I'm getting tired of this "nerds" vs "cool kids" narrative. It is a false dichotomy. Kids fall all over the map in terms of behavior and social groups as they grow up.
Case in point: I was a quiet "nerd" all the way through high school, but really found my element and became a social butterfly in college. Some other people have the opposite trajectory, or zig zag all over the place.
Kids are kids. All of them do stupid things at some point, and all of them have potential to grow and change their personalities to a large extent.
But, it seems to be popular in various circles these days to set up these labels of "cool" and "nerd" and it leads to pointless tribalism.
You just labeled yourself as a "nerd" in high school and demonstrated that it didn't forever cast you into a life of loneliness and despair. You excelled! Likewise, the cool kids won't be cool forever. That's the point. Who you are in high school doesn't define you.
But it does for a lot of people. I know people who have the same friends from HS, listen to the same music and generally act the same way. They graduated HS, but never really left the mentality.
Maybe not to a lot of people. All you know is that some people were affected. But you are not accounting for all the people who were not affected. Yours is a common bias.
Actually, didn't we just see somewhere that your first name affected the possibility of getting an interview?
Something along the lines of identical resumes, where names were stereotypical African names vs. stereotypical "American" names, and the latter would get more interviews, in statistically significantly higher numbers.
It was in the Freakonomics documentary. They also referenced another study where they cataloged over 100 unique spellings of the name "Unique" (e.g. "Uneek").
They also appear to have covered it in a podcast...
Agreed. I know many of the same. But I would also say that many of them fell into the "cool kids" camp in high school. Not so cool anymore. Likewise, a "nerd" may have the same friends, same hobbies, etc., but this may have led to greater success and recognition as an adult than being the star quarterback or drummer in a band in high school.
Perhaps I should have said status among peers in high school does not future status within society (ie. cool now does not equal cool later).
I entirely agree with you -- it is far too trivial to place adolescents into distinct subpopulations. However, I think this study did a pretty good job defining the traits of youth they tracked, see the abstract:
>Pseudomature behavior—ranging from minor delinquency to precocious romantic involvement—is widely viewed as a nearly normative feature of adolescence. When such behavior occurs early in adolescence, however, it was hypothesized to reflect a misguided overemphasis upon impressing peers and was considered likely to predict long-term adjustment problems.
The authors used these criteria to determine whether a specific set of early life behaviors are predictive of later life decisions. In this case, the statistics say that this is the case. While that may not be true in every sense (the "nerd" can get into drugs, the "cool" kid can also get a 1600 on the SAT), it is more common than not based on these data.
The "cool"/"nerd" labels themselves seem mainly to be injected by the media atop the findings of this particular study.
Yes, that is a great point, I should have been more clear. I am tired of this narrative in the mainstream media. From a brief glance at the study, it looked like it took a more nuanced and scientific view.
Case in point: I was a quiet "nerd" all the way through high school, but really found my element and became a social butterfly in college. Some other people have the opposite trajectory, or zig zag all over the place.
Kids are kids. All of them do stupid things at some point, and all of them have potential to grow and change their personalities to a large extent.
But, it seems to be popular in various circles these days to set up these labels of "cool" and "nerd" and it leads to pointless tribalism.