The level of popularity you experienced in childhood and adolescence is still affecting you today in ways that you may not even realize. Learn about how psychologists study popularity and how these same concepts can be used in adulthood to be more successful at work, become better parents, and have a happier life.
Popular Teens are Not as Risky as we Thought?
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Из курса от партнера The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Psychology of Popularity
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How Does Popularity Change Our Mood, Feelings, and Behaviors? (Part 2)
We will review why popular people really do have better skills and life outcomes compared to others.
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Dr. Mitch PrinsteinJohn Van Seters Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, and Author of Popular: The Power of Likeability in a Status-Obsessed World
UNC Department of Psychology and Neuroscience
[MUSIC]
Hi. We've been talking about
how popularity plays a role in health risk behavior.
And what we just learned was that it wasn't likability, but
it was the type of popularity that we think of as being high status and
dominant that might be most closely associated with health risk behaviors.
The thing that's really interesting about this is that it's those really high status
kids that end up being very influential within their environment.
So the fact that they're the ones at most risk for health risk behaviors
has major implications for all the less popular kids in school.
Because they are the ones that are setting the norm that everyone else is
going to follow.
What we know now is that one of the reasons why is because we tend to
engage in behaviors that match what we think other people do.
Especially if there's someone that's engaged in a behavior and
we really like that person or we really want to be like them.
Then we're very inclined to emulate those behaviors.
This is why there is celebrity endorsers for so many products in marketing.
Because the idea is that if we identify with that celebrity, or
if there is someone that's very high status that we think,
I'd like the be more like them and they engage in a behavior,
or buy a product, or have a belief, then we're very likely to follow.
Here's the problem, though.
When it comes to adolescence, and
when it come to health risk behaviors, adolescents are trying to
do what they think those really popular kids in their school are doing.
But there's really good evidence to suggest that what they
think the popular kids are doing is wrong.
They're totally overestimating how much it is that popular kids really engage in
health risk behavior.
And that's what we're about to talk about.
We did a study where we were specifically looking at that, trying to understand how
much kids might overestimate their peers engagement in health risk behaviors.
So in a paper that was authored, first authored by Sarah Helms,
we looked at different crowds that you usually see in a lot of high schools,
particularly here in America.
And really interestingly, this is a way of understanding popularity
that matches the way that kids talk about popularity.
So, of course, adolescents in high school don't talk about social preference or
social reputation, but they do, especially in America, talk about peer crowds.
The groups of kids that are athletically oriented,
they're referred to as the Jocks.
The groups of kids that are really high status, like the mean girls,
they're the Populars or the Preps.
Or in that movie the Plastics,
the group of kids that are really academically oriented, like the Nerds or
the Geeks or the Brains, and the ones that engage in deviant behavior, the Burnouts.
This doesn't happen as often in other cultures, and it might be because in many
other cultures, we see that high schools are tracked.
So by the time the kids get to secondary education, they've all ready placed into
university oriented schools versus more trade schools, or non-university tracts.
And, because there's more homogeneity in terms of academic achievement, these very
disparate groups, based on their interests and habits, are less salient.
We do see this though very much in America and
it's depicted in our movies which then, people see in other countries as well.
So no matter where you live,
you probably know what I'm talking about with these peer crowds.
Really interestingly, these peer crowds have been around for decades and decades.
They might have different names but back in the 50's, all the way to today,
there has been some form of Jocks, and Populars, and Nerds, and Burnouts,
as well as some other groups as well.
Well what we did, is we asked kids to tell us, using a pier nomination assessment,
who are the kids in your school who are the most quintessential,
stereotypical Jocks, of all the Jocks, and
who are the most quintessential Populars, same for the Brains and the Burnouts?
And this was very easy to do among adolescents, because these were the words
that they use, and this is the way that they think about it.
And they love talking about all these crowds, so we got all that information.
And then we ask them all to fill out a measure to tell us about
the health risk behaviors they engaged in, all kinds of health risk behaviors.
I'll talk about just a few.
Now what we were able to do with this information is we were able to look
at how much do people who are not a part of the Jocks,
think that the Jocks engage in a health risk behavior?
For instance, let's say, how many partners do they have,
that they engage in sexual intercourse with?
Now, because this was Non-Jocks, or lets say Non-Populars,
perceiving what it is that the Populars did, we refer to that as out-group norms.
So what do people outside of the group think is normal,
among those, in that group?
We were also then able to look at in-group norms.
So what did the Populars think, the other Populars did?
How often did they engage in a behavior, or
how many sexual intercourse partners did they have?
And then, because we knew who the real quintessential Populars were, and
they had all filled out our measure, we're able to look at how much they
self-reported that they had actually engaged in these behaviors.
So, how many sexual intercourse partners did they really say that they had?
Well, here's what we found.
In this graph, what you'll see is we're just looking at the out-group norms.
So how much do Non Jocks think that Jocks engage in sexual intercourse?
And this is was based on a Likert scale, where 1 indicated 0 partners and so on.
Different batches of partners, so for instance, 2 indicated 1 partner,
3 indicated 2 to 3 partners and so on.
And what you see here is that Non Jocks think that Jocks are having sexual
intercourse with quite a number of partners.
Non Populars are thinking that Populars
are having sex with quite a number of partners.
And that's more so than the number of sexual intercourse partners that
people think Burnouts are having.
And certainly a lot more than people are thinking that the Nerds are having,
the number of partners that the Nerds have.
Now what you can see here are the In-Groups.
And the In-Groups are, how much do Jocks,
how many sexual intercourse partners do Jocks think their fellow Jocks have?
How many sexual intercourse partners do Burnouts think their fellow Burnouts have?
What you can see here are a couple of things to take note of.
First of all, it turns out that the people that are not Jocks and
not Populars are overestimating how many sexual intercourse partners Jocks and
Populars have.
The folks who are Jocks and are Populars say, well everyone thinks we have a lot of
sex, but it's actually not with as many partners as everyone thinks.
Or at least that's what they perceive.
Interestingly also, what you can see is that everyone thought that the Jocks and
the Populars had the most partners.
But when you look at the in-groups,
you're seeing that the Burnouts tend to have not significantly different
number of perceived partners as do the Jocks and the Populars.
Okay, so again, this is all based on perceptions.
What it is that the Non Jocks think Jocks are doing, and
what the Jocks think Jocks are doing.
What's really interesting is when you look at the actual data.
So how many sexual intercourse partners did Jocks really say that they had
when we asked the most quintessential, stereotypical Jocks?
What we found was that when it comes to the high status crowds,
the Jocks and the Populars,
people are way overestimating how much they're engaging in health risk behavior.
So actually,
the Jocks are not having more sexual intercourse partners than the Nerds are.
The Populars are having a little more sexual,
they have more sexual intercourse partners, but not much more.
And it turns out, the Burnouts are the ones that have significantly
more sexual intercourse partners than any of the other groups.
In fact, people have a pretty good perception of what the Burnouts are doing.
This was relatively accurate.
But for all other groups, and especially the Jocks and
Populars, people think they're engaging in health risk
behaviors more than they're reporting they actually are.
So we can look at this same pattern of results with a number of
other health risk behaviors.
Here we’re looking at binge drinking, and
what you can see is that people are grossly overestimating how much they
think the Jocks and the Populars are engaging in binge drinking.
That’s five or more drinks on a single occasion.
But they're not overestimating as much,
how much the Burnouts are engaging in binge drinking.
And in fact, they're a little bit underestimating, but
not significantly, how much the Nerds engage in binge drinking.
So again, the pattern is that, at least for
these behaviors, that people tend to overestimate health risk behaviors,
specifically, of the popular high status peers.
Here you can see results for cigarette use.
Again, you can see that Burnouts are actually engaging in this behavior
the most.
People do think they're engaging in behavior the most, but
they're also substantially overestimating how much the Jocks and
the Populars are using cigarettes.
When it comes to damaging property, again, you see a similar pattern.
People think that the Jocks and Populars are doing this a lot, but they're not.
In fact, the Populars are engaged in that behavior even less frequently than
are the Nerds.
When it comes to studying, just to demonstrate that we can see this
affect differently depending on the behavior,
it's not the case that people just overestimate whatever the Popular and
Jocks do, it's specifically health risk behaviors.
When it comes to a behavior we would think that the Nerds do a lot of,
people do overestimate how much it is that the Nerds are studying.
Here people are saying, based on our Likert scale,
that the Nerds must be studying 24 hours a day.
But actually, the four black bars here were
not statistically significantly different from one another at all.
Everyone was engaged in the same amount of studying,
people just misperceived how much the Nerds were studying.
And similarly, when it comes to the number of friends, people perceived that
the Populars and the Jocks had way more friends than the Burnouts or the Nerds.
But again, the four black bars here are completely consistent with each other
statistically, indicating that across all four groups,
folks had the exact same number of friends, statistically speaking.
But there were misperceptions.
So overall, what this is suggesting is that there seems to be a tendency for
people to overestimate how much the high status kids,
the popular kids, engage, specifically, in health risk behaviors.
And we also found that the extent to which kids think that the Populars and
the Jocks are engaging in high levels of health risk behaviors,
that predicted increase in their own engagement in substance use over time.
So in other words, not only are these perceptions wrong, but they're very
powerful in predicting adolescents' own engagement in substance use,
really suggesting that one of the reasons, one of the ways in which popularity is
effecting health risk behavior is that popular kids engage in this behavior more.
And this is the kind of popularity we're talking about, that high reputation or
status group.
They engage in substance use more and maybe because of that,
people start to perceive their engaging in that behavior, but at much,
much higher levels than they actually are.
And because everyone is trying to emulate those popular kids, those perceptions,
those erroneous perceptions of how much the Populars are engaging in substance
use, for instance,
then makes everyone else engage in substance use at even higher levels.
So we can see how that peer influence effect, starts with the Populars, and
has an effect on everyone else.
And that might be explaining why we're seeing such increasing levels of health
risk behavior, over time.
Okay.
For our next, and our last clip, we're going to talk about some of the ways that
childhood popularity is related to long term outcomes much later in adulthood,
with a few recent studies that have looked at effects even into the 40s and 50s and
beyond to see how popularity is having an impact, not just in adolescence, but
for the rest of our lives.
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