THEY GET THE POWER! CONSEQUENCES AND ANTECEDENTS OF AGGRESSIVE, PROSOCIAL, AND ACADEMIC POPULARITY NORMS IN ADOLESCENTS’ CLASSROOMS

Abstract

When youth enter adolescence, there is a marked increase in their desire to belong to peers and to gain popularity in their peer group. “How can I become popular?!” therefore in an important question to them. This dissertation indicates that the route towards popularity varies across classrooms: in some classrooms, it is “cool” to be aggressive, whereas in other classrooms, prosocial behavior may contribute to popularity. Behaviors that relate to popularity in classrooms are referred to as “the popularity norm”. This dissertation indicated that popularity norms emerge relatively quickly at the start of the school year, and that they inform adolescents’ friendship decisions as well as adolescents’ tendency to adopt the behaviors of their friends. For instance, in classrooms with strong aggressive popularity norms, aggressive adolescents clustered together and mutually enhanced each others’ aggression during the school year. However, popular youth also have many positive qualities and if they display prosocial behaviors, they can stimulate prosocial friendships and behaviors in their classroom while discouraging aggression. Importantly, this only happens when these popular youth (or other popular youth) refrain from aggression. In classrooms with equally strong prosocial and aggressive popularity norms, aggressive popularity norms overpower prosocial norms: friends enhance each others’ aggression, while prosocial behavior is mitigated. Popular peers' achievement goals (mastery vs. performance goals) was found to set a norm for friendship processes around achievement. The emergence of popularity norms depends on the classroom composition and classroom “pecking order”. Aggressive popularity norms are more likely to emerge in classrooms with stronger asymmetries in popularity between classmates, whereas prosocial popularity norms are more likely to emerge in more egalitarian classrooms. The development of popularity norms also depends on the type of students present in the classroom, from the very beginning of the school year onwards. Socially dominant aggressive and socially dominant bi-strategic students contributed to higher aggressive popularity norms, both directly and by enhancing the classrooms’ popularity hierarchy. Socially dominant prosocial students weakened aggressive popularity norms, both directly and by buffering against the role of socially dominant aggressive adolescents in the aggressive popularity norm.