I found an interesting article theorizing about why so-called “nerds” tend to be unpopular. It mostly talks about middle and high school age kids but I suppose some of it could apply to some adults as well.
I’m not saying it is absolutely correct but it certainly could explain my own long-ago nerdy adolescence. What do you think?
So you’re saying the Poindextrose theory (Simpson, 1998) is in error?
I’m sorry, I’m not familiar with that particular theory. Please elaborate.
(Simpson, eh? Bart? Homer?).
Two thoughts:
I had nerdy friends who weren’t smart. And,
Did anyone else go to a school were there wasn’t this great chasm between the popular and unpopular people? Maybe it’s a function of the size of my school (160 in my graduating class), but we simply didn’t have this sort of social striation. Yes we had groups, but the groups were big and squashy and rather a large number of people traveled between them. Am I alone in having gone through high school without experiencing true high school?
Julie
It explains some things. Nothing really shocking was revealed or anything. It’s pretty common knowledge that the jocks are idiots and the nerds will end up marrying their girlfreinds. jk 
So in what way were they nerdy? Simply because they were unpopular?
I have to say I’ve known a lot of smart people who aren’t the least bit nerdy but I haven’t met too many nerds who weren’t smart, at least in areas they were interested in.
I can’t help you with your social striation question. I went to two high schools and the size of my class in both was >500 people. I have to say, though, most of my social problems were gone by 11th and 12th grades. 7th through 10th were the real excrutiating ones (more junior high than high school).
I guess it never would have occured to me at the time that I was unpopular because I didn’t WORK at being popular, and that the kids who were popular really cared about it and worked at it all the time. To me, it seemed the popular kids acheived their status effortlessly.
Also as I’ve gotten older I’ve recognized that I lacked social skills in school because my parents also are not very social people. They didn’t (and still don’t) have a circle of friends, other than their relatives. Even after we moved pretty far away from most of my relatives they didn’t cultivate friends, say, in our neighborhood. They had contacts through our school or Scout activities but these didn’t extend much beyond those areas.
I contrast this with my wife, who has a vast network of friends from high school, college, her old neighborhood, her old jobs, our current neighborhood, our hobbies (skiing, mostly), and my son’s school, all of whom she keeps in pretty good contact with. How? She works really hard at it! Who knew that was the secret?
For some reason, the link in Part I won’t allow you to Part II. So here ya go:
It’s an interesting perspective, but I think there are really two forms of popularity. Some people are popular because lots of people really like them, while other people are considered popular because they’re the ones people would name if someone asked “Who’s popular at your school?” In the former group, you’re likely to get people who are popular because they’re being themselves and people like them for it. In the latter group, you’re more likely to get people who devote themselves to being “cool” 24/7.
Yeah, my parents are fairly quiet too. I never hung out with my cousins, saw grandma once a year at Christmas. My parents have no friends, except for acquaintances at work.
I understand how they had felt, as I am the way they are now. But still, I feel deprived of my extended family. I could go out and try to make contact, but that would be to weird to me, as I hardly know them. Sorry for the hi-jack.
It’s Lisa, from the episode in which a new student keeps hitting her, and she discovers that a chemical exuded by nerds (called "poindextrose) causes bullies to hit them.
Unpopular, dorky, guys who were focused on specific “nerdy” things like Tolkein or D&D and they hung out with nerds. Maybe there’s a better word for them, but there were a number of them and they weren’t necessarily very bright.
Julie
Mine wasn’t that bad. The jocks hung around the jocks and the smart kids with the smart kids and us weirdos with whoever showed up, but it wasn’t the rigidly enforced social system you see at a lot of schools.
My high school is specifically devoted to nerds, as evinced by the name: Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. We teach nerds. That’s our business. We have sports teams, but most of them are nerds as well.
However, there are still hateful little pukes, and I know quite a few. Less than I used to, and they’re not specifically bent on mocking and taunting me, but they exist. There is some cameraderie, but their main goal is to be intolerant and to make other students feel bad. I am their more or less current object of ridicule, because I hold views that are diametrically oppsed to their bigotry. I’ve given up trying to argue with them, because they’re immune to logic.
The man who wrote these articles is extraordinarily insightful.
“Norbert Wiener”? Were his parents trying to get him pantsed every day of his life?
These articles were fascinating. I don’t agree with everything he said, but a lot of it rang true for me. I was a lucky nerd because I didn’t care about being popular, and didn’t care what I was “supposed” to be doing; I just did what interested me. My high school was also smaller, the boundaries weren’t as rigid, and there was very little bullying.
I like the idea that adolescence doesn’t have to be the most miserable time of your life, and that it could be made much better by something as simple as giving teenagers a reason for living. Now that I think of it, the happiest kids I went to school with were the ones who had big plans, and were working towards them.
On the other side of the coin, I have heard studies that say kids are getting burned out by having too much expectation on them from too young an age. Is this caused by striving for their parents’ expectations, not their own, do ya figure?
I think the article makes some interesting points, but overall, it doesn’t mesh with my own high school experience. Did I miss this in the article, or does it not specifiy when the author went to high school? I was class of '87, public suburban high school, school size was about 1200 students.
There were certainly more popular kids and more nerdy kids, but the lines weren’t very firm. Being smart was valued at all levels. First, it was a rather competitive school, so “book smarts” and grades were important. I’m not saying that good grades are the hallmark of smartness, but rather that no one was branded a nerd or a geek simply because of a high GPA. Granted, some of the kids were thinking along the lines of “I want to do well in school, so I can go to a good college, and join a good frat, and go to a lot of good keggers,” but there were plenty of popular people who valued being smart in the more philosophical sense as well. One of the most popular boys, an athlete and a student government guy, is now a big time neuroscientist, who had research published when he was an undergraduate. He was (and presumably still is, he seemed to be when I saw him at our 10 year reunion) very socially adept and genuinely a nice guy. Clearly his scholarship didn’t suffer because he spent time being social, nor did his popularity decline because he devoted a lot of energy to his studies.
This is an example, but he wasn’t the exception to the rule, either. A very anecdotal, unscientific look at my graduating class 15+ years later doesn’t demonstrate to me any particular correlation between popularity (or lack of it) in high school and success (or lack of it) later in life.
Was there cruelty? I remember feeling that there was at the time, but I remember the feelings much more than I can recall the actual incidents that presumably made me feel this way. I started high school towards the bottom of the popularity scale, but the system seemed to break down and become more egalitarian by the end. I’m pretty sure this wasn’t due to any sort of amazing shift in the universe, but more because I and the other students all managed to gain some level of maturity and social skills in the four years.
Plenty of the popular kids in my high school were smart, but, in general, smarts weren’t the only thing they had going for them. They were also outgoing, seemingly confident, and otherwise had generally good people skills. (There were a few real assholes, but the kids who won prom queen and student president, etc., really were pretty nice folks.)
I think the tendency among nerds or geeks (and I put myself in this category) is towant to believe “Oh, people look down on me because I’m smarter than they are.” I’m not sure how true that is, though. In high school, I definitely fell on the nerdier side of the spectrum. I was smart, sure, but I was also not very outgoing and pretty openly contemptuous of people I didn’t think were intellectual enough. Fortuantely, my social skills have developed since then, but I can see why my some of my peers might not have liked me.
Thanks for the link. I couldn’t find Part II in a cursory search earlier.
The author loses me somewhere in the middle of Part II. I didn’t rigorously hate every single thing we studied in school for example, whereas he apparently does. I liked some of the books, and most of the science courses.
I agree with his thesis, though, that most of the work we are required to do in school bears little resemblance to the type of work most of us do later in our working life.
This is my experience as well. From the article:
I think that’s a bit dishonest. I was popular and don’t recall not having other activities to concentrate on besides being popular. I have always been an avid reader, and enjoyed other activities besides fashions and parties. I also had very good grades. I’ll admit that my grades sometimes earned me resentment, but I believe it was how I responded to the resentment, that made the difference.
I think the key point in this article is the attention given to being popular. The “D Table” kids were either focusing all their talents on something more important than popularity, or they simply lacked the talents to become popular. That’s why I sat at a table with really smart and really stupid people.
I also remember noticing that the “funny” kids really weren’t all that funny. They were just loud. To me, I thought being funny with a tiny audience would be a higher quality existence than to be annoying and have a crowd presenting predictable courtesy laughs. I once had a kid pick a fight with me because I didn’t laugh at a “funny” comment he made in class (8th grade). By high school, we were friends.