Nobody actually likes the popular kids in high school. You wouldn’t know that from the deference they receive, from peers and teachers alike. Yet several years ago, reading Dr. Ellen Hendriksen, the author delved into several studies in how people make friends—and the outcomes were surprising, and frequently ugly. Our social structure relies on principles which we frequently can’t see or understand.
Quoting a 1998 study by Dr. Jennifer Parkhurst et al., Hendriksen writes that Parkhurst studied high school social dynamics, a popular field in social psychology. They concluded that popular kids are well-liked, amiable, and natural leaders. But Parkhurst took the unusual step of reading her outcomes to the students she’d studied. To her astonishment, one of her subjects stood up and said (I’m paraphrasing): “Nuh-uh!”
One of Parkhurst’s student subjects, supported by others, reported that peers often widely dislike, even despise, the “popular” kids. They achieve popularity by dominating others, waving their weight and social connections around, and behaving in an entitled manner. Parkhurst, astounded by the outcomes (and probably suffering her own flashbacks to adolescence), reevaluated the data. Turns out, people obey popular kids mostly out of fear and fatigue.
Growing up in a military household, my family moved frequently. Many military brats say likewise, but my father served in the Coast Guard, which mostly operates domestically, and therefore can afford to move personnel more frequently than other branches. Only once did we stay anywhere longer than two years. This proved particularly frustrating because, I now realize, most schools have an unofficial hazing process usually lasting a year.
Without the long-term longitudinal experience that comes from staying in one place for long, I truly never learned to read group dynamics in large populations. If Hendriksen hadn’t reprinted Parkhurst’s findings, translated into vernacular English, I might’ve persisted in believing that I received that hazing alone, unaware that everyone else experienced it too. I certainly would’ve remained mired in the delusion that the popular kids spoke for everyone.
(I know others, like migrant farmworkers’ kids, undoubtedly have it worse. I’m not comparing scars here.)
Put another way, I legitimately believed, not only throughout childhood but well into adulthood, that the loudest, most attention-hungry person in the room spoke for everyone. Presumably we all experience that phase, including that person. You presumably watched Mean Girls too. The persons demanding others’ attention and obedience legitimately believe they’re shepherding the crowd where it wants to go, simply keeping stragglers in line.
Something which former gymnast turned lawyer Rachael Denhollander said recently stuck with me. Speaking in the documentary For Our Daughters, Denhollander said: “It costs you something to side with the weak and the vulnerable and the oppressed. It costs you nothing to side with the one who’s in power.” Denhollander meant this about women and girls sexually abused in church, but it applies, mutatis mutandis, to all relationships with power.
For most children, public schools are our first interaction with organized power. Teachers have nigh-absolute power over their students, and I believe most wield that power with benevolent intentions. But as with most powerful people, there’s a gulf between intention and act. Whether they bend to a malicious minority, or go along with administrative dictates to get along, the outcome is largely similar for students, inexperienced at resisting injustice.
Popular kids and “mean girls” basically reproduce the regimes they witness, filtered through children’s eyes. They misunderstand the larger purposes behind adult authority; they only witness the demand for obedience and conformity, and repeat it. Meanwhile, adults don’t think like children, and attribute adult reasoning to childlike behavior. Both the popular kids and the subject-blind adults side with the powerful, which costs them nothing.
Kids could, hypothetically, organize against the popular kids and the adults who enable them. Indeed, something Malcolm Gladwell wrote recently stands out, that subgroups like Goths resist by making themselves look unapproachable, thus exempting themselves from popularity dynamics. But the outcasts shepherded by the cool kids, almost by definition, lack the leadership and organizational skills to unionize and form more healthy social dynamics. They’re doomed to struggle.
My father timed his retirement to coincide with my high school graduation, whereupon the family relocated one last time, to their hometown. This dumped me into adult responsibilities with no existing social network to streamline the transition. I hope other “nerds” and outcasts at least preserved their nominal support systems, because to this day, I struggle to read rooms. No wonder so many adults still have nightmares about high school.
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