It starts innocently enough. “Are we OK?” she’ll ask her boyfriend. “I’ve just been noticing that something feels different between us.” Occasionally Pam’s instincts are correct: sometimes the men she dates have lost interest or even feel intimidated by her overt confidence. But more often than not everything is fine, and her boyfriend will affirm that that is the case. It’s here that the problem begins.
Pam doesn’t trust that others will like her as much as she hopes they will, so she simply doesn’t believe their assurances. “I know in my head that he said everything is OK, but I just get scared that maybe it’s not. What if he loses interest?” she explains. This is usually when she asks her boyfriend again for reassurance. Once again, she receives it, but once again she is doubtful, and a self-defeating pattern begins. Sometimes this cycle develops over a period of weeks or months, but it can even arise within the span of a single conversation. In either case, Pam’s previous experiences with rejection cast a shadow over any potential relationship, triggering transactions that become very predictable.
Psychologists refer to this pattern as “excessive reassurance-seeking.” It often takes place in the context of a romantic relationship but can also occur in friendships or even between employee and supervisor. Experts in excessive reassurance-seeking, like Jim Coyne and Thomas Joiner, have proposed that this behavior sets up a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure. The constant questioning and doubting of a reassurance-seeker can make an individual from whom reassurance is sought feel distrusted, stressed, and ineffective, wondering, “Why can’t I help this person that I care so much about? Why doesn’t he or she believe me?” Eventually, the pressure to continually reassure causes them to withdraw. They become slow to return messages, less convincing in their declarations of love. They become less comforting, and of course, this is exactly what the reassurance-seeker is hypervigilant to detect.
“I knew it! I knew he was pulling away!” is Pam’s typical reaction when her boyfriends dump her. But in her furious righteousness and validation, she doesn’t perceive that this outcome may have been the result of a transactional process that she initiated. It was her own behavior that elicited the rejection, and it is that rejection that makes her feel justified seeking constant reassurance in successive relationships. Each failed romance seems to doom the next one.
Research from my own lab has demonstrated just how powerfully excessive reassurance-seeking can undermine relationships and just how early this transactional pattern starts. In one study, we recruited 520 adolescents and asked them to tell us about their reassurance-seeking behavior. We also asked them to name their very best friend and how they thought that relationship was going. We then approached the friends and asked for their own feelings about the friendships. We followed up with our subjects and their friends twice more annually to see how their relationships evolved. We also measured how much each teen was liked or disliked using peer nominations.
Our results revealed that excessive reassurance-seeking can lead to negative transactions, starting in adolescence, and predicts which teens are disliked. In fact, adolescents who engaged in excessive reassurance-seeking told us that their friends had started to become angry with them for their behavior, even telling them to stop. But the adolescents who sought reassurance just couldn’t understand how this was negatively affecting their relationships. While they still enjoyed their friendships, their friends had a different perspective. Specifically, the more frequently adolescents sought reassurance in the first year of our study, the more often their friends reported in year two that their relationship was troubled. They had less fun when they were together. Many friends had begun to withdraw, and some ended their friendships altogether. Not surprisingly, by the end of our study, excessive reassurance-seekers had grown significantly more depressed than others.
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Understanding the transactional nature of relationships teaches us that popularity is a reflection of how others regard us, but it is, in some part, also a product of how we treat others. This cyclical give-and-take between our social interactions and others’ reactions doesn’t merely influence our day-to-day experiences. It truly can alter our life course, and it is for this reason that popularity is such a remarkably powerful predictor of so many life outcomes. Beyond all of the factors that we already know to be important predictors of our success, our mood, and even our physical health is one that we didn’t really think mattered much after high school.
When I speak about popularity, I invariably hear from two different groups of people. The first are those who as children fit the standard categories—Accepted, Rejected, Neglected, Controversial, or Average. They tell me, for instance, that they were rejected on the day they started kindergarten, and they have felt that way in every school, relationship, and job ever since. They are convinced they are doomed to be rejected their whole lives.
Individuals in the other group tell me that their childhood popularity was transformed. They used to be liked, or disliked, they explain, but somehow, something changed. The process started with how they interacted with those around them. Now they look back on their childhoods and barely recognize the person they used to be. It is as if their memory stars a character they watch empathically, but one who has long since ceased to exist. This is the group that believes there’s a way to break the pattern of popularity.
They are correct.
PART III
So What Do We Do Now?
CHAPTER 6
Our High School Legacy
How We Can Conquer the Prom Queen Today
If you’re like most people, then high school may seem like a distant memory. Even if not many years have passed since you attended, it still feels like ancient history. We can’t go back and change how popular we were back then, so what’s the point in even thinking about it now?
But what if I told you that those teenage experiences are still affecting you today? Not through just occasional memories, but thousands of times each day. Arguably, those old confrontations with popularity are the very basis for your adult personality.
Fortunately, even just being aware how this dynamic works can be remarkably powerful in helping to keep the prom queen or locker room bully from affecting your life today.
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A few weeks ago, I stumbled across my high school yearbook and, against my better judgment, decided to flip through the pages. There I was—tinted glasses, wide-collared shirt, and a wannabe mullet.
Who was that? Was I really the same person today as that boy in the yearbook? I recognized him—he was like a long-lost little brother—but I’ve now lived more years since that photo than I had when it was taken. My tastes have changed, and my hopes and dreams have evolved. I’m not that person anymore, am I?
Many of us feel this sense of distance when we think about ourselves over the course of time. Sometimes it occurs when we see an old photograph that seems like an abandoned version of who we once were. At other times, we may look in the mirror and be surprised to see someone so old staring back at us. It’s amazing how detached we can feel from who we once were or even who we are now.
Of course, that really was me—I am the same person. Or at least, there are plenty of through lines that connect that teenage boy to the man I am now. For instance, the boy in that yearbook was very late to mature—even as a teenager, I was a pip-squeak. Today, I still religiously lift weights, which is probably not a coincidence. And surely my tendency to behave and dress like a young, cool professor is just an evolution of my mouthing off in high school advanced placement classes—both good strategies to avoid seeming like a total nerd.
These are the kind of continuities that are easy to recognize—the traces of our adolescent selves we see in the people we are today. Perhaps you like the same music. Maybe you still have the same core group of friends, or still wear your hair in the same way (thankfully, I do not). These are the superficial vestiges of our past that we
feel we can control.
But what if the legacy of our adolescence extends deeper than that? What if it still marks us today in ways we don’t even realize? And what if it is affecting us in ways that undermine our lives?
However alarming that is to imagine, accumulating evidence suggests that this is indeed the case. In fact, who we were as teenagers may influence our lives even more than who we are today.
For instance, in one recent study, a group of economics professors from the Universities of Michigan and Pennsylvania examined earning potential among men. Using large national databases in the United States and Great Britain, they looked at factors that predicted the salaries of over twenty thousand men at age thirty-three. One of the items they considered was each man’s current height and how tall these same men were when they were sixteen years old. Was height related to how much money each subject made?
Yes, it was—tall men earn more money. But perhaps especially surprising was that it wasn’t how tall these men were at their current age that was most closely related to their salary, but rather their height at age sixteen. Something about having reached that height in adolescence had an effect on these men for the rest of their lives. It changed something in them—how they felt about themselves, how they acted, or maybe what experiences they’d had since. Whatever it was, it remained with them for decades.
Studies show that it’s not just our physical appearance in adolescence that marks our adult lives. There are other characteristics that matter, and some probably even more so, because as compared to how we feel about our changing looks, which are obvious to us, there are some things that occur during our teenage years that affect us in ways that we don’t see.
In fact, recent research suggests that the aspect of our teen years that may have one of the most powerful influences on who we are today is that one thing that mattered to us so much back then—our popularity. And popularity didn’t just change us superficially—it altered our brain wiring, and consequently, it has changed what we see, what we think, and how we act.
Luckily, the extent to which we let our teenage experiences dictate our lives today is well within our control. But we must first stop to consider what popularity meant to us when we were young.
In my own suburban hometown on Long Island, as in many hometowns, popularity was strongly linked to money, in the form of fancy houses, jewelry, and the “right” clothes. All the popular kids had Members Only jackets and designer acid-wash jeans. They were the first to get an Atari, and they spent the entire fall talking about their summers at expensive sleepaway camps in upstate New York.
But I was neither wealthy nor cool. I was raised by a single mother who worked as a secretary for a group of accountants. I worked, too, part-time at the local grocery store, and saved my paychecks to buy a Members Only look-alike jacket at a flea market. I even tried to make my own acid-wash jeans with a bottle of Clorox and a fresh pair of pants from Sears. (It didn’t work.)
I tried hard to fit in, and that meant faking it. At lunch, I held my money in a clenched fist so no one could see that I was paying a reduced price. I pretended I’d watched music videos that in reality I never saw because we couldn’t afford MTV.
Overall, when it came to popularity, my anxiety that I was too blue collar to fit in was a feeling that stuck with me. This doubtless accounts for the special kinship I feel with first-generation college students at the university where I teach.
So how does my background affect me today? Have I grown up desperate for wealth and materialistic excess, whether in the form of luxury cars or expensive watches? No, it’s not that simple. Our adolescent hopes play out in our adult lives more imperceptibly and more pervasively. The power of popularity comes from the subtle, almost invisible ways it continues to define us—in what psychologists call our “automatic” reactions.
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Although we don’t talk much about antiquated psychological concepts like the id, ego, superego, and unconscious anymore, we do know that there are plenty of actions we take without thinking—feelings that seem to bubble up from nowhere and ways that we react to life that just seem to be part of our “personality.” Today, we understand that all of these automatic behaviors, feelings, and thoughts are related to specific activity in our brains. Recent research suggests that, in a very literal sense, our brains were built on a foundation of popularity.
It’s during adolescence—or at the start of puberty, to be more precise—that our brains develop more dramatically than at any other point in our lives after the age of one. As we enter our teens, our brains grow far more new neurons, allowing us to store substantially more information. Adolescence also results in more substantial neural coating with myelin, the fatty substance that makes our brains work faster, enabling more efficient and sophisticated thought. In short, our brains evolve from the way that children think (spontaneously, in the moment, and without self-consciousness) to the way adults do (more ruminative, autobiographical, and attuned to others’ perceptions of us).
The experiences we have in those critical years have the potential to affect the brain we will live with for the rest of our lives, which gives our teenage experiences with popularity such immense power. They are among the first thoughts that seem especially important to us at the very time that our brains are evolving so substantially. It is in these newly maturing brains that popularity moments and encounters will be encoded and that all subsequent experiences will be compared to and built upon.
Did popularity play a big role in how your brain developed? Try testing yourself. What’s easier to remember, the name of your ninth-grade social studies teacher or the prom king and queen in your high school? If you’re like most people (who didn’t major in history), then you probably have far richer memories of the popular kids in your school than anything else in adolescence. You can probably even recall the feelings you had about the cool kids—and maybe even relive some of those feelings all over again as you remember them. It’s not just a matter of nostalgia—it’s as if those teenage experiences seem far more recent than they actually are, and far more salient and impactful today than they should be.
This is no accident, as has been established by recent studies in psychology and neuroscience. Scientists used to think that different parts of our brain were autonomously responsible for what our senses perceived, how we behaved, and each of our emotions. But we now know that this isn’t quite right. Functional MRI scans conducted with adults while they are asked to look, smell, hear, or feel what the researchers present to them tells us that it’s actually a collection of interconnected brain regions that are at play—a neural network. The same thing happens when we experience emotions, solve problems, or make decisions. And findings have revealed that our hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for so much of our autobiographical memory, is in on the action far more than was ever realized. This means that our past is continually called forth and used as a template for us to evaluate, compare, and respond to what we experience today. In other words, at some level, without our being aware of it, our brains spend all day, every day, drawing upon those initial, formative high school memories.
Adolescent memories can affect us in many powerful ways—specifically by creating biases in what we see, what we think, and what we do. Psychologists refer to these as several of the steps of “social information processing,” which is a complex way of saying that if we were to review any social interaction in our lives in super–slow motion, we would discover that the thousands of reactions involved in it are actually the result of a series of discrete automatic decisions. We don’t experience these as discrete steps, of course, but rather as instinctive behavior, because this all takes place in literally a fraction of a millisecond.
For instance, I recently ran an errand at the grocery store, and as I entered, a large man was hurrying out. As he passed by me, our shoulders bumped, and I was nudged a bit to the side. I instantaneously said, “O
ops, sorry.” That was an automatic reaction.
This kind of trivial incident happens so often that we never bother to think about it. But this time I asked myself: why did I apologize? The slight collision wasn’t my fault, so my response seemed a bit foolish. A split second later, I saw another customer being brushed aside by the same man in the same way. His automatic reaction was different, shouting something that isn’t fit to print. Neither one of us planned our responses to getting pushed—they just happened. The millisecond decisions we make in such reactions reveal some form of bias that can be traced back to our past. Individually, each of them may not always have significant consequences. But collectively, they define who we are and how our lives unfold.
Psychological science has now demonstrated exactly how these biases are shaped by our memories—referred to collectively as our “social database.” In many ways, this process can be quite useful. It helps us efficiently scan all of the social information we confront, make decisions about how to respond, and execute satisfactory behaviors that maintain our survival. After all, we can’t stop and seriously reflect on every single social interaction we have in a day. Our sophisticated and efficient adult brains simply rely on whatever has worked for us before. Someone walks by and says hello? Nodding back seemed to be successful previously, so we do so again. Someone bumps into you? Being polite, getting out of the way, and avoiding conflict has always proven to be the path of least resistance, so we’ll go with that.
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