The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth - Alexandra Robbins [159]
Some schools have attempted to ease clique tensions, such as those at Riverland, by requiring school uniforms, to create the illusion of sameness among the student population. Students I interviewed, however, said that uniforms don’t work. “There’s still pressure to act and look a certain way,” said a senior at an all-girls school in Arizona. “If you don’t have the new Vera Bradley design as your backpack, or you’re not wearing the cutest flats or the cool Vans, then you’re not popular. People spend crazy amounts of money on their shoes, backpacks, and designer earrings. The uniforms were supposed to stop girls from spending too much time worrying about clothes or what they look like, but [they] do just the opposite.”
In a study of a Southern middle school’s incentive-based voluntary uniform policy, within the first three weeks the number of students wearing uniforms dropped from 70 percent to less than 40 percent. Eventually fewer than a fifth of the students complied, and even then, mostly on days the school rewarded them for it. At many schools with uniform policies, shoes and accessories end up playing the same roles as clothing does at non-uniform schools. “The people who don’t care wear Birkenstocks (I do),” said a Florida senior. “If you wear fake Uggs, you get made fun of. If you wear other boots, you get made fun of. And if you wear black boots, you get looked at weird.”
If students experience such a strong urge to conform, then why do they resist standardized clothing? The answer returns us to the battle between the group and the individual, the dichotomy of hoping to stand out yet striving to blend in. As writer-performer Quentin Crisp wrote in his 1968 autobiography, The Naked Civil Servant, “The young always have the same problem—how to rebel and conform at the same time. They solve this problem by defying their parents and copying one another.” Although people conform as a way to belong to a group, they nonetheless want that group to seem unique and special. This need to be distinct from other groups can even overtake the desire for a positive group image, which may partly explain why some cliques pride themselves on being mean.
You’ve seen this phenomenon before. Popular students might stop using catchphrases once nerds adopt them, celebrities move on to new designer denim when trickle-down versions arrive on discount-store racks. Men are less likely to order a small steak when it is labeled a “ladies’ cut.” British fashionistas deserted Burberry caps once they became ubiquitous among soccer hooligans.
A basic tension exists between the opposing drives for similarity and distinction. According to marketing professor Jonah Berger, “People resolve [this tension] by defining themselves in terms of distinctive category memberships. When people feel overly similar, their renewed need for individuation drives them to emphasize distinctive group memberships (e.g., band member rather than Plainsville High student); when people feel excessively different, they emphasize broad, generic social category memberships (e.g., Plainsville High student rather than Chess Club member). Membership in small groups allows people to feel similar and different at the same time: similar because they are part of a group and different because the group is separate from the masses.” Freud referred to the hostilities that can arise from the perceptions of some of these smaller distinctions as “the narcissism of minor differences.”
The social process that results from this need for distinction is called divergence. Except in the case of perceived upward mobility, groups generally don’t want to be mistaken for one another. Scene kids don’t want to be misidentified as preps. Geeks aren’t interested in mimicking the punks. Even as Bianca insisted the preps conform to her fashion standards, she wore anklets as a way to distinguish herself.
In an intriguing divergence experiment at Stanford, Berger and his team distributed yellow Livestrong wristbands to freshmen in a target dorm and a control dorm. They told the students it was “wear