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Many studies show that once students slap a label onto someone, they don’t want to remove it. It can be difficult for the child who was socially awkward, nerdy, timid, or odd in elementary or middle school to change his reputation, even if he alters his behavior—and especially if he attends a small school. The major exception occurs when one’s status drops; classmates are only too eager to acknowledge a peer’s downward mobility by demoting her to a so-called freak, slut, or loser.

In the early 1900s, a German gym teacher told the popular students in her class ahead of time to defy her classroom instructions. When the teacher asked her students to raise their right hands during a calisthenics exercise, the popular children instead raised their left. After class, students recalled that the unpopular students were the ones who disobeyed the teacher. Subsequent experiments conducted by psychologists have had similar results.

Here’s why. As previously discussed, when social circles form, group members inevitably develop stereotypes about each other and about outsiders’ traits and behaviors. They might initially base these assumptions on first impressions—and first impressions cling. Beyond those impressions, as University of Pennsylvania education professor Stanton Wortham has written, people “ ‘rent’ categories from the society in order to make sense of themselves and others. These categories of identity often come packaged in larger models that show habitual characteristics, relationships, and events involving recognizable types of people.”

One reason labels stick is that when we place someone into a category, we expect him to behave in a way that’s consistent with that category. That’s why students who defy those expectations might become cafeteria fringe or further marginalized. For some groups, the inconsistency is too confusing to handle. As a result, they also tend to interpret inconsistent behaviors more negatively than might be warranted. Many students told me a version of this description: “I feel like I have to act and look the way I am perceived. I can’t wear anything too low-cut because I’m the ‘innocent one.’ I can’t goof off because I’m the ‘smart responsible one,’ ” said a California junior. “In most ways I am those things. But sometimes, when I do things that are unlike me, I get looks as if I’m not acting like I should act.”

This reaction to inconsistency can apply to racial stereotypes as well. A Maryland high school teacher said, “Students who break away from stereotypes are often somewhat ostracized from the ‘race group’ as a whole. When black or Hispanic students do things that are considered ‘un-black’ or ‘un-Hispanic,’ they tend to lose friends,” an observation supported by many of my student interviews.

Labels stick because people want them to stick. It’s easier to sort out your social world when everyone stays in her place. Consistency is less taxing than inconsistency. It’s less work for the brain. Several studies have shown that teenagers are more likely to remember behavior that conforms to stereotypes than behavior that doesn’t. Similarly, it’s easy for our brains to misremember behavior that does not conform to our expectations, which explains why the German students assumed it was the unpopular students, rather than the popular, who had disobeyed instructions.

Psychologists have a name for this set of expectations based on social status. “Reputational bias” typically surfaces during elementary school, as children address their need to begin compartmentalizing their social environment. Adults, too, have this type of memory process. Canadian researchers asked experienced judges to score the short programs of fourteen figure skaters. Six of the judges had heard of only half of the skaters; the other six knew of only the other half. The judges gave significantly higher scores to the skaters whose names were already familiar—particularly for technical merit, a supposedly objective measure. “Why is the exact same skating performance being given higher