At 15, being in demand and being close to someone can look like the same kind of social success. A University of Virginia study that followed 169 teenagers for a decade suggests they lead to different places. By age 25, the teens who had been widely sought after by their classmates reported more social anxiety, while those with strong best friendships reported less social anxiety, higher self-worth and fewer depressive symptoms.

The study, led by Rachel Narr with psychologist Joseph Allen and published in Child Development, is one of several long-running projects that have tried to measure what popularity costs and what it gives back. None of them can prove that chasing popularity causes later problems. Taken together, though, they describe a consistent pattern: being liked and being close to people tends to go with better outcomes, while being known, admired or seen as “cool” often does not.

Two ways of measuring social success

The Virginia team assessed the same young people every year from 15 to 25. According to the Society for Research in Child Development’s summary of the paper, the researchers measured two separate things at 15.

The first was the quality of each teen’s closest friendship, judged by the best friend’s own report of how much attachment, support and personal sharing the friendship involved. The second was popularity, counted as the number of classmates in the same grade who named that teen as someone they would like to spend time with.

The two measures were only weakly related. Many teens had one without the other, which allowed the researchers to see how each one played out on its own. Neither predicted much change in mental health over the short term. The differences appeared later, as the group moved into their twenties.

“Being well-liked by a large group of people cannot take the place of forging deep, supportive friendships,” Allen said when the study was released. Narr suggested that teens who were popular in high school “may be more prone to social anxiety later in life.”

The sample was small and drawn from one region of the United States, and the published summary does not give effect sizes. The finding is a correlation over time, not a demonstration that popularity itself produces anxiety. It does run against a common assumption, that the most sought-after teenagers are the ones best set up for adult life.

Liked versus high-status

Part of the explanation may lie in the word itself. Mitch Prinstein, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of the 2017 book Popular, argues that there are two quite different kinds of popularity.

One is likability, which Prinstein describes in an American Psychological Association podcast as being based on how much a person makes others “feel happy, valued and included.” The other is status: being visible, influential and dominant. His summary of the research is blunt: “Likeability is good, status is pretty bad.”

Prinstein says children who are likable from an early age tend to do better for decades, while high-status teens grow up at greater risk of addiction, anxiety and depression, and he points to Allen’s Virginia studies as part of the evidence. He also notes that research has found many high-status children are not especially well liked by their peers. In his account, status works a little like an addiction: once a person has it, or wants it, there never seems to be enough.

That is one researcher’s summary of a large body of work. It also raises a question about the Virginia study, whose popularity measure, how many classmates wanted to spend time with someone, does not separate being liked from being high in status.

What happened to the “cool” kids

An earlier study from Allen’s group looked at status more directly. Researchers followed 184 teenagers from public schools in suburban and urban areas of the southeastern United States, from age 13 to 23, collecting information from the teens, their peers and their parents.

The study focused on what the authors called pseudomature behavior: trying to seem older in order to win popularity and attention. In practice that meant early romantic involvement, minor delinquency, and placing a high value on spending time with physically attractive peers. At 13, teens who behaved this way were seen as popular by their classmates.

A decade later, the picture had changed. According to the release accompanying the 2014 paper, by age 22 these young adults were rated by peers as less competent at managing relationships. They were more likely to have significant problems with alcohol and drugs, and more likely to have engaged in criminal activity.

Allen’s explanation was that keeping the image going took escalating effort. Over time, he said, “these teens needed more and more extreme behaviors to try to appear cool.” The habits built to hold on to status, on this evidence, did not turn into the skills adult relationships need.

When adults chase fame and image

The cost of building a life around being admired does not appear to stop at school. In a study published in the Journal of Research in Personality in 2009, researchers Niemiec, Ryan and Deci of the University of Rochester surveyed 147 alumni from two universities in their second year after graduation and again a year later.

The researchers separated two kinds of life goals. Extrinsic goals included wealth, fame and image, summed up in survey items such as achieving “the look I’ve been after.” Intrinsic goals included deep and lasting relationships, personal growth, helping others and community involvement.

Graduates who valued either kind of goal tended to make progress toward it. The difference was in what reaching the goal did for them. In the paper’s abstract, attaining intrinsic aspirations “related positively to psychological health,” while attaining extrinsic aspirations “related positively to indicators of ill-being.” According to the University of Rochester’s account of the study, people who reached extrinsic goals reported more negative emotions such as shame and anger, and more physical signs of stress, including headaches, stomachaches and low energy.

The authors suggested several reasons, among them that status-driven goals can crowd out time with friends and family, and that comparing oneself with those further ahead breeds a sense of falling short. Deci’s conclusion was that pursuing such goals “does not contribute to having a satisfying life.” This was a small, well-educated sample followed for one year, and the authors called for research in other groups.

What these studies can and cannot say

All three studies are observational. They follow people over time and track what goes with what, so they cannot rule out other explanations. A teenager whose social life rests on status may already differ in temperament or family background from one who invests in a single close friend. The samples are American and relatively small, and the details reported here come mainly from university summaries and abstracts rather than the full papers.

What makes the pattern worth attention is that it appears across different ages and measures, and in work from more than one research group, and that it points the same way as the much larger Harvard Study of Adult Development, which began following 724 participants in 1938. Its director, Robert Waldinger, has reported that satisfaction with relationships at age 50 predicted health at 80 better than cholesterol did. “Everybody needs at least one solid relationship,” he told the Harvard Gazette, “someone whom they feel they can count on in times of need.”

Popularity can open doors, and being liked by many people is not a problem in itself. The research suggests the cost comes when popularity becomes the foundation: when the effort goes into being seen rather than being known, and the close relationships that seem to matter most later in life are left to look after themselves.

Photo: RDNE Stock project / Pexels