Three Faces of Teen Popularity
https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cdev.13269
This paper discusses a recent study that examined how certain traits in young adults have affected their popularity. Most young people are concerned about their image and status within their peer group. Popularity, gained through both positive and negative adjustment outcomes, tends to be preferred to being liked. In the past, researchers had concluded the existence of two forms of popularity, prosocial and coercive/aggressive. Prosocial adolescents accumulate status by building social alliances, using cooperation, as well as empathy and emotional support, to make themselves rewarding and indispensable. Coercive adolescents accumulate status using power – displays of physical and relational aggression designed to make an individual visible, feared, and respected. This study, however, confirmed the existence of a third type of popularity, bistrategic adolescents (aka Machiavellians). These people combine coercive and prosocial tactics to gain additional status by deploying cooperation to mitigate damage arising from forceful exercise of power. Adolescents displaying prosocial and bistrategic popularity showed a more well-adjusted social and emotional profile in the long-term, while aggressive popular adolescents presented the highest levels of internalizing symptoms, as dominance based primarily on fear may interfere with the ability to maintain close relations with others.
This paper examined many topics covered in this class. Game theory was very prominent, in that one could build a game (as shown below) for any two people to examine how their personalities/popularity is shaped by peer exposure. The principal of mixed strategy is heavily prominent in the behaviors of 12% of the study sample who displayed bistrategic adolescence. The researchers noted a high level of popularity with this group, who were less prosocial than prosocial popular adolescents, but also less aggressive than coercive popular adolescents. By employing a mixture of these strategies, they were able to achieve a more optimal payoff in popularity. Twenty percent of the sample in the study also displayed pure strategy by favoring the prosocial approach, and five percent employed pure coercive strategy. While the actual values cannot be determined, it can be concluded that each person in the sample chose a strategy for attaining popularity by analyzing their individual payoffs, which vary based on innate personality traits, social exposure, and age. This study also examined the notion of positive and negative relationships that develop as a result of the type of strategic popularity that the person displays. As stated above, those displaying aggressive behavior tended to form negative relationships, while those employing prosocial behavior, at least to some extent, were able to form positive relationships with their peers.
