Do popular kids exist?

How so?

The chavs I encounter always think they're the popular ones. Usually, there are enough of them that they get away with their delusions. Actually, I never really saw the chavs at my high school interacting with the kids who I would have put as the genuinly popular people. They only ever picked fights with the loser people. And the really popular kids would be on the losers' side if anything happened, because no-one really likes the chavs.

Yeah, chavs I encounter seem to equate 'popular among their group' with 'popular within the school as a whole'.

You know, it's kind of weird, but it honestly took seeing this thread to make me realize that popularity as described by Disney teen movies basically ended in middle school. Now "popular" has just become this weird code word for "douche", while the actually popular people are just refered to as "nice" or "fun". And even in middle school, it wasn't this ridiculously rigidly defined caste system - but the people that everyone half-admired/half-envied were kind of jerks, but I suspect that's just a by-product of everyone being, you know, 11 years old. It even started to dissolve by 8th grade. Now the different interest groups rarely get any contact with each other, but when we do, it's mostly civil. And without further ado, here they are:

• The Type A's: AP students, theater geeks, student government members, club leaders, etc. Also includes about half of the music and art group. The more outgoing half of LGBT crowd tends to hang out here, too.
• The Athletes: In addition to the typical football/basketball crowd, we have work-out maniacs, skaters, track team people, swim team people, and people who aren't in sports but are crazy adventurous.
• The Stoners: God, these people are boring. Glassy-eyed, spacing out, and prone to saying "Whatever" a lot. Mostly hang out with their own kind, and try to make clever jibes when they encounter members of another group.
• The Misfits: The other half of the artsy crowd, the other half of the LGBT crowd, the goths, the hipsters, the vocal atheists (although some hang out with the Type A's), etc.
• The Outcasts: A very small category mostly only populated by people with Down's Syndrome or other severe birth defects.

In middle school I was part of a pretty tiny class. So the social groups were mostly just divided between guys and girls. I don't think there was enough room for anyone to be unpopular, but it's also possible that I was on top of the food chain so I didn't notice. I think I enjoyed talking to everyone though.

In high school, I was part of a huge class, so most people were just strangers. It was loosely divided into the underachievers who didn't particularly care about school and the overachievers who did. I hung out with the overachievers, who also seemed to be most of the athletes. I don't think there was any distinction between jocks and nerds. Jocks were nerds, but there wasn't anyone to look down on them so no one cared.

I'm kind of an asocial person, so I'm assuming I'd normally be an outcast normally, but everyone was pretty friendly to me. And I was cordial to everyone. Um... it wasn't very notable. There were some individual grievances between individuals, but nothing I could consider any kind of caste conflict. If you don't like someone, don't hang out with them. That's about it.

Yeah, I think for there to be true cliques, we need to hit some sweet spot between "too small to make meaningful sub-groups" and "too large for everyone to know each other." My high school was the latter, but my middle school hit the sweet spot.

I think all those Disney "teen" movies that talk about this Popularity Food Chain are aimed at preteens, not actual teens. I mean, in high school it's R-rated movies all the way (plus Pixar - everyone loves Pixar).

Psychologically, there is actually a popularity hierarchy. It's based more on personality rather than which kid has the shiny Charizard card (or whatever is the cool thing to have these days. As you can see, I stopped caring 13 years ago.)

I'd go into more detail, but I don't have access to my Developmental Psych notes at the moment.

edited 16th Feb '11 11:23:02 PM by Malph

Popular kids are those who are perceived with a higher social status and often put on the pedestal for real or perceived qualities people hold ideal.

Every school I've ever been to has had at least one kid who had more friends than anyone else, and who everyone else perceived as "cool." However, I've yet to see any place that has something resembling the overblown popularity food chain which is present in so many movies and shows. Probably because real life is, as you may have guessed, usually less dramatic than fiction.

Oh, and generally the lower you are on the popularity chain, the more clearly you see it. Generally the popular kids deny that popularity even exists, meanwhile their less popular classmates describe them as The Libby.

Damn. So that made me popular now :/

edited 21st Feb '11 1:29:23 PM by BalloonFleet