The level of popularity you experienced in childhood and adolescence is still affecting you today in ways that you may not even realize. Learn about how psychologists study popularity and how these same concepts can be used in adulthood to be more successful at work, become better parents, and have a happier life.
How Did Your Parents Determine How Popular You Were?
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Psychology of Popularity
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Why are Some People More Popular Than Others? (Part 2)
We will review why facial and body attractiveness plays a role in popularity and how parents can make
their children more popular.
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Dr. Mitch PrinsteinJohn Van Seters Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, and Author of Popular: The Power of Likeability in a Status-Obsessed World
UNC Department of Psychology and Neuroscience
[MUSIC]
Hi. Welcome back.
Before we start this next piece, I'd like for you to do a small exercise.
Think back to the time when you were in kindergarten.
Remember what it was like with your peers.
Remember running around, remember sitting in a classroom?
Remember what it felt like?
Try and get a good vivid picture of what that experience was like
when you were about four, five, or six years old when you were with other peers.
I'm going to ask you to take a second to jot down a couple of notes to remind
you of what story, what image you're thinking about.
But most importantly, try and think about not just which
image is standing out in your mind, but what do you think that story means to you?
Why do you think that that is the story that stands out immediately
when I'm asking you to think back to that age.
Once you're done jotting that down, then start again.
Okay, welcome back.
We've been talking about all of the different things that play a role in why
some kids are more popular than others and what that might mean for us as adults.
The last topic that we're going to talk about has to do with
all of the things that parents can do.
Or family experiences can happen, that might lead some kids to be more popular
than others, and this is a huge area of research in developmental psychology.
So I'm just going to give you a little quick example of a few of the different
topics, and I'd be more than happy to share more information as needed.
Of course, the idea here is that we might find that
there are things about parents that are then related to kids.
But in specific, we might think about the ways that parents could play a role
because of their own social skills because of parent's own psychopathology.
As well as other possible factors that might be genetically transmitted or
models within the parent environment that might lead to kid's social competence, and
might lead to popularity.
So this very simple question quickly becomes very complicated one,
because there are a number of possible parent factors that can relate to a number
of possible child factors that would all relate to kids' popularity.
Let's talk a little bit first about parent social competence.
Is it the case that parents who are more socially skilled have kids that are more
socially skilled?
Well the answer is yes.
In fact, Martha Putallaz has done really interesting work showing that.
When looking at how parents interact with each other in a waiting room while their
kids are involved in her own research studies,
she can see which kids will be the most popular.
She can predict that statistically based on how moms
interacted with each other in the waiting room.
There's a very clear way in which kids model
learn their social skills based on how there parents model those skills.
But there are a lot of different ways that we see that.
Not only do we see a modelling of social skills but also there are some
parents that believe that social skills and social interactions are important.
And those parents that tend to emphasize how much their kids needs to make friends,
believe that it's important to be nice to others, believe it's important to share,
and not just believe that, but actually do something about that.
They instruct their children to do that and
they demonstrate it by how they interact with adults themselves.
That all seems to play a very big role.
We also see that moms who have very large social networks of their own
tend to have kids that do very well.
Because moms who have very large social networks tend to know more people for
their kids to get practice learning how to behave socially.
And the more practice that a child gets by putting them into situations
where they'll interact with peers, they'll learn about how to resolve fights,
they'll learn about good sociable skills.
Those kids do, in fact, grow up to be more popular,
so all of those efforts really do make a difference.
One of the things that's really interesting,
though, is that Martha Putallaz also found that simply asking parents to think
about what their own peer experiences were like when they were kids is something that
can be used to predict how popular their children will be, and
that's the exercise that I just asked you to do.
I asked you to think about an experience that you had
when you were in kindergarten age.
This is just the same thing that Martha Butalis did,
and I actually did, myself, in my own dissertation.
And I asked parents to report how much they could remember a specific story,
and why that story stood out to them.
And why they thought it stood out in their mind.
And here's what some of those parents say.
There were some parents that said,
it reminds me of how important it is to have strong bonds with friends.
It was a great time.
Or I had happy times with my friends, I felt confident and
comfortable with myself when I was with them.
If your story, and
why you think you remember that story has this kind of a theme to it,
then we would say that your recollections have a positive social frame.
You remember your peer experiences as being happy and
surrounded by good, positive, social experiences.
But sometimes, when people are asked the same question,
and they're asked why they think that they remembered a specific story,
they say something a little bit different.
They say, for instance, it reminds me how cruel and mean kids can be, and
I always pray that my own kids' feelings don't get hurt like that.
Or it hurts so much that teasing was antagonizing to me, it represents the pain
we suffer as children to try and fit in, belong and have people like us.
And we would call these types of memories or
explanations of why these memories bubbled up as a negative social frame.
Anything that represents something where people were being mean to you, or
you were being mean to others, or there was cruelty or hostility.
But yet, a third set of moms reported something that was far more anxious or
lonely sounding.
They said things like, I was somewhat insecure.
I cared what others thought, and I felt isolated.
Or it set a pattern for me that made me uncomfortable in groups of strangers.
So again, these were moms that talked about,
feeling generally like the peer place was scary, and they were somehow left out.
What's really interesting is that research suggests that if you ask moms these
questions and you code moms into positive, negative,
or anxious lonely social frames, you actually can predict pretty well
how well their kids will be in terms of their popularity.
So here's the social preference score.
Remember that's likeability of kindergarten kids grouped
by whether their moms were in positive, negative or lonely social frames.
And the most dramatic finding here that you'll see is moms that had
negative social frames Have kids that are really low in likability.
They were much more likely to be in the rejected group.
Whereas of course, moms who had the positive social frames,
had kids who were much more likely to be popular.
They had high scores of likability.
But an interesting thing happened with the moms who had anxious,
lonely social frames.
In research studies that have looked at this those moms sometimes have kids that
do well or in this case you can see have kids that do a little bit not so well.
They tend to be a little bit disliked.
And the reason why moms with anxious lonely social frames
tend to have kids that may do well and may not do so
well is because it seems that those moms really vary.
And whether those anxious, lonely experiences have led them to teach their
kids to withdraw from peer experiences, in which case their kids get pretty rejected.
Or if those moms decided to reinvest in their kid's relationships and
make sure their kids didn't have it as hard as they did.
Some of those moms decide that they are going to put extra effort into their kids
peer relationships to make sure their kids are not anxious or lonely like they were.
And when those moms do so,
their kids do just as well as the moms with the positive social frames.
So that leads us to wonder, what is it that those moms do?
What is it that a parent can do within their social environment
that might make their kids more popular?
Well again there's lots of information here and a huge literature so
I'm just going to touch on a couple of things.
But basically moms and dads can do
things to change the way they coach their kids through peer experiences.
How they manage their children's social interactions.
There's also some things they can do to change the environment
that their kids are brought up in.
And the way that that family experience is different will change their
children's developing social confidence, and ultimately their kids' populariy.
Of course they also, can provide ways of demonstrating right in front of their
kids, how to interact with others.
How to make an effort, and be nice, and share, and be sociable.
And that also can play a role.
Really briefly I'll mention, that when it comes to the social environment,
we see that kids who have a strong attachment to their parents, and
by this I mean classic research that suggested that within the first two years
of life there are some kids that show an ability to connect with their parents,
and their parents show an ability to provide warmth with their children,
that allows children to go out and explore in ways that feel safe.
That's called a secure attachment.
And that's contrasted with parent-children dyads that have an insecure attachment.
Kids who feel like they can't leave their parents safely.
Or kids who feel that even when they're with their parents, it's not a warm and
supportive experience.
People have found that kids who come from securely attached
relationships tend to do much better with their peers.
Than those who are that come from insecure attachments.
We also know that parents that express their emotions with their children in very
appropriate adaptive ways, they let them know when they're happy or
sad and they explain those emotions, those kids do really well.
Moms and dads who play with their kids have kids who do really well.
Dads who tend to engage in more rough and
tumble play with their kids, moms engage in more turn taking play.
Results suggest that both of those types of play are important for kids to do well.
Moms and dads each contribute something differently.
Doesn't matter if it's a mom or if it's a dad per se,
it's just good to get a broad repertoire of parenting behaviors.
And parents who provide again.
A warm, supportive but still sometimes strict parenting style
tend to have kids that do much better, than those who come from parents,
who are very very permissive or very very strict without being warm.
There is also a lot of research to suggest that the ways moms hover around
their kids, while their kids are engaging in experiences with their peers
tends to play a very big role.
Those moms who have kindergarten kids that directly monitor their children.
They watch their children,
they're there to make sure that their kids are behaving well.
That's good.
Kids that have parents who continue to directly monitor them that closely,
even as they're getting older, that's not so good anymore.
That's too much oversight.
It's much better for parents to more indirect monitoring at that point.
They might stay far away from where their kids are playing or they might not even be
there at all, but they do still check in and ask how their kids did.
And that's good as the kids get older.
Moms who do that have kids who tend to be more popular.
Who tend to initiate more frequently play contacts in both structured and
unstructured activities, that tends to be really helpful.
By structured activities, I mean things like signing them up for Cub Scouts,
or Boy Scouts.
Or signing them up for the soccer team, or ballet lessons.
It's good to sign up children for
structured contacts if you want your children to be popular but
it's also good to have a healthy amount of unstructured playtime as well.
Not everything has to be structured.
And providing children with both of those types of peer experiences
does seem to make kids more popular over time.
And last of course parents that tend to coach their kids even in the middle of
an argument between their child and other peers,
that kind of coaching can be really helpful, and that's what a lot of anxious
lonely moms to sometimes to make sure that their kids are still in the peer group.
And even if they're feeling hesitant or shy, they're coaching them right there
to make sure that they're interacting, initiating contacts and
establishing new period relationships, and all of that pays off for popularity.
So overall, it's really important for
parents to play a very active role in their kids' social lives, but
be sensitive to the differences in their kids' needs as kids get older.
And parents that do that tend to have kids that do much better in
terms of social competence, and they're also much more popular.
I've talked a lot about moms,
because almost all of the research in this area is on moms.
But we are seeing with every passing generation that dads are playing a much,
much stronger role in how they are rearing children.
And hopefully the research will soon catch up.
So far what we see is that everything we see from moms applies for dads or
a second parent as well.
Even if they're not a dad it could be any kind fo co-parent that provides something
incremental above and beyond what a first parent might provide to kids.
So that's also very important to do.
And we should think about how our own popularity
might change the ways that we are thinking about peer experiences, and
how are own experiences might be changing the way that we're socializing children
as they are growing up and learning their own social skills.
The research suggests that everything that we're doing in those areas
is making a difference for our kids' popularity.
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