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Popularity and Gender Prototypicality: An Experimental Approach

  • Empirical Research
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Abstract

Despite the growing scientific understanding of peer popularity, there are few theories that explicitly address the development of peer popularity in adolescence. The studies reported here present a preliminary test of the theory that popularity is associated with gender prototypicality. Popularity is associated with physical attractiveness, as well as with attributes (e.g., athletic involvement for boys, having stylish clothes for girls) that often reflect gender-based expectations. After being exposed to either a high school popularity priming condition or a neutral control condition, 1st-year college students rated photographs (Study 1, N = 368, 34% male, 66% female; Mage = 19.30, SD = 1.78, range 17–35), vignettes (Study 2, N = 249, 16.4% males, 83.2% females, 0.4% other; Mage = 18.71, SD = 2.31, range 17–40), and social media profiles (Study 3, N = 218, 30.3% male, 69.3% female, 0.5% other; Mage = 19.40, SD = 2.31, range 18–39) depicting gender-typical and gender-atypical adolescents’ appearance and interests on a number of popularity-related characteristics. These results indicated that gender prototypicality in both appearance and interests is associated with popularity.

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Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge Dr. Jennifer Barnes, Dr. Erin Freeman, and the OU Social Development Lab for their input on study design, and for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of the manuscript.

Funding

No funding was used for these studies.

Data Sharing and Declaration

The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are not publicly available but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Oklahoma, 455W. Lindsey Street, Norman, OK, 73019, USA

    Margaret Kleiser & Lara Mayeux

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  1. Margaret Kleiser
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  2. Lara Mayeux
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Contributions

M.K. participated in the design and implementation of the study, analyzed the data and drafted portions of the manuscript; L.M. participated in the design and implementation of the study, assisted with data analysis, and drafted portions of the manuscript. Both authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Margaret Kleiser.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical Approval

This research was conducted in accordance with the principles of the Belmont Report. Approval was granted by the Institutional Review board of the authors’ university (Study 1 – approval date 03/06/2018, IRB #9076; Study 2 – approval date 09/11/2019, IRB #11145; Study 3 – approval date 03/04/2020, IRB #11800).

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Kleiser, M., Mayeux, L. Popularity and Gender Prototypicality: An Experimental Approach. J Youth Adolescence 50, 144–158 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-020-01344-5

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