The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory, and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School

by Alexandra Robbins

  When Joy trudged into the bio room, her classmates kept coming by to ask if she was okay, which made her even sadder. A girl who had just transferred to Citygrove gave her a card, which Joy put into her bag unopened.

  The biology teacher came over to Joy. “Hey, kiddo, what’s up? How ya doing?” he asked.

  “I’m fine. Just . . . here.” Joy tried hard to hold back tears.

  The teacher looked sympathetic. “Joy, you know you have people here who care about you,” he said, referring to the crew that ate lunch in his classroom every day. “Try to relax. You’ll visit Jamaica soon.”

  Joy nodded and kept to herself for half of the period. During this time of introspection, she needed to make herself be who she wanted to be. It wasn’t going to happen passively. If she was stressing too much over work and social adjustments, then she just had to stop. She decided to accept that she, and only she, could control whether worries consumed her or slid off her back.

  Joy dug into her bag. She found the card from the transfer student. “Hey Joy, I know you’ve been stressed a lot lately. I hope you feel better.” Joy smiled. Not everyone at Citygrove cares only about themselves, she thought. Maybe being depressed has been a way to teach me that.

  Later, she emailed a Jamaican friend. “i made a promise 2myself which i am leaving here . . . to be happy and satisfied with everything i have. And starting now I’m gonna go have fun. And stop worrying over this crap.” She was fed up with being sad.

  WHITNEY, NEW YORK | THE POPULAR BITCH

  One day, Madison approached Whitney in the hallway. “Hey, I’m having a party Saturday night. I invited the twins in gym today.”

  Finally, Whitney thought, she could show up at a party with non-phony people, and also snatch a spot in the party car. “Okay!” she said. “I can drive them since they’re on the way.”

  Students treated the twins differently than other new kids. The twins partied and dressed to fit in, and they did. Meanwhile, Fern, another new student, sat in the corner of classes and hardly ever spoke. Word had gotten out that Fern, who was overweight, with acne and greasy hair, was so poor that she lived in a ghetto. Immediately branded a loser, Fern appeared not to have any friends at Riverland. Whitney’s only interaction with her was on Fern’s first day of school. When a fabric bow on Fern’s shirt unraveled, Whitney reached over and tied it for her.

  Whitney picked up the twins at a house littered with beer boxes. The twins confided that they had moved to town to start over after a troubled stint in their old school district. At Riverland, the twins had merged into the popular group, but some cracks were beginning to show. They fought with each other often and reeked of smoke, neither of which typically would have been acceptable to the populars, but the girls were cute cheerleaders who dressed well. For now, the preps overlooked their shortcomings.

  At Madison’s, Whitney was getting drunk when Luke, already intoxicated, stumbled into the house. Whitney and Luke grew increasingly cuddly, putting their arms around each other, caressing each other’s legs as they chatted. Whitney knew that Luke got horny when drunk. He was the only person to whom she wanted to lose her virginity. Her wheels turned. “Come with me to get something from my car,” she told him.

  She took his hand and walked him outside. She leaned against the side of her car. The chilly October air made her shiver through her filmy shirt. Luke took off his zip-up and put it around her. He zipped her in slowly, and when he got to the top, their eyes met. Her heart pounded. He hugged her to him tightly. She stopped shivering.

  He whispered in her ear. “What do you want right now?”

  “I’m not sure,” she whispered back.

  “I don’t want to ruin our friendship.”

  “Me either, but I totally think it’s going to happen.”

  “Yeah. Me too.”

  Neither of them moved for at least five minutes, seemingly wrestling over what they were going to do. Please let us hook up tonight, she thought as they hugged. Please, please.

  Then he said, “We need to swear that nothing will be weird with us and that it won’t change our friendship.”

  Whitney reached her hand above her head, pinky extended. He did the same. “I promise,” Whitney said.

  Luke broke the embrace, looked into her eyes, and kissed her. It was better than she could have imagined. If she hadn’t been leaning on the car, she was sure she would have fainted from happiness. Her fingers curled around the back of his neck. He ran a hand through her hair. It wasn’t cold at all anymore.

  They heard voices and sprang apart. Two drunk guys from the party were rounding the corner. “Oh, hey, Whitney! People are looking for you,” one of them slurred as they walked by.

  As soon as the guys left, Luke and Whitney resumed making out. His hands moved down her stomach and began unbuttoning her jeans. She had no doubts that she wanted this to happen. She couldn’t stop smiling. Her hands slid down his body. They went into her car.

  When they were through, Whitney reveled in her afterglow, ecstatic that she had lost her virginity to someone she loved. As they dressed, they decided they weren’t going to tell anyone what they had done. When they walked back into the house, however, the partygoers stopped what they were doing and eyed her “crazy sex hair,” disheveled clothes, and flushed cheeks. Whitney knew they knew. She slithered through the crowd to get her coat. Giselle came dashing over.

  Whitney later found out that the two guys had told Giselle that Whitney was throwing up by her car because that was what their intoxicated minds assumed. Giselle had gone outside looking for her, peered into the car, caromed back into the house, and screamed to the entire party, “WHITNEY AND LUKE ARE HAVING SEX!”

  “Whitney, oh my God, are you okay?” Giselle said, large, drunken tears streaming down her face.

  “Uh, yeah?” Whitney said, perplexed. “Why are you crying?”

  “Because you just had sex.”

  “But, like, you just had sex five minutes ago.”

  “But you expect me to have sex,” Giselle said.

  The next day, Whitney and Luke discussed their relationship. They decided to hook up only with each other, but without the boyfriend-girlfriend label. Whitney accepted these terms because she was overjoyed that their relationship had moved beyond platonic friendship.

  IRENE, A SHORT, LOUD junior, had been trying to manipulate her way into the popular group ever since she had moved into town a few years before. This year, as a cheerleader, she managed to get onto Giselle’s good side. She regularly invited the populars to her large house and offered to steal liquor from her mother.

  Irene’s status changed at a party at Giselle’s, where she hooked up with one of the popular guys. For the next few weeks, because she was dating a prep, Irene officially became one. Whitney was suspicious; she didn’t think Bobby was attractive, and Irene had never expressed an interest in him. Before long, Irene was taking Whitney’s spot in the party car more often than not.

  As Irene’s popular stock rose, the twins’ plummeted. They argued during lunch and skipped classes. Rumors spread that they slept around for coke.

  One day, Bianca announced to the populars, “Yeah, so who is starting to get annoyed with the twins?” Everyone but Whitney firmly raised a hand. Aw crap, Whitney thought, and reluctantly added hers.

  “They stand there like they’re out of it,” Chelsea said. “And they talk like they’re on serious drugs.”

  “Oh my God, I’ve never hated someone more than I hate those two girls,” Irene declared. Whitney noticed that Irene now dressed exactly like the preps.

  And so it was resolved, without Bianca having to say another word. The group gradually froze out the twins. They stopped inviting them to parties and ignored them in person. They edged them out of the lunch table and spent entire lunch periods talking about them behind their backs. Irene in particular went out of her way to be mean to the twins, calling them names and starting cruel rumors, especially when Bianca was within earshot. Consequently
, the twins looked elsewhere for companionship, allegedly finding questionable people in unsavory places. Their new acquaintances further tarnished their image among the preps.

  Except for Whitney. Whitney thought the twins were well-meaning girls who were stuck in an inescapable social cycle. She said, “They hung out with bad people because they had no one else to hang out with, and they had no one else to hang out with because they hung out with bad people.” The populars issued a decree that no one could talk to the twins. Whitney texted and talked to them in secret anyway.

  In public, when the preps disparaged the twins, Whitney reluctantly joined in so as not to call attention to herself. On the nights that Whitney was left out of the party car, she hung out with the twins. When they asked her why everyone suddenly was ignoring them, she said she didn’t know.

  Within weeks, Irene broke up with Bobby. The next time Whitney saw Irene, at the local diner, she struck up a conversation about it, curious what Irene would say.

  “So, you and Bobby, huh,” Whitney prompted.

  “Yeah, I wanted to end things before it got bad, you know?” Irene said.

  “Yeah, I guess. You two did work at Giselle’s, I heard . . .”

  “No, we just made out,” Irene replied. “We didn’t have sex.”

  “That’s not what the rumors are.”

  “Ugh, great. Honestly,” she said, sounding relieved to confide this, “I didn’t really want to be making out with him. I felt my body doing it, but in my head I was thinking, Ew, this is so weird.”

  Whitney wondered if any of the other populars realized that Irene had used Bobby to get into their group.

  Not long afterward, Whitney was at a school library computer when one of the twins sat down next to her. “I’m going to punch Irene in the face if she says one more thing to me,” she told Whitney.

  Whitney looked up from the computer. “What happened this time?”

  “My sister was wearing a shirt with a beer can on it, so she was given a sweatshirt from guidance to wear. Irene comes storming over, accusing her of stealing the sweatshirt from the school.”

  “Eww,” Whitney said. “What is her deal?!”

  “I don’t know. But it’s turning everyone against us. Preps, like, hate us now for some reason. We can’t even sit with them anymore. We just sit by ourselves.”

  “That’s so weird,” Whitney said, acting clueless. She didn’t have the same lunch period as the twins.

  “Yeah. I hate coming to school because I have to put up with all of this. We skip school all the time now because we hate coming here so much. You’re our only friend, because Giselle and Bianca and them made everyone hate us.”

  A week and a half later, the twins moved to another district. Whitney was disappointed; she believed they had moved to town to try to be better people, but left the way they had arrived, all because of the populars’ rejection.

  ______

  WHY IT MAY BE BETTER NOT TO BE IN A GROUP

  The preps’ treatment of the twins may be rooted in a phenomenon called group polarization, a tendency for groups to form judgments that are more extreme than individuals’ personal opinions. Experts have theorized that polarization occurs for three reasons: individual members (1) are exposed to the group’s rationale during discussions, (2) may feel pressure to conform to the group’s opinion, and (3) may take even more extreme positions than the group average in an attempt to get the rest of the group to like them better. Irene was meaner to the twins than the rest of the preps because she probably was desperate for the preps’ approval.

  Group polarization occurs among adults as well. For example, juries whose individual members sway toward guilt as a group are more likely to recommend a harsher sentence than would each member alone. Even federal judges can succumb to group polarization. A study of civil liberties decisions in U.S. district courts in the 1960s revealed that in more than 1,500 cases in which a person claimed a violation of constitutional rights, the single judge sided with the plaintiff only 30 percent of the time. In cases in which three-judge panels presided, however, the percentage jumped to 65 percent.

  In an experiment on group polarization in France, researchers asked individual high school students about their feelings toward the United States and toward General Charles de Gaulle. Then the students participated in a group discussion on those topics. The researchers again surveyed the students individually. After the discussion, they felt more positive toward de Gaulle and more negative toward the U.S. than before the discussion. Other studies have found that group polarization can make students feel more negatively about their school, push students’ evaluations of faculty to either extreme, and lead already prejudiced high school students to adopt even more racist attitudes.

  Polarization is just one of many ways group membership can change an individual. Perhaps the most striking effect of group membership is that it can modify individuals’ perceptions of themselves. Unable to separate their personal introspection from the ways they believe other people perceive them, teenagers may have what psychologists call an “imaginary audience,” meaning they believe that other people are just as attuned to their appearance and behavior as they are (cue any pimple cream commercial). These perceptions can affect various aspects of their lives. For example, psychologists found that when Asian girls were subtly reminded about their Asian identity, they performed better on math tests. When they were subtly reminded about their gender, however, they performed worse.

  Students can come to see themselves as they believe their groupmates see them. It’s one thing for parents and teachers to influence children’s self-views, but when a child sees herself through the prism of her peer group, the resulting self-image can be distorted. She might suddenly believe that she’s too heavy (Danielle and Whitney), too serious (Noah), too foreign (Joy), or too eccentric (Eli). It may be no coincidence that when Blue’s friends told him that they couldn’t take him seriously, he stopped taking himself seriously as well; his descent into hopelessness could not be blamed solely on his relationship with his mother. Eli didn’t feel badly about not going to parties until Raj called him strange for not wanting to. Students usually don’t refer to themselves as nerds until someone else accuses them of being one.

  Many students think that to be accepted, they have to fulfill the role their group has imposed on them. A California sophomore accustomed to being excluded was pleased when upperclassmen on her Model UN team took her under their wing. But their fellowship came with a price. “My older friends called me the ‘happy freshman’ and I felt obligated to keep sad feelings to myself,” she said. “Now I’m with a different crowd and I feel immensely relieved. I changed myself to be more socially acceptable, but now I embrace who I am.”

  This pressure can add not only emotional strain, but also academic stress. A number of students told me that because classmates viewed them as nerds or smart kids, they felt extra pressure to pull straight As. An eighth grader in Indiana told me he didn’t mind being labeled a nerd—“it’s a lot better than being a nobody”—but he was tired of feeling like he had to continue to get perfect grades to be socially accepted. “That’s what defines my group, and if I don’t live up to their expectations, I would be letting them down.”

  When so much of students’ brainpower is concentrated on their peers, it can be challenging to distinguish their social identity from their personal identity. Granted, this struggle is a natural part of growing up. But the process of group polarization is not so different from groupthink (defined by Merriam Webster as “a pattern of thought characterized by self-deception, forced manufacture of consent, and conformity to group values and ethics”). In both cases, individuals feel less personal responsibility for the consequences of the group’s decisions. They can take a more risky stance, because if the group is unsuccessful the responsibility is shared. Groups threaten to de-individualize people in a process that primatologist Richard Wrangham called “the mindless sinking of personal identity into the group of
Us.”

  This mindlessness can occur both in small groups and large crowds. Some psychologists have espoused the controversial theory that in the midst of a crowd, an individual’s layers of restraint peel away, revealing potentially barbaric instincts and a susceptibility to “crowd contagion.” This theory could help to explain why kids in the bleachers at a pep rally or a football game can get so out of hand so quickly, or, as a Pennsylvania high school teacher told me, “Usually one person starts making fun of a weird kid or nerd to his face and everyone else in the class joins in.”

  More subtly, groups can trigger the brain’s inclination to take shortcuts. “The human brain takes in information from other people and incorporates it with the information coming from its own senses,” neuroscientist Gregory Berns has written. “Many times, the group’s opinion trumps the individual’s before he even becomes aware of it.”

  This tug-of-war between the group and the individual has been a matter of deliberation for centuries. Does one act in his own interest or that of the group? Follow the urge to be unique or give in to the yearning to belong? Psychologists say these needs are in opposition, that “the satisfaction of one tends to come at the expense of the other.” As Concordia University psychologist William Bukowski described, “Insofar as groups require consensus, homogeneity, and cohesion, they eschew individuality, diversity, and independence. As homogeneity and conformity within a group increase, diversity and individuality decrease.”

  These elements can characterize groups of any age. But students in middle and high schools might have neither the cognitive development to be able to extricate themselves easily from the influence of a group nor the awareness that they are mentally programmed to be so vulnerable to its whims. For them, the struggle between individuality and inclusion both adds to the confusion of adolescence and counters likely the strongest lure toward groups that they will ever experience in their lives. Which makes it all the more remarkable when a student is bold enough to swim against the tide.