Popular

by Mitch Prinstein

  Physical appearance is one example of an inherited trait. We usually think of beauty as being a contributing factor to the type of popularity that emerges in adolescence and is based on status and dominance. But physical attractiveness is a predictor of likability too, and attractive parents tend to have attractive children.

  Countless studies have demonstrated the powerful effect of physical beauty on popularity. Some of this work has focused on body attractiveness. Obese children, for example, are more likely to be teased by others than are those with average body shapes, even as early as preschool. But most research has focused specifically on facial features, suggesting that looks play an important role in determining whom we like and whom we don’t—even well before sexual attraction per se is a factor.

  In a typical study, a group of adults is asked to review a series of photos of children’s faces and rate each on attractiveness. To make sure these ratings are not influenced by how wealthy or happy each child may appear, photos are cropped so that the raters cannot see the children’s hair or clothes, and all the faces have a neutral expression. These attractiveness ratings are then compared to children’s likability, as reported by their peers. Findings from investigations like these reveal that the most attractive children are also the most popular. The children rated least attractive are the most strongly rejected, even among children as young as five years old.

  How can this be? Have kindergarteners already absorbed the standards by which our society values beauty? Have they developed biases against less attractive peers?

  It seems to go deeper than that. Research conducted by psychologist Judith Langlois at the University of Texas at Austin finds that even infants at three months old stare longer at attractive faces than unattractive ones. It doesn’t matter whether the faces belong to adults or other infants, or whether they are from the same or different ethnic groups. Infants are also more likely to be fussy around unattractive strangers.

  Why, starting at birth, are we hardwired to prefer attractiveness? Some think it’s because we are programmed to propagate, and attractive faces signal good genetic health, increasing the chances for successful reproduction. Others suggest that attractive faces are favored by babies because they best represent the prototype of what a face is supposed to look like. Langlois has demonstrated that attractive people have faces that are more symmetrical than others, and more “typical” as well. When she digitally combined photographs of a number of different faces to create a composite, the result always appeared more attractive than the individual faces used to make it—even if all of the faces were already very attractive. Our idea of attractiveness is based in large part on facial “averageness.” As infants, we are drawn toward the average or typical because it helps us contextualize all of the new things we are exposed to. It is an instinct we are born with to help us understand what is prototypical, and then we can understand everything else as deviating from that average template.

  Because our predilection for attractive people is present from birth, our good-looking peers have a head start on becoming the most likable people in our social circle. Research shows that teachers pay greater attention to the better-looking children in their classrooms. Even parents, in subtle ways, tend to offer greater comfort and support to their more handsome offspring.

  Note that beauty is not the only inheritable trait that contributes to popularity, however. There also is a genetic basis for our general comfort level when we interact with others. This is not extroversion per se but rather an attribute that is referred to as “behavioral inhibition,” which is more broadly associated with an interest in what is new and different versus a preference for what is comfortable and familiar. As one might imagine, babies who are genetically disposed to be socially inhibited are less interested in interacting with others, which has a direct effect on popularity. Each avoided social interaction is another lost opportunity to develop social skills that will be needed to become accepted, likable children years later.

  But genes do not always control our destiny, especially in our social lives. Just as those of us who don’t have the genetic foundation to be models or movie stars may still be considered beautiful, research has found that inherited predispositions toward popularity or unpopularity are also substantially influenced by powerful environmental factors.

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  It’s noon and I am near my hometown on Long Island, in New York. It has been years since I lived here, so I feel like a tourist, watching the people around me like a foreigner would gape at the natives. As I sit in the cafeteria of the local Ikea, I watch the crowd of kids screaming in every direction while their parents bicker over the decision between a Duken and a Fjell. Suddenly a tray of food falls to the floor just behind me, but before I can turn around to help clean up the mess, I hear a woman, presumably a mother, whispering so loudly, and so tensely, that she might as well be yelling.

  “What. Are. You. Doing?” she asks. “Get your hands in your lap right now. You think this is funny? If you drop one more thing, I promise you won’t be laughing anymore!”

  Too stunned to turn around, I sit very still, not meaning to eavesdrop but unable to help hearing the argument that has erupted just inches behind my head.

  “Honey, let it go,” a man’s voice says. “She doesn’t know what she’s doing.”

  “I’m sick of it,” the woman replies. “She does it on purpose. She just loves to aggravate me.” She sighs and then exasperatedly snaps at the child, “Why won’t you listen?”

  At this point, I lean over to pick up a sippy cup that has landed at my feet and turn to hand it to the woman. She takes it from me, rolls her eyes while nodding to her child, and offers her thanks. I catch a glimpse of the cup-thrower: she is only about eighteen months old and giggling in her high chair. She has no idea why it’s not permissible to push a tray onto the floor.

  I don’t know anything about this woman or her child, but anyone can tell that this mother is overstressed, and research suggests that adults like her may not have been very well liked when they were younger. Studies have also indicated that children like that little girl might grow up to have problems with popularity, too. The same will be true of her children, because popularity is related not only to the kind of parents we had but also to the kind of parents we become.

  One of the factors that most strongly predicts who will be popular and who will be rejected is whether they are raised in an aggressive social environment, an atmosphere that tends to persist across generations of a family. Psychologists can measure a child’s social environment fairly easily. In fact, the way parents complete just one simple task can offer remarkable insight into their own past and their children’s future.

  The assignment is easy: talk about your child for five minutes. Parents effectively practice this all the time. After running into an old friend they haven’t seen for years or a colleague on an elevator, they are typically asked, “So, how are the kids?” Almost all parents can go on at great length in response, but their answers differ greatly.

  Psychologists Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi asked almost six hundred mothers from England and Wales to complete this task with respect to their five-year-old children. The researchers were interested in learning how warm or critical the children’s social environments were, and after only five minutes of conversation with their parent, they discovered a world of differences. They also wanted to investigate how this social environment may be related to children’s aggressive and unpopular behavior. Interestingly, they chose to include only monozygotic twins in their study, which enabled them to ensure that any differences they identified in children’s behavior could not be explained by genetic variation, since each pair of twins had identical DNA.

  They found that even though they were born at the same time, to the same parents, in the same household, and with the same genetic makeup, each twin grew up in seemingly very different social environments. This was evident f
rom the ways that their mother spoke about them. Some of the women offered descriptions and details about their children that communicated warmth and affection (“She is so funny—the other day she made up a song and she was dancing and singing in the garden”) while others were far more critical (“She is horrible” or “He is so lazy”).

  Moffitt and Caspi returned to their subjects two years later to see how the children were growing up. Now, at seven years old, some were highly aggressive, while others were well behaved. These outcomes were strongly predicted by the social environments in which they grew up. The results are especially notable given that the researchers even saw differences between identical twins. The more warmly mothers spoke of their children at age five, the less aggressive their children were at age seven. The more critical the mother, the more her child’s aggression increased over the two-year period. Subsequent research has confirmed the link: mothers who are critical when discussing their children, even for as short a time as five minutes, tend to create more hostile social environments for their children, who subsequently grow up to be unpopular.

  It’s not just aggression—there are plenty of other qualities in a child’s social environment that also predict his or her popularity. For instance, research has revealed a long list of ways in which depressed mothers may differ from other moms, and many of these have a direct impact on their children’s eventual popularity, too. Compared to other mothers, depressed women discipline their children less effectively. They spend less time with their children and smile less often. Depressed moms also may pass along genes that predispose their kids to be sad or withdrawn. Probably for these reasons, these kids are much more likely to have social difficulties years later.

  When it comes to the factors that set children on a path toward popularity or rejection, even seemingly trivial interactions can make a difference. Picture a baby lying in her or his crib, looking up at a dangling mobile. If its mother is feeling playful, her smiling face may suddenly appear—she may even tickle her baby—causing the infant to laugh and kick with glee. The laughter is so infectious that mom turns the moment into a little game. She again makes a surprise appearance over the crib, the baby laughs in return, and the process continues, over and over. After a few giggling exchanges, the mom may turn on the mobile to help soothe her baby, who falls peacefully asleep.

  This sounds pretty normal, but can such a brief episode really affect a baby’s eventual popularity? Can it influence his or her entire life?

  It can. Those few moments during which the infant had a chance to see Mom smiling produced a biological reaction in the baby’s brain. Research suggests that this reaction will help the child cope with stress more productively for decades to come. This will help her remain calm when a peer makes her angry at school years later, or even decades after that, when she becomes a mom and her own baby cries. The game of peekaboo also taught the baby the concept of turn taking, which is a fundamental social skill we use in every successful conversation. Watching her mom smile got her excited, and that, too, is critical for teaching children how to experience strong emotions and how to regulate them. Mothers who are depressed may deprive their children of some of these opportunities, and consequently, research studies find, these children are far less capable of managing their emotional outbursts.

  As that baby drifts off to sleep watching her mobile, she is also learning how to calm herself—a skill that never would have been acquirable had her mother not approached her crib in the first place. Of course, this small episode had transactional effects, too, as described in Chapter 5. The more fun that Mom had playing this game, the more likely she will be to play it again, giving that baby even more opportunities to practice all of the same social skills.

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  If you weren’t very popular when you were a child, the results of the studies cited above may have tempted you to draft an angry email to your parents right about now. It would be easy to blame them for all of the ways that they compromised the development of your social skills and your opportunities for social success.

  And if you are a parent, you may be feeling a little pressured or guilty based on this research. Believe me, I understand. When my own kids were born, I felt bombarded by a barrage of information on how I was supposed to raise them and what kinds of things I could do to help my kids reach their full potential. It was all very helpful, but ultimately exhausting, and seemed to set a virtually impossible standard. After all, what parent hasn’t lost patience, felt hopeless, or said something critical to a child that they later regretted? At times, we all feel frustrated with our kids. And with one out of every five women and one out of every ten men in the United States experiencing a clinically significant depressive episode by age twenty-five, it’s worrisome to think that any time we express a sad mood we might be damaging a child’s long-term success with peers. It’s simply impractical to expect that we can play peekaboo with a baby twenty-four hours a day.

  But we can let ourselves off the hook, at least a little, because a child’s popularity isn’t completely within her parents’ control. The key factor is the nature of the relationship between parent and child, and this has as much to do with how parents behave as with what children bring into each social interaction. It is the back-and-forth, the constant give-and-take, that shapes both parents and children, and that also strongly influences a child’s social development. Psychologists refer to this as the parent-child “attachment.”

  Parent-child attachments come in two types: secure or insecure. It takes only about twenty minutes to identify which version describes a particular family unit. A parent brings his or her nine- to eighteen-month-old baby to an unfamiliar room. After playing together, a friendly adult stranger joins them, and over the next few minutes, the baby stays alternatively in the room either with his parent, with the stranger, or with both. Psychologists measure whether the child seems more likely to explore and play with the parent, the stranger, or with neither in the room. The baby’s reaction to the inconspicuous disappearance of his parent also is noted, as well as how he reacts when the parent returns.

  About two-thirds of parent-child pairings prove to be securely attached, which is established by the fact that the child is most likely to play when his parent is nearby. Securely attached children become mildly distressed when their parent steps out, are a little skittish around the stranger, and then are quickly soothed when the parent returns. Parents in securely attached relationships respond in ways that show that they are highly attuned to their child’s distress, able to help their baby calm down, and attentive to what their child needs.

  But in insecurely attached relationships, any number of things can go wrong. Some babies don’t appear to be entirely comfortable with their parents and even seem to avoid them altogether. Others are overly clingy. Some are inconsolable when their parents leave the room; others don’t even seem to notice. Parents, for their part, may be overly responsive or seemingly unconcerned about their child’s behavior.

  Research has demonstrated that infants in secure attachments grow up to have far more interpersonal success. Not only are they more popular but they also are happier in their romantic relationships and are more likely to form secure attachments with their own children. In one study, a team of Dutch researchers led by Marinus van IJzendoorn measured parent-child attachment in twelve-month-olds who were adopted; thus any connection between their outcomes and their parents’ behavior could not be attributed to shared genes. They found that at age seven, children who had been securely attached as infants were far more likely to be popular, according to their schoolmates, than those who were insecurely attached, even after accounting for socioeconomic status and individual temperament. Studies that looked at the effects of attachment with a father have found the exact same effects.

  It also may be comforting to learn that parents can easily change the family’s social environment. In fact, one way they can affect their children’s later popul
arity is by playing games with them. But it depends on how they play.

  When psychologists Ross Parke, Gregory Pettit, and Jackie Mize observed parents playing with their children, they noticed differences that help set the stage for how children learn to behave socially. Some parents, Mize and Pettit found, play with their children as equals. They let their kids decide what game to play, make up the rules for original games, and decide when to switch to another. They talk a lot to their kids while playing, and they express a range of emotions. Their children grow up much more likely to be accepted by their peers. Through these moments of parent-child interaction, kids learn how to share and cooperate, be creative and explorative, and empathize with others. In other words, these moments of play are rich opportunities to learn emotional intelligence.

  But not all parents play in this manner. Some dominate, set stern limits, and remain reserved, even stoic while playing with their children. Not surprisingly, their children behave in the same way when playing with others their own age. The more that mothers asserted their own power when interacting with their children, especially when they displayed an absence of warmth or responsiveness to children’s needs, the more aggressive their children were with peers even years later, and ultimately they became very unpopular.

  The way that fathers play is also important. Compared to mothers, dads are more likely to be rough-and-tumble with their kids. Children typically laugh much harder and get more excited when wrestling with a parent than when, say, putting a puzzle together. These highly physical play sessions are valuable for teaching children how to regulate strong emotions. Moms and dads who express their own emotions freely while playing, and demonstrate how to safely control those feelings, also have children who grow up to be more popular. That’s likely due to the fact that children learn from their parents how to express themselves, cope, and get support when they need it.