A workplace can be happy or dysfunctional in any number of ways, but ask someone about their secondary-school social hierarchy and they’d describe something instantly recognisable, and closely resembling the setting for Mean Girls. There are the popular kids – the confident, athletic guys and attractive, socially adept girls – and the nerds, with several strata in between. The “popular” kids can be cruel and Machiavellian, and they are often widely envied and disliked – psychologists call this “perceived popularity”. But there are also always some people with “high sociometric popularity”: these are the kind, decent kids, the ones who might stand up to a bully, who really are liked by almost everyone.
When you’re inside, this hierarchy feels all-consuming. Your friendship group will never define you in the same way it does when you are a teenager, trying to establish your place in the world. It might be tempting to think of school cliques as warped, immature versions of adult social groups, but the University of Oxford psychologist Lucy Foulkes sees them as complex systems worth studying on their own terms. Entering or leaving a teenage friendship group can, after all, be as involved and formal a process as changing jobs, she observes.
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