Popular

In the popular musical, Wicked, the character Glinda takes Elphaba, otherwise known as the Wicked Witch of the West, under her wing. It’s grade school, and Glinda is the class pet. She’s pretty and talented, and everyone assumes she is also good. Elphaba, on the other hand, is bookish and solitary.

Glinda, with the intention to do a public service of sorts, decides to help Elphie make friends and be liked. She sings,

Popular! You’re gonna be popular! I’ll teach you the proper ploys when you talk to boys, little ways to flirt and flounce; I’ll show you what shoes to wear, how to fix your hair, everything that really counts to be popular! I’ll help you be popular! You’ll hang with the right cohorts, you’ll be good at sports, know the slang you’ve got to know…

I love this song and the way that Kristin Chenowith sings it. But as a parent and an educator, I have a love-hate relationship with the concept of popularity. Maybe that’s why, at the bookstore last week, I found myself drawn to a title I’d not heard of called Popular: The Power of Likability in a Status-Obsessed World by Mitch Prinstein, a psychology professor at UNC Chapel Hill.

The book just came out and is bound to be a bestseller. For who among us hasn’t grappled with the desire to be popular, or with popularity itself? In the book, Prinstein exposes both the immediate and long-lasting effects of popularity on each of us. His research indicates that our earliest experiences with our peers imprints on us and, over time, contributes to, if not shapes, our lives. Successes at work and the quality of our interpersonal relationships and self-image can be linked back to whether or not we were accepted or rejected by our peers as children.

Reading this book, I couldn’t help revisiting elementary school memories of being included at one minute, excluded the next by the popular kid on the playground. It was all so confusing — the being in and the being out. Then, in middle and high school, it got only more confusing as the opportunities to try on popularity presented themselves.

Despite depictions in books and films about popular kids who wreak havoc on the lives of others and often on their own lives as well, Prinstein points out that popular individuals can make a positive impact on others when they bring energy and creativity to the things they endorse. There is a difference between seeking popularity for the status it confers and being popular on the basis of one’s warmth, interest in others, and likability. 

Likability, Prinstein says, hinges on the positive way that we make others feel. Likability can’t be asserted and it can’t be bought. It can only be garnered through a geniune connection with other people. While there will always be those who seek popularity for the way it makes them feel, there will also be those who don’t seek it, and yet who are popular for the way they make others feel.

I really liked Popular: The Power of Likability in a Status-Obsessed World. And in liking it, I hope to help to make it popular.