POPULARITY PROBLEM #4:
We Think Status Will Make Us Happy
Today we live in a Warholian world, where we all bid for our brief moment of highly visible status. In the United States alone, over $11 billion a year is spent on plastic surgery. Books about how to earn excessive wealth and prestige regularly appear on bestseller lists. Even in our private lives, in moments when we should be working or connecting with loved ones, we post and tweet, with the not-so-subtle hope that we will garner status. The mid-2010s saw the emergence of consulting firms whose sole purpose is to help individuals increase the number of their social media followers. Will all this time, energy, and expense dedicated to raising our status actually pay off? Will high status actually make us happier?
The answer is no . . . or more accurately, mostly no. I hedge here because the outcome depends on how we approach the question. If we consider the consequences of low status—the fate of those who are widely disregarded, perhaps due to significant deficits in wealth, power, or beauty—then naturally we conclude that it is associated with risk for many types of difficulties in life. It’s not merely that low status serves as a marker for these other determinants of despair. It has been associated with outcomes like depression even when accounting for the effects of socioeconomic stress or cultural disadvantage as predictors in their own right.
But most of us do not seek status as a practical way to make ends meet or to help alleviate personal shortcomings, just as most do not wish to reach only the middle of the bell curve. Rather, we long for high status, which, somewhere deep inside, we continue to believe will make us happy.
But what if that conviction is wrong?
Recent research has documented exactly what it’s like to have high status, and it’s not a pretty picture. In one study, psychologists were able to interview over a dozen of the “most popular” peers in our society whose names would be instantly recognizable—a group that included movie stars, CEOs, TV actors, a state governor, music legends, NBA and NHL athletes, journalists, and even a former child celebrity. No matter what their background, those with the highest status in our society all tell a very similar story, one that plays out in a series of stages.
Stage 1: Elation. The attainment of high status is accompanied by a whirlwind of attention and adoration.
“The first thing that happens is that everything and everybody around you changes . . . And you can feel it filter down to whatever your inner circle of friends is,” explained one subject. The attention also comes with perks: “The access is unbelievable.” “Suddenly, you’re worth something. You’re important.” “When you reach a stage financially when you don’t need freebies, that’s when freebies are thrown to you.”
The experience is variously described as a “guilty pleasure,” a “high,” and a “rush.”
Stage 2: Overwhelmed. Most people find their sudden rise in popularity becomes almost too much to deal with.
As another subject warned, “Fame 101 is needed to teach people what’s coming: the swell of people, the requests, the letters, the emails, the greetings on the street, the people in cars, the honking of the horns, the screaming of your name. A whole world comes to you that you have no idea is there. It just comes from nowhere. And it starts to build and build like a small tornado, and it’s coming at you, and coming at you, and by the time it gets to you, it’s huge and can sweep you off your feet and take you away.” Not surprisingly, this quickly leads to . . .
Stage 3: Resentment. The attention becomes irritating.
“You are an animal in a cage,” the movie star said. “If you’re sitting at a sporting event in a seat and you’re on the aisle . . . all of a sudden you have someone on your left arm kneeling in the aisle [wanting to talk to you]. I want to push them down the stairs.”
Stage 4: Addiction. The ambivalence regarding popularity becomes almost too much to bear.
If you’ve ever watched E! True Hollywood Story, you’ll recognize this stage as the moral of each episode.
“I’ve been addicted to almost every substance known to man at one point or another, and the most addicting of them all is fame,” said one celebrity. As is true of any addiction, a number of people become dependent on their next hit, hating themselves for wanting it but desperate to have it anyway. Some high-status individuals never get beyond this phase, and their lives become an endless chase for an ever-greater high. If it eludes them, they become the junkies who will do almost anything simply to get even one last taste of the notoriety that they so desperately crave. The cycle can become debilitating, because unlike other addictions, it inherently requires the participation of others to satisfy the craving for status.
Stage 5: Splitting. The high-status individual realizes that his popularity is not based on his or her actual character at all.
“You find out there are millions of people who like you for what you do. They couldn’t care less who you are,” acknowledges one well-known figure, while another says, “It’s not really me . . . it’s this working part of me, or the celebrity part of me . . . So, I am a toy in a shop window.”
Some report that they are forced to form split personas to retain any real sense of a genuine self-concept—a version of themselves that is for the public, and a version they can maintain with family and friends, while their true self remains somewhere trapped in between. Over time it becomes harder and harder for them to even remember which is real. One subject reports he has “two different dialogues—the one that I’m thinking and the one I’m saying . . . [I can’t be] as authentic as I’d like to be . . . to show my true self.”
Stage 6: Loneliness and Depression. At this stage, there is no one who really knows the high-status individual at all.
As one respondent explains, “I’ve lost friends . . . just by all this adoration that comes whenever you’re in public, [my friends] feel less. They feel inferior . . . You’re special and they aren’t. You’re extraordinary and they’re ordinary . . . and the next thing you know, they’d really rather not have anything to do with you. And you understand them. You have to.”
Philip Burguières, CEO, president, and director of at least a dozen large, international energy conglomerates over the years, spoke about this isolation often. “I estimate that 50 percent of CEOs, at some point in their lives, experience depression. I receive calls about it daily, and at least twice a week I meet CEOs who are struggling or have struggled with depression,” he said. Rock star Dan Reynolds of the band Imagine Dragons has described his rise in status in similar terms: “[I’ve been] depressed as hell . . . It’s lonely when your life changes like this . . . I’ve lost all my friends . . . the relationships feel false.” Olympic swimmer Ian Thorpe recalls how “The cancer of attention [contributed to my depression]. People sometimes don’t think you have a right to feel like this because you’ve been famous or successful.”
Stage 7: Wishing for Something Else. Celebrities have everything that many other people wish for, but lack the one thing they desire most.
“[Popularity] is an intrinsically untrustworthy dance partner—it could leave you at any time . . . so it’s a very mysterious thing,” explains one. “Anyone who comes through that dance partner to you is also mysterious. Why? Why do they want me? Why are they interested in me? . . . You start double-guessing yourself. I find I put up a kind of a wall around me, and I just deal with people up to that wall but not inside of it.”
One cried while explaining, “I worry about my son, because I don’t want him to think of me, because I’m famous, as being any more special than he is. And I wonder sometimes if he’s going to confuse fame with worthiness or value as a person, that if he doesn’t grow up to be someone who has celebrity or fame, he is somehow not recognized or not worthy of people’s respect or admiration. I think a lot of people confuse it. In our whole culture, people confuse it.”
In response, these high-status individuals decide to invest in
something that feels authentic. For some, it’s humanitarian work or charity; for others, it’s stumping for a cause. But for many with high status, it’s genuine human connection that they long for more than anything else. Relationships with people who care about them for who they are, accept them, and want to spend time with them. It’s awfully ironic: while the rest of the world is wishing for status, those who have it are wishing for likability—the type of popularity that is so much easier to achieve.
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How about those kids with whom we grew up who were “most popular”? They didn’t all end up becoming sports heroes or celebrities, or in high political positions. How did they turn out? Recent scientific data has addressed this question as well. Joe Allen and his colleagues at the University of Virginia sought to track down the “cool” kids from one of their high school samples to see whether having elevated status led to long-term benefits or problems. Allen’s study had begun with a group of youth who were just about to enter high school. They were thirteen years old—pubescent, naive, and in the throes of the usual adolescent awkwardness. Some had high status, but most did not. Using a variety of measures, Allen determined which were most popular and also which seemed to care most about having high status.
As anyone who has attended high school might expect, these high-status adolescents were among the first in their grade to get involved romantically with others; the first to show signs of minor deviancy, like shoplifting or sneaking into a movie without paying; and the most likely to have physically attractive friends. These are the qualities that many adolescents consider to be “cool,” and sure enough, it was these kids who were named as “most popular” by their schoolmates. Allen and his colleagues labeled this group the “pseudo-mature” teens.
Ten years later, Allen and his team tracked down all the participants in the initial study to see how the pseudo-mature teens had matured compared to their peers. By now the subjects were in their twenties and dispersed far from their hometown of Charlottesville. Allen’s lab flew around the country to meet with each participant, interview his or her friends and romantic partners, collect public records concerning them, and even gain permission to follow each participant’s social media profiles as another source of data. The result was one of the most comprehensive studies ever to examine relationship development from early adolescence to young adulthood.
What they discovered was that the pseudo-mature participants who seemed to have it all at thirteen were no longer doing as well. In fact, they seemed to be experiencing many more difficulties than their formerly low-status peers.
Allen found that by their twenties, the high-status kids were significantly more likely to abuse alcohol and marijuana, and to have higher likelihoods of serious substance-related problems, like DUIs and drug-related arrests. Even after considering their socioeconomic status and adolescent use of alcohol and marijuana as possible predictors, it was their focus on high status as teens that was significantly related to these adult outcomes.
Having high status at age thirteen also predicted poorer-quality friendships later in life. Allen asked each participant in his young adult study to bring a close friend to the research lab. These friends were able to tell the researchers a great deal about the subjects’ lives. Results indicated that those with high status at age thirteen had a more difficult time making friends in adulthood, and those friends they did have said they didn’t much enjoy that friendship.
High-status teens also were less likely to be involved in satisfying romantic relationships as adults. When those relationships broke up, they were more likely to believe that it was because their partners did not find them to be “popular enough” or “part of the right crowd.” Caring about status at age thirteen seemed to be related to a lifetime of seeking more popularity.
Similar results have been found in longitudinal studies of adults. In their studies on extrinsic goals—the kinds of wishes that focus on being well regarded by others—psychologists Richard Ryan and Tim Kasser found a curious link with life satisfaction and well-being. They studied people’s wishes in countries throughout the world, including North America, Russia, Croatia, Germany, and South Korea. Their findings were remarkably consistent no matter where the research was conducted: those who wish for intrinsic rewards, like those that come from close and caring relationships, personal growth, and helping others, report far greater happiness, vitality, self-esteem, and even physical health. But wishing for extrinsic goals—fame, power, excessive wealth, and beauty—is associated with discontent, anxiety, and depression. When Ryan and Kasser likewise followed their research participants over time, it was those who wished most strongly for status who were the most likely to be faring worse later in their lives.
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So, what is the point of seeking status in the twenty-first century? We don’t need it for the same reasons we did when our brains first developed. In most contemporary societies, humans can access vital resources like food simply by visiting the local market. And with the advent of computerized dating sites and fruity alcoholic cocktails, finding a willing mating partner also is easier in the modern arena, even for those who are not the “alpha” member of their group.
But our ancient brain wiring has us yearning for status nevertheless, and over time we have created new and sophisticated ways to help satisfy those cravings every day. Society has fostered the illusion that by spending enough time, money, and energy, anyone can attain high status.
But that’s not the kind of popularity that will make us happy. Perhaps it’s time for us to realize that status is no longer worth wishing for.
PART II
The Surprising Ways That Some Types of Popularity Can Change Our Lives
CHAPTER 4
Herds and Headaches
How Our Bodies Are Programmed to Care About Popularity
An old house sits at the top of a wooded hill, a cape of fog swirling around it in the darkness. The only light comes from a single window shrouded with overgrown vines and a broken shutter. Inside lies a man in a tangle of sheets on a bed with a headboard as tall and heavy as a tombstone. He is frail, wheezing, yet desperately clutching something made of glass. His dry, crusted lips part; the sound of air slowly escapes his body.
“Ro . . .” he moans. “Rose . . .”
His eyes open suddenly, staring straight ahead with pain, fear, then anger. He finally finds the strength to utter:
“Rosenbaum!”
From his hand drops a frame holding a picture of his childhood bully, Damien Rosenbaum. It falls to the floor, the glass shattering to pieces as the last sound of air emerges from the limp body above . . .
OK, none of this actually happened. But it could have. Recent evidence suggests that being unpopular can be hazardous to our health. In fact, it might even kill us.
That’s because our bodies are literally programmed to make us care about popularity. More on that later . . .
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First, a quick quiz:
Do you own an iPhone/iPad?
Do you drive a Honda?
Have you recently bought something from Amazon?
Do you use a Gillette razor?
Have you purchased anything made by Disney recently?
Did you drink a Coca-Cola product this week?
Do you have a Gmail address?
If you answered yes to at least one of these questions, then you’re pretty much like most of the rest of the world. It is part of human nature to follow trends. The above list was adopted from a report on the largest global brands, and while some of their success reflects the fact that they offer excellent products and services, it also has to do with popularity. We like to follow the herd, and we tend to rely on one another substantially when we make our own choices. There is something about popularity that is inherently appealing.
Princeton sociologist Matthew Salganik and his colleague at Yahoo!, Duncan Watts, condu
cted a series of experiments to test just how strongly drawn we are to popularity. In one study, over twelve thousand participants from North America, South America, and Europe were asked to visit an internet site to rate some new music and download it for free. The site wasn’t real but was developed by the experimenters to make it look similar to iTunes. Through this study, Salganik and Watts were able to examine how our taste in music relies on that of others.
Participants were initially presented with a list of forty-eight unfamiliar rock songs. They were instructed to listen to each, rate it from one to five stars, and then, if they wished, download the song for free. In this first phase of the study, the experimenters simply collected data on the popularity of each song. For instance, “She Said” by the group Parker Theory was by far the most popular—15 percent of all participants who heard it chose to download it. “Florence” by the group Post Break Tragedy was the least popular, with only 1 percent of listeners downloading it. Much like on iTunes, the researchers used these data to create a list of the songs organized by their popularity. “She Said” was listed first, with the most downloads, and “Florence” was last.
Then, the experimenters began their study on conformity by testing what might happen if they manipulated the ranking of each song. For their next group of participants, they simply inverted the data on each song’s download rate: “Florence” was now ranked as the most downloaded choice, while “She Said” was the least. With this manipulated ranking posted, the experimenters opened the music portal again and watched to see how each song’s apparent popularity affected the participants’ musical choices over time. As you may expect, popularity mattered—the download rate of “Florence” increased tenfold, while that of “She Said” plunged to only 2 percent. And as more people downloaded “Florence,” it was made to seem even more popular, leading in turn to even more downloads, while “She Said” remained at the bottom of the pack.
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