The class was placated. “It’s okay, Davis, we still love you,” someone said.
“It’s okay,” a girl repeated, “I have a girlfriend too.”
A boy stood up. “Well, since we’re all coming out of the closet, I too have a girlfriend.” The class laughed.
It felt so much better to be open with people, which was Regan’s nature to begin with. Over the next several days, students freely asked her about Crystal. Regan loved being out at school.
DANIELLE, ILLINOIS | THE LONER
Danielle was excited to hear that the snow team season was under way. The snow team was a club that organized trips to a Wisconsin resort every week or two from November to March. The bus left after school on Fridays and brought the students back later that night. Eager to try out her new snowboard, Danielle asked, in succession, Paige, Camille, and Nikki to go on the first trip with her, but none of them agreed. She didn’t bother asking Mona, who wasn’t athletic. Danielle went anyway.
She didn’t mind that she was the only student who had come by herself. On the hills, she spent much of the time falling on her knees and her backside, to the point where she almost cried out from the soreness. Frustrated, she kept getting back up to try again, determined to improve. She loved speed, snow, and extreme sports. (Despite her mother’s protests, Danielle planned to skydive on her eighteenth birthday.) Once her psychology class had taken a test that measured students’ penchant for thrill-seeking. Danielle scored 12 out of 14 points, the highest score in the class.
After three hours of boarding, Danielle took a break. Inside the lodge, students gossiped loudly. Danielle sat down to eat at an empty table by the window. Everyone else was hanging out with a group, and Danielle didn’t want to infringe on people’s space. She tuned out the noise and watched snowboarders and skiers gliding down the black diamonds. When she finished dinner, she went upstairs to explore. In a lounge area with a large window overlooking the slopes, she saw a couple of girls from Stone Mill sitting with guys from another school. Shelby, the snow team president, spotted her. “Danielle, come sit with us!” Hesitantly, Danielle sat at the edge of the table next to the other girl, a sophomore whom she recognized from meetings for the school literary magazine.
“Hey,” said the girl, smiling at Danielle.
“Hey. Does Shelby actually know these people?!” Danielle asked in a low voice, gesturing to the guys.
“No, she just met them and decided to sit with them.”
“Oh.”
“How long have you been snowboarding?” the girl asked.
“I took lessons last year, but this is my third time. You?”
“Three years.”
“Oh.” Danielle tried hard to think of something else to say. I suck at small talk with people my own age, she thought.
Shelby looked over and mentioned an art class that she had TA’d when Danielle was a sophomore. “You were always so quiet in that class! I hated that about you!”
Danielle shrugged. “Oh, yeah . . . I didn’t really know anyone in the class, so . . .” She didn’t see why her reticence mattered. Danielle wandered outside again and spent the remaining hours of the trip by herself.
At school, Danielle had shifted to visiting Emily and Viv during lunch instead of during her free period. That way she didn’t have to deal with finding lunch companions. The aide would sit Danielle and two other student visitors in a semicircle to answer questions about themselves. In response to their answers, Viv, who could understand speech, would nod or raise her eyebrows.
As Danielle returned to the sisters’ classroom week after week, she realized she enjoyed visiting them. She liked making crafts with the girls, and helping with the goofy stuff they did, like the “Armadillo Race,” which they looked forward to every year. Each visitor planted an amaryllis; the student whose amaryllis bloomed first won a prize. Because the sisters couldn’t see the plants, the students wrote their names on note cards in puffy glitter ink and glued on a symbol so the sisters, who judged the race, could tell the plants apart. Danielle’s symbol was a bead in the shape of a conch shell.
When Danielle had picked up her amaryllis plant from Viv and Emily’s classroom, she walked through the halls, head down as usual, half-hidden by a large white flower with flashes of pink. Other students made snide remarks. “What is she carrying?!” various students said, giggling.
Danielle nearly snapped at one guy that he must be “a complete idiot” if he couldn’t tell that she was carrying a plant, but she held back. It’s not worth it, she told herself. They’re stupid. They don’t have any idea that the flower is a big deal to Viv and Emily. She told herself not to get angry, but it wasn’t easy. Those people can see and do pretty much whatever they want, while Viv and Emily can’t really do anything. Yet they make fun of the things that Viv and Emily like. Kids at this school are such asses.
Danielle relished the challenge of working with people who had mental and physical handicaps. It wasn’t easy to abide by new rules, steel herself from freaking out, and get used to seeing someone drool. Danielle was pleased that with the sisters, she was able to be patient without getting frustrated; patience was not Danielle’s strong suit. Best of all, she liked talking to them. They seemed sincerely interested in Danielle’s opinions and answers to the aide’s random questions. They didn’t judge her or pressure her to be someone she wasn’t. Because the sisters couldn’t talk, Danielle liked guessing their reactions by their facial expressions. Danielle slowly came to the realization that the girls’ mutual appreciation of each other’s company meant that Emily and Viv were her friends.
______
THE COURAGE OF NONCONFORMISTS
If there is one trait that most cafeteria fringe share, it is courage. No matter how awkward, timid, or insecure he or she might seem, any teenager who resists blending in with the crowd is brave.
A closer look at this age group’s psychology reveals that the deck is stacked against singularity from early on. Studies have shown that children are psychologically drawn to peers who are similar and more likely to end friendships with kids who are different. From the age of five, students increasingly exclude peers who don’t conform to group norms. Children learn this lesson quickly. A popular Indiana eighth grader told me, “I have to be the same as everybody else, or people won’t like me anymore.”
Numerous studies show that students in the same social circle tend to have similar levels of academics, leadership, aggression, and cooperation. The most influential kids are also typically the same ones who insist most stridently on conformity; researchers have found that even in late adolescence, popular cliques are more conformist than other groups. Given that many children often try to copy populars’ behavior, it makes sense that conformity trickles down the social hierarchy.
But conformity is not an admirable trait. Conformity is a cop-out. It threatens self-awareness. It can lead groups to enforce rigid and arbitrary rules. Adolescent groups with high levels of conformity experience more negative behavior—with group members and outsiders—than do groups with lower levels of conformity. Conformity can become dangerous, leading to unhealthy behaviors, and it goes against a teenager’s innate desire to form a unique identity. Why, then, is conformity so common?
In the mid-twentieth century, psychologists discovered that when asked to judge an ambiguous test, such as an optical illusion, individuals usually parroted the opinions of the other people in the room. In the 1950s, social psychologist Solomon Asch decided to gauge levels of conformity when the test answers were absolutely clear. Asch assumed that people wouldn’t bother to conform to an incorrect group opinion when the answer was obvious.
Asch was wrong—and his results stunned academia. For the experiment, he brought college students, one by one, into a room with six to eight other participants. He showed the room a picture of one line and a separate picture containing three lines labeled 1, 2, and 3. One of the three lines was the same length as the line in the first picture, while the other two
differed by as much as several inches. Asch then had each volunteer call out the number of the line he believed to be the same length as the first. Unbeknownst to the college student, who was the last to be called on, the other participants were in on the experiment. Asch had instructed them to call out the wrong number on twelve out of eighteen trials. At least once, even when the answer was plain to see, nearly three-quarters of the students repeated the group’s wrong answer.
Sixty years later, scientists are discovering that there are deeper factors at work than even Asch could have imagined. New research using brain imaging studies suggests that there is a biological explanation for the variation in people’s ability to resist the temptation to conform. Neuroscientists monitoring brain images during conformity experiments similar to Asch’s have found that participants are not necessarily imitating the majority merely to fit in. Instead, participants’ visual perception seems to change to align with the answers of the rest of the group.
To understand how this change could take place, it’s helpful to know that the brain is an efficient organ that likes to cheat. In order to conserve energy, it takes shortcuts whenever possible, such as the reliance on labels explained earlier. Another shortcut is a concept known as the Law of Large Numbers, a probability theorem according to which, “the more measurements you make of something, the more accurate the average of these measurements becomes.” When the students in Asch’s experiment conformed to group opinion, their brains were taking the Law of Large Numbers shortcut, assuming that the opinion of the group was more statistically accurate than any individual’s. In 2005, neuroscientist Gregory Berns conducted a similar experiment, this time using MRIs to measure participants’ brain activity. Berns observed that deferring to the group took some of the pressure off the decision-making part of the brain.
Berns also noticed something else, as he wrote in his intriguing book Iconoclast: “We observed the fear system kicking in, almost like a fail-safe when the individual went against the group. These are powerful biological mechanisms that make it extremely difficult to think like an iconoclast.”
Berns saw increased activity in the amygdala when his test subjects did not conform to group opinion. Amygdala activity can lead to a rise in blood pressure and heart rate, sweating, and rapid breathing. “Its activation during nonconformity underscored the unpleasant nature of standing alone—even when the individual had no recollection of it,” Berns wrote. “In many people, the brain would rather avoid activating the fear system and just change perception to conform with the social norm.”
Researchers in the Netherlands discovered an even stronger link between nonconformity and fear. In 2009, they published their finding that when a person learns that his opinion differs from group norms, his brain emits an error signal. The signal is produced by the same area of the brain engaged when someone faces financial loss or social exclusion. That signal, the researchers said, triggers a process that can impel the person to conform to the group, changing his opinion even when the group opinion is wrong (as in the Asch experiment).
These scientists took MRIs of volunteers’ brains as they evaluated the attractiveness of a series of faces. After the volunteers rated a face, they were told the “group” rating, a fictional number manipulated by the scientists. Thirty minutes after the experiment, the researchers unexpectedly asked the participants to rate the faces again. The participants who conformed the most to the group were those whose brains had emitted the strongest error signals when they learned the ratings. The researchers concluded that a person’s tendency to conform is partly based on his brain’s response to social conflict; the strength of the error signal determines the threshold that triggers conformity. “Deviation from the group opinion is regarded by the brain as a punishment,” Vasily Klucharev, the study’s lead author, said, which “explains why we often automatically adjust our opinion in line with the majority opinion.”
Nonconformists, therefore, aren’t just going against the grain; they’re going against the brain. Either their brains aren’t taking the easy way out to begin with, or in standing apart from their peers, these students are standing up to their biology. In their struggle to stay true to themselves, the featured characters in this book ultimately were not deterred by the emotions or physical sensations caused by the brain’s error signals. Blue expressed unconventional theories, Regan came out, Danielle went alone on a school-sponsored trip. Simply by being cafeteria fringe, these defiant outsiders were braver than they knew.
WHITNEY, NEW YORK | THE POPULAR BITCH
At a winter break party thrown by a Riverland alum, Luke and Whitney got drunk. Whitney tried to convince Luke to have sex with her in her car, but he didn’t want to be rude to the partygoers. Whitney tore out of her car, slammed the door, and went back into the house, drunk-crying and smiling at the same time.
“Yeah, Whitney!” said Spencer, and slapped her palm.
When Luke walked in after her, the prep guys feigned enthusiasm. “Yeahhh, woooh!” they shouted. “Yeah, Luke!” Spencer yelled obnoxiously, and tried to give Luke a high five.
Luke, still angry, walked by Spencer, muttering, “Nah, man, it’s not like that.”
Whitney kept drinking. She was in the kitchen with some of the popular guys and an older girl when Spencer said, “You know, Whitney, my brother’s been talking about you all night.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” the girl agreed. “He’s been really lonely since [his girlfriend] broke up with him.”
“Really?” Whitney tried to pay attention through her drunken haze.
“I heard he has a huge dick,” the girl said.
“REALLY?”
“Yup. I’ve seen it.”
“I can’t because of Luke,” Whitney said.
“Whitney, girls would kill to be in your position,” Spencer said. “He’s so much better than Luke. Luke’s just stoner trash.” He badgered her about Luke being “weird and different.”
Whitney’s head was foggy. Were her friends sincere or attempting to sabotage her relationship with Luke? “I don’t know.” She turned to the girl. “You make the decision for me. You’re like my big sister.”
Whitney was fighting desperately to keep her status in the clique. Earlier that week, Whitney had IMed Bianca to ask if anything was going on. Bianca said that several people were going out for lunch. Thanks for inviting me, Whitney thought, and met Bianca, Giselle, Madison, and Bobby at the pizzeria. When Seth (who was now Giselle’s boyfriend) and another popular guy showed up and asked if anyone wanted to go to the school’s basketball game that night, the group quickly arranged a car, leaving Whitney out. No one seemed to notice.
Whitney made the two-hour drive to the game anyway; because the event wasn’t a party, it was acceptable to take a second car. In the parking lot afterward, Seth mentioned to Whitney that the group was going out to dinner. Whitney turned to Bianca and Madison. “Would you guys mind riding with me so I don’t have to drive alone? We could be one car and Bobby, Seth, and Giselle could go in Seth’s car.”
Bianca and Madison exchanged a look. “Uh,” said Madison, “well, Seth is bringing me home after dinner.”
“I could drive you,” Whitney said.
“Uh, maybe!” Madison said.
Whitney watched in disbelief as Bianca and Madison speed-walked across the parking lot and jumped into Seth’s car. Whitney got into her own car and, crying, followed the populars’ car to the restaurant. She sat at their table, quietly sipping lemon water and pretending she wasn’t upset.
Now, her inhibitions drowned in seven shots of vodka, Whitney threw herself at other guys in front of Luke until he got fed up and left the party. Meanwhile, Whitney’s friends told Spencer’s brother that she wanted to sleep with him. He texted Whitney from the living room. “I want to see your underwear on the outside. Let’s go to my truck.”
Whitney flashbacked to junior year prom, when she had been so intoxicated that she had almost been date-raped. Luke was
the only person she’d told about that. Whitney found Spencer in the dining room and told him she didn’t want to sleep with his brother. She and Luke were exclusive.
Spencer got angry. “Luke’s a fucking loser, Whitney. He looks like a girl and is this tall!” Spencer held his hand up to his nose. “You’re better than that. You’re stupid if you don’t fuck [my brother] tonight.” She didn’t do it. Whitney spent the rest of the night passed out and vomiting.
The next day, still hungover, Whitney volunteered to be the designated driver for that night’s New Year’s Eve party. Irene asked for a ride. Whitney checked with Bianca online. “Tell her ‘No,’ ” Bianca said. “Tell her there isn’t any room,” though there was.
Without a spot in the party car, Irene spent New Year’s Eve at home.
ELI, VIRGINIA | THE NERD
Eli desperately tried to organize an outing for his Spanish camp friends. He invited eleven of them to a large local mall. He had reservations about inviting Debra—he was sure she had laughed at him behind his back since middle school—but he asked her anyway.
“Hey, Debra,” Eli called out from his seat as she entered their Spanish classroom, “Me, Raj, and Ashley are going to [the mall] this weekend. Would you wanna go?”
Debra, who was semi-popular, looked around the room, seemingly embarrassed. “Uh, I have to ask my mom first,” she said, her voice cold and dismissive. She leaned over to whisper to a friend, who stared directly at Eli.
Am I really that awkward? he thought.
That night, Debra IMed Eli:
Debra: Why’d you ask me to go with you guys this weekend? 2
Eli: I thought you’d want to go . . .
Debra: okay. It’s just, I mean . . . I’ve been kind of a jerk to you. And I don’t know why
Eli: Hahaha don’t feel bad about it.
Debra: but I do. I have so much fun when I hang out with you and everyone but then I get to school and I’m like a witch-with-a-b and idk why
The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory, and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School Page 17
