But maybe there's a reason why we also care about popularity as adults.
That has to do with present day.
If you think about it, there are a lot of ways that in our adulthood life,
we are still thinking about and probably really affected by popularity.
And hopefully that's why you're here.
You're here so that way you can get an idea about how popularity is
affecting how happy you are today, how successful you are today and
how your relationships are going today.
There are a lot of different ways that we see this and
probably now much more than we have seen for decades earlier.
We see all this reflected in social media.
So social media is really pulling us all back into that adolescent world of
caring about who responded to our Facebook likes and
posts and how many Twitter followers we have.
And which pictures we put up, and how many people have paid attention to that.
It's kind of in a way of playing out this idea of popularity all over again, but
it's doing it in a way that's explicit and measurable and
there are numbers next to it.
And people sometimes even get very hyped up about
how often their posts have been paid attention to.
Or they seem to try and get more relationships through social media.
So it's affecting us as adults.
It's certainly affecting these adolescents growing up today.
But it's also affecting us as adults.
Another way that we really see popularity playing a role
is our big fixation with celebrities.
And if you think about it,
celebrities are kind of the popular kids in the adult high school.
For some reason, and all you have to do is go to the grocery store and
kind of see all the magazines there.
We are remarkably concerned about what they're doing and
what they look like and what they say and what their opinions are.
This is even a big marketing strategy to get celebrity endorsers with the idea that
if a celebrity buys a product or
espouses a world view, we might be more likely to have similar attitudes.
And the reason why is it's playing up on these same ideas of popularity that
we will see what those people do as highly influential.
In fact, a lot of marketing is really geared towards
leveraging the same types of popularity dynamics in current day.
And when you think about marketing from the perspective of political marketing.
We're really seeing that when it comes to campaigns and
presidential campaigns, there's really a way in which we're trying to be pulled
towards the same types of popularity politics.
And that really plays an important role.
And it's something that's effecting our whole culture.
And that has a lot to do with popularity.
But, even if we go beyond the perspective of the entire culture,
how is popularity affecting your life?
What are things that you are experiencing every day that have a lot to
do with popularity, as many of us have studied it, in childhood and adolescence?
Well If you work in an office with other people, then you've probably noticed
that there are some ways that the office has some of the kinds of cliques and
groups and reputations that there was in high school.
It might be far more sophisticated.
It might be presented in a way that's a little bit different.
No one is kind of playing on a playground or
teasing kids that have to sit in the corner of the room in the workplace.
But there are ways in which some people tend to have much more influence
in meetings, people really want to hear what they have to say,
they have a way of really getting people laughing.
They might stand in the door frame having conversations with their coworkers a lot.
Where as other people, they're not invited to lunch,
they really aren't someone that people want to affiliate with.
Turns out that really affects work performance.
That affects how much the company, overall, is successful.
That even affects how long people will stay in their job, and
a lot of that has to do with popularity.
We also see this of course, play a role in all of our relationships.
So whether it's our adulthood friendships and
how much we feel we're getting support from friends in times of stress.
Or how much we feel in our friendship groups.
There are some people who tend to be the boss.
And tell everyone what they're doing and what the plans are and
whose house you're meeting at.
Versus those that tend to still feel a little bit like they're on the outskirts
of the social group.
Or they're not the ones in the neighborhood that are often
invited to all of the events.
That's all about popularity too.
In fact, we even see that play a big role when it comes to romantic partners.
Who you meet, how dating goes, how we feel during a date.
Then afterwards, our satisfaction in our marital relationships or
other kinds of romantic partnerships.
A lot of that stems from the things we learn about popularity.
Of course, for those of us that are parents, in our adulthood,
we also find that parenting is something really tied into popularity, as well.