Popular: The Power of Likability in a Status-Obsessed World - Hardcover

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Mitch Prinstein is the John Van Seters Distinguished Professor of Psychology and the Director of Clinical Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He and his research have been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, U.S. News & World Report, Time magazine, New York magazine, Newsweek, Reuters, Family Circle, Real Simple, and elsewhere.

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Chapter 1

The Adult Playground

Where Popularity Still Matters

Popularity gets you nowhere after high school; matter of fact, it’s the last thing on your mind.

—Anonymous

On a Tuesday evening in October, about two hours outside of Chicago, a woman wearing a short skirt attempted to sit gracefully on a chair made for a small child. That woman was Paula, a friend of mine from college. When I first met her, Paula had brown, tousled hair, and recently had lost some significant weight. Today, she is an ER nurse. She is married, has two sons, and has become a bit of a fashionista—always buying new shoes and trendy handbags. Nevertheless, she usually still thinks of herself as “that pudgy girl with the sloppy hair,” and on that Tuesday evening, she texted me just before the start of the school board meeting at her son’s middle school. “It’s all coming back to me while I sit here. The teasing, the anxiety, the homework. I feel like someone may shoot a spitball at any moment. :)”

Paula was at the meeting to lobby for funds that would revitalize a gifted program she desperately wanted for her children. After six months of trying without any progress, she was losing patience. She’d written a coherent proposal, developed a budget, gathered data from comparable programs in nearby districts, and even asked a few teachers to testify on behalf of her idea.

“If we have a better gifted program, fewer parents will send their children to the local private school,” she argued. “The retention of gifted children in the school system will lead to better test scores and a return to the levels of state funding we had three years ago. The program will essentially pay for itself.” But the previous month, the board had allocated funds for a faculty lounge in the same school instead.

I checked in with Paula a few days later to see how her meeting had gone. She told me that just before it started, a woman named Susan showed up.

“She walks in, probably just to show off another new Birkin bag, and looks around the room like we’re supposed to throw roses at her feet or something,” Paula said.

Susan’s daughter was in the same class as Paula’s son. It was Susan’s first appearance at a school board meeting. Several of the other parents in the room saw her and waved enthusiastically. One woman immediately ran over to give her a hug and cried, “Oh my goodness, it has been so long. We have to catch up!”

“Ugh, I got so annoyed when I saw how everyone kisses up to Susan,” Paula told me. “But I gave her a hug, too.”

The meeting started, and the board president began by soliciting ideas for how to help the school develop a higher profile within the district. A few minutes into the discussion, Susan stood up and addressed the room.

“I agree that we need to think about how to make ourschool stand out. I was visiting my sister last week in Michigan, and a few kids from the gifted program at her kid’s middle school had just won a science tournament. The next thing you know, the school was in the paper, and the drug company that sponsored the tournament gave the school a big donation. Why don’t we do that here? Do we even have a gifted program?”

Within thirty minutes, the board voted to approve additional funding for the program. Paula was both elated and furious—it was great news for her son, but in a few minutes, Susan had achieved what Paula hadn’t been able to do in six months. Susan hadn’t offered any new arguments or presented any research on school funding trends. But somehow, her ideas got traction.

“Everyone is always just so excited to do whatever Susan wants,” Paula complained. “Sometimes I can’t stand it.”

Joe is a professor at a well-known university. He’s been on staff for ten years, but was not supposed to be next in line for a promotion. His more senior colleague, Franklin, has been in the same position three years longer and has a more impressive record of scientific publications. In just the past year, Franklin obtained a prestigious grant to support his work, and a top journal featured one of his papers as its lead article, suggesting that his research was making a very important impact in the field.

Joe has also been publishing, but in journals of much lesser quality, and he has never been awarded a grant.

Nevertheless, everyone loves Joe. He always has something amusing to offer at faculty meetings. He regularly makes the rounds up and down the halls of his department, having energetic doorway conversations, and he’s always open-minded to whatever opinions are expressed when department politics emerge. People reflexively smile when they see him.

That is not the case with Franklin, though. In fact, heis so contentious that his very name has become an adjective in the department, as in: “Let’s add this to the consent agenda, so no one gets all Franklin about it.”

At one faculty meeting, the agenda included a discussion about which of two courses should be added to the requirements for a second undergraduate major offered by the department. A committee that had spent the past three months developing the proposal outlined the pros and cons for each of the course selections, and then asked for comments and questions. As Franklin’s hand launched up, the rest of the faculty shifted in their chairs and avoided eye contact with him.

“I don’t know why we want a second major at all,” he began. “I’ve been saying for years that this is a huge waste of time that puts burden on our staff, and also on us. I spent three hours last week meeting with students about this, and I don’t even know why we have it. One major is enough for our department!”

Groans could be heard all around the room. Many of the faculty lowered their heads, ostensibly to check something on their phones. After a moment of uncomfortable silence, the committee chair opened the discussion to other comments. A few people praised the committee for its work and expressed a clear rationale for which course should complete the major requirements. A consensus quickly became evident, with enthusiastic nodding around the room.

But Franklin was not convinced. “Look, I think this is a huge mistake,” he said, interrupting the next speaker. “You are all going to wish you had stopped this second major when you had the chance,” at which he defiantly picked up his iPad and tuned out for the rest of the meeting.

Two weeks later, a senior professorship opened just above the level occupied by both Franklin and Joe. It was Joe who received the promotion.

Jennifer is a successful statistician who works at a federally funded research center that is testing new cancer drugs. By age thirty-five, she already had become the director of her unit at the institute and the president of a national professional society for statisticians, and she had even been invited to the White House as a member of an expert panel. She also is deeply in love with her wife of fifteen years, an oncologist.

But Jennifer is not happy. In fact, on many days she’s pretty down on herself. Even though she knows she is doing well professionally, she just can’t shake the feeling that she is somehow inferior to her colleagues. The...