groups that we all fall into during that time in our lives, and those were accepted, average, controversial, neglected and rejected. Can you explain each one and what the benefits and concerns of each group are?
Mitch Prinstein: Sure. Those are five different types of likeability, and it's really based on the extent to which your peers select you as someone that they like the most or they like the least. It actually can be measured as young as the age of three years old, and it's remarkably stable over time. The accepted kids tend to do really well. They're picked by others as being like the most, but rarely picked is like the least and they tend to have lots of advantages and be more likely to become leaders.
But the rejected kids have special powers also that's important. They're often picked as being liked the least and not picked as like the most, but they tend to be particularly good at picking up on social cues suggesting rejection, and that can be very handy in a variety of different contexts so don't rule out those who are rejected. Controversials tend to be picked as liked most and liked least and might be especially likely to have high status and be status seekers in adolescence. Whereas the neglected kids are not picked as liked most or liked least by their peers, and research initially thought that these might be kids who have trouble but that's not true. They tend to be highly adaptable from context to context, and very likely to change to become accepted over time.
Kaitlin Luna: So if you are in these groups, is that just a group you belong to because of who you are, your personality, who you know is it just something that's inherent to all of us or there ways to change this? To change which group you might belong to?
Mitch Prinstein: We can absolutely change which group we belong to. One of the biggest predictors of how likable we are and which of those groups we fall in is the extent to which we act aggressively or in pro-social ways. So aggressive kids are more likely to be controversial or rejected, and we tend to learn a lot about aggressive behavior by watching our parents or others. But we can also engage in pro-social behaviors like paying attention to others, thinking about their needs and engaging in behaviors that are welcoming and inclusive. Those are really powerful ways to make sure that we become accepted. The same rules that apply when we were on the playground in elementary school also apply in the workplace today or in, one day, our retirement communities. Those same dynamics play out in remarkably similar ways across the entire lifespan.
Kaitlin Luna: And can you belong to more than one group at a time?
Mitch Prinstein: Not typically, although there are some groups where it's easier to go between. So neglected kids are not likely to suddenly become controversial, but we might see neglected folks become rejected or accepted based on how they start acting in a new environment.
Kaitlin Luna: And when kids and teens get older are their opportunities to change that? Like when they go to college they're, you know away from their home environment they can kind of reinvent themselves to be a new person, is that an opportunity to maybe become a member of a different group that you weren't in when you were growing up?
Mitch Prinstein: It absolutely is possible. It's not as easy as Freddie Prinze Jr. movies would make you believe, but it is possible to change. The problem is that we don't talk very much about popularity or likability, so we don't teach people what behaviors they should engage in to change. There's research actually that shows that without any intervention you can put a child into a brand new context and within three hours they have the same likeable reputation that they had in their old context. So it's really important that we're talking about this and helping to teach kids why it's important to engage in likeable behaviors.
Kaitlin Luna: I'm sure there's certain approaches you want to take with that too, because you want to tell kids you want explain it I'm sure in a healthy way, saying like you want to get along with others, you want to you know be a part of a group, you want to be you know like in some ways without making them feel like they are sacrificing who they are to please others. How would you go about telling a child or a teen to, how to do that?
Mitch Prinstein: You're absolutely right. It's really important that kids know, just like adults, that we are going to be valued for being who we are, we just have to make sure that the way that we are is not somehow making other people feel inferior or dominated or somehow like they're not welcome as a member of the community. That's a really important message that unfortunately we've forgotten perhaps now in this day more than years past where we live in a society that's really about promoting our own voice rather than thinking of ways to help others feel connected and genuinely cared for as a community.
Kaitlin Luna: And what advice do you have for parents of kids who are not popular, so if they might fall into that neglected or rejected group, what can they do.
Mitch Prinstein: I think it's really important for parents to think about how they can help their kids social behaviors, but parents have to be realistic and honest about the ways in which their child might interact. First of all, I would say that I wouldn't want any parents to freak out if their kids were rejected, because there's a lot of research to suggest that having one or two very good friends can be really really important and compensatory for folks who are having a tough time with rejection. So that might be the first goal is to really think about how to foster a couple of friendships. But if a child is experiencing difficulties with rejection, it's important to really look at whether that child might be acting aggressively or doing other things that make them not respectful of the social norms. An example might be a kid who very pleasantly suggests an activity to play and kind of, let's all play Legos while everyone else is playing with cars, but instead of doing it in a way that seems to be respectful of what everyone else is already playing they might do it in a very abrupt way that comes across as awkward and disruptive. That sometimes is the difficulty, and it is something that can be trained.
Kaitlin Luna: And if you were that kid who was bullied or you were in that rejected group growing up during these crucial years, how can you find maybe some healing as adults because we often hear about the long-lasting impacts of being bullied or rejected because of whatever reason. So how can you yourself get over that experience and help to thrive as an adult?
Mitch Prinstein: I wish that everybody knew about research on bullies that shows that in many cases it's bullying that is related to serious emotional difficulties. And it might be helpful for those who were victims to recognize that they were victimized not often because of their own weaknesses or any kind of difficulties that they may have experienced but it really is more of a sign of how much bullies themselves were suffering from emotional distress, where they were exposed to that kind of aggressive behavior somewhere in their lives. The more we can move away from making personal attributions, from blaming ourselves from being a victim, I think the easier it would be to cope with and recognize that it was the bully that probably was experiencing a lot of difficulties and the victim might have been the unfortunate recipient of that, but it doesn't mean that someone actually had any personal weaknesses that were worth being victimized about.
Kaitlin Luna: And on the flip side of all this, so for parents of kids who are really popular either because of status or likability, and this might be a two-part question because those are very different aspects of being popular, what do those parents need to know?
Mitch Prinstein: Well I think that for parents of likeable kids that's terrific, and I think that that's a really good opportunity to really positively reinforce how kids are making others feel welcome and how they're being sensitive to other kids' feelings. So that might be something that parents want to really look out for and find opportunities to reinforce and help them generalize as they enter a world that values those behaviors sadly less and less. But for kids who are high in status, it's gonna be very very hard to get kids to not be interested in status. I would recommend that parents remind those high status kids that it's important to be likable too. You can be cool and dominant and highly influential and visible and you're not going to convince anyone not to be but remind them that they should not maintain that by putting others down, by being aggressive and being so overly focused on status that they're constantly seeking for more. Instead teach them that while they might enjoy high status they should also take time so that others feel included. Ultimately it's not going to reduce their status but it is gonna help them develop the skills they'll need for decades to come.
Kaitlin Luna: Can young people choose the type of popularity they want, especially today in this ranking culture with social media being involved in every aspect of our teens lives, and it seems like we can't go back from that there's no putting the genie back in the bottle if you will and changing you know what teens are facing today in terms of the internet and social media?
Mitch Prinstein: Yeah I think social media is here to stay. The platforms change often but I think the teens have grown up not knowing anything but, and it's important that we acknowledge that there's something very reinforcing even biologically addictive about social media that's gonna be hard to change. So I suggest moderation. I think it's important that we allow teens to participate on social media, there's actually a lot of benefits that come from social media as well to adolescents, but we help them to also sometimes get off social media or use social media to promote actual face to face or voice to voice interactions as well because there's still a place for that and that's still important for child development.
We can help teens think about how to use the direct message functions or how to use the information they learn online to bring up in conversations offline. We also need to have parents talking a little bit more, according to research, about how kids are consuming the information they see on social media. Do they recognize that kids are liking one another's posts because they're fronting or because they are doing it to save face or maintain friendships, not because they necessarily agree with every value and behavior that's expressed in social media posts. I think digital media literacy is an untapped need within our school systems and among parent-child discussions that's really really important in today's day and age.
Kaitlin Luna: Can adults choose the type of popularity they want? You know meaning is status inherent or likability, it seems like there's some push-pull on that, you can work on you've mentioned it a bit throughout the podcast, you can work on your likability skills. So adults can they choose how to be the type of popularity they want?
Mitch Prinstein: I think we are making those choices hundreds of times a day without realizing it. When we speak up in a meeting, when we decide what we're gonna wear, when we decide what we're gonna buy, when we decide what kind of interactions we want to engage in or how much time we want to spend on our own social media feeds we are making the choice. Are we trying to make ourselves stand out and seem somehow better than the rest of the crowd, are we trying to garner more power and influence or are we making choices that signal to others that we care about them feeling valued. That we want others to feel included and that we are more interested in creating connection and community than we are in making ourselves seem like we are better than others. I think we make hundreds of those choices a day, and I hope that once people know about the two different types of popularity, it will give them some insight into how to make those choices wisely each day.
Kaitlin Luna: And last question, I hope this is a fun one, what teen movie do you think best depicts everything we have discussed today?
Mitch Prinstein: Oh there's so many that I think are important. I think “Never Been Kissed” is a great one. I think “Breakfast Club” is a great example of popularity in high school and the different groups that are out there. There's just so many honestly that I think are important, and it's interesting to me that a topic that we don't spend a whole lot of time investing policy dollars in or educational time in is the one way that we all, Hollywood and each of us, remembers our adolescence. We can't think about our teenage years without thinking about popularity, and it's probably why we find those teen movies to be so important as a way of kind of working through what we all ubiquitously universally went through when we were teenagers.
Kaitlin Luna: Thank you so much for joining us Dr. Prinstein it's been a really wonderful conversation.
Mitch Prinstein: Thank you.
Kaitlin Luna: To learn more about the book “Popular” and other research from Dr. Prinstein, visit mitchprinstein.com. And before we go as I mentioned at the top of the show, we'd love to hear from you. You can email me your comments and ideas to kluna@apa.org, that's kluna@apa.org. And please give us a rating in iTunes, we'd love to know what you think. Speaking of Psychology is part of the APA podcast network, which includes other great podcasts such as APA Journals Dialogue about new psychological research and Progress Notes about the practice of psychology. You can find all of our podcasts on iTunes, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also go to our website SpeakingofPsychology.org to listen to more episodes. I'm Kaitlin Luna with the American Psychological Association.
Mitch Prinstein, PhD, is a clinical child and adolescent psychologist who is the John Van Seters distinguished professor of psychology and neuroscience and the director of clinical psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His Peer Relations Lab has been conducting research on popularity and peer relations for almost 20 years, resulting in over 100 scientific works, including journal articles, book chapters, a set of encyclopedias on adolescent development and a textbook on the field of clinical psychology. Prinstein has served as president of the Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology and the Society of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, and on the boards of the American Psychological Association, the Council of University Directors of Clinical Psychology and publication board of the Association of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies. Prinstein's research has been featured by national media outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, CNN and more.
