The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth - Alexandra Robbins [28]
Weed is a must, but no hard drugs.
Eating disorders are okay, but they have to be secret.”
The Exclusives gathered at someone’s house every Friday night. Populars who missed that event without a valid excuse were not allowed to sit with the group at lunch for a week. Any member who broke the rules was similarly banned from the cafeteria table and could not sit with the group at the next football game.
It’s not uncommon for popular cliques to use these types of rules to keep their members in line. A Canadian junior said that at her all-girls school, the populars hold each other to strict standards. “Hair color has to be blonde or brown and God forbid it’s curly,” she said. “My best friends won’t go out on weekends if their hair isn’t straight. We all strive to look anorexic, which is awful, but it’s reality. We are not friends with fat people. If your eyebrows are not perfect, you will be judged. You have to make fun of everything. You obviously have to drink, not throw up, smoke cigarettes and weed. A popular girl needs to be pretty, skinny, dress nice, party hard on weekends, not be a virgin, [and] be funny, daring, and rebellious.”
Many adults know that membership in the popular clique does not necessarily indicate the dictionary definition of popularity. A more accurate definition in the high school context could be “a shared recognition among peers that a particular youth has achieved prestige, visibility, or high social status.” It took a long time, however, for developmental psychology literature to catch up to this definition. For decades, when researchers conducted surveys and experiments on popularity, they measured it in terms of sociometrics, which means that psychologists asked students to rate their classmates by how much they liked them or wanted to spend time with them. The researchers would simply tally up the results and consider those with the most votes to be the most popular.
More recently, however, a funny thing happened. Psychologists started noticing that when they asked students directly to rank how popular they thought classmates were—separately from how much they wished to spend time with them—the two lists were strikingly different. To address this discrepancy, psychologists created a new term: perceived popularity. Perceived popularity refers to how students rank a classmate’s reputation rather than their personal opinion about her.
Other studies examined the traits that students attributed to perceived popular students versus sociometrically popular students. Students viewed classmates who were sociometrically popular as kind and trustworthy. They viewed classmates who were perceived popular as dominant, aggressive, and conceited. Students reported that those who were perceived popular and sociometrically popular—some students are both—exhibited all of the aforementioned traits. (Anecdotally, many students with no knowledge of these terms call popular subgroups “mean popular” and “nice popular.”)
Whitney often wondered how she could be popular and yet have so few real friends at school. Eventually, she realized that social standing does not necessarily translate to social acceptance. This is a crucial concept that so many teens—those who are trying to achieve popularity and those who are disappointed that they can’t—tend to miss: To be popular does not mean to be liked.1
NOAH, PENNSYLVANIA | THE BAND GEEK
Band practice moved along tediously as the director broke down the show, practicing segments four measures at a time with each instrument, then bringing all of the sections together for a fifteen-second blast of music. Noah and the rest of the Honor Guard raced around, moving props and setting up instruments and microphones.
Afterward, when Noah waited with Leigh for her father to drive them home, Leigh asked him to come over. “I can’t tonight,” Noah replied. “I really need to study for my physics test. It’s important.” Noah wanted to do well in all of his classes, but he especially wanted to prove himself as the only junior in AP Physics.
Leigh quieted. Noah knew