Why Nerds Are Unpopular

In My Humble Opinion
21

I never really bought into the idea that smart=nerd. There are plenty of intelligent people out there who also had social skills in high school. In fact, I think a “nerd” is someone who hides behind their intelligence or academic achievement in order to compensate for their lacking in other areas. It many ways, they are similar to a “dumb jock” or “pothead” or any other one dimensional person.

I find this interesting. It really isn’t until late into the college years do we start to expect kids to act like adults. I’ve also noticed that even in the adult world you have “nerds” and outcasts. It may not be as visible since there is a natural selection process that starts to separate people by skills and attributes, but it’s still there.

In fact, I think that pressure to conform is worse as an adult than it ever was in high school. I see little diference between working in a corporation, joining a fraternity, or sitting at the cool table in high school. The only diference is that the pressure to conform to standards of dress, appearance and behavior becomes more institutionalized. Now you don’t even have to put up with D or F level people since you can weed them our right from the beginning.

22

Based on experience, I’d subscribe to that theory.

I went to high school in India. The system is a lot more competitive than anything in the U.S. and smart people are generally envied fairly openly. No one really victimized them, but for whatever reason, the braniacs in my class didn’t really develop social skills worth mentioning. Hence nerd.

But,
That has a lot to do with the pressure they put themselves under to succeed. I’m a pretty damn smart myself (modest too) but neither my parents nor I felt any great need for me to be top of my class. I settled for high average and playing soccer. I was probably an A on the table scale, and have never felt like an outcast. My point is - the nerd’s and his/her parents’ attitudes have a lot to do with it. I’m at a tech school in the US now, and have generally found that nerds here aren’t misunderstood geniuses. They’re (generally) people who put a lot of time into their work because its the only way they can do well. And they feel thats more important than the world around them.

23

I’ve found that the kind of social heirarchies that identify and punish nerds are less likely to be found in an all-boy high school. It seems that girls are much more the arbiters of social standards than boys, and can be especially cruel, at that age. I’m not saying that social stratification doesn’t exist in all-boy high schools, but it’s fairly weak compared to what goes on in the typical co-ed high school.

24

What Graham said about nerds who hang out with stoners, how the two groups overlap, resonated with me. After 2½ years in highschool, when I had gotten fed up with being ghettoized as an unpopular intellectual, I rebelled. The hell with it. I took to marijuana and growing my hair long, and hanging out with stoners. Many of the other straitlaced nerds felt revulsion to see me going this way. I didn’t care; I was fed up with everything in that school. When I saw Easy Rider I knew I was going to become a hippie. Of course, stoners are expected to suppress their intellect as the price for belonging, which was unthinkable for me. And hippies, for all their positive qualities, are very often infected by the anti-intellectualism that has pervaded American life since the Know-Nothing era. So I never could conform exactly to any sort of peer group.

Still, the marijuana helped me a lot to re-establish myself as a human being. Even if I wasn’t completely accepted by the stoners, I had no aspirations to be completely acceptable to anybody but myself.

I saw the limitations inherent in each group and was determined to bust out of all limitations anywhere I found them. Intellectuals can’t get high. Who says so? Hippies can’t be intellectual. Who says so? You can’t like classical music, modern jazz, and psychedelic rock all at the same time. Who says so? I was the only kid in my school to go vegetarian and experiment with meditation. I had a sort of eccentric gadfly need to challenge society’s pat, comfortable little assumptions and shake people up a little, make them think, épatez la bourgeoisie. I went ahead knowing full well that it would earn me weird looks and maybe unpopularity, but by that point I was beyond caring. I was already unpopular from the beginning, so why not go for broke and at least make myself happy? Being cast into the role of “nerd” was as inhibiting as a straitjacket (well, so was any other role); by cultivating my eccentricity I found a way to bust loose and creatively take charge of my own identity. Instead of being beaten down for being weird, I positively exulted in the defiant joy of being weird. I was already ostracized, had nothing to lose, so I went for broke and made my own self-esteem from scratch.

My daughter is 15 now and so much like me, it’s uncanny. Loves to read books and listen to offbeat music, very socially withdrawn and shy. Loathes the mindless conformity of teenage peer groups. That’s me exactly. I see myself in her in all the social-anxiety torments she has been going through since she turned 13. She was so alienated by the big public high school we sent her to that we had to pull her out and send her to a special one reserved for the weird kids, where she was much happier and made friends for the first time since starting highschool. She and I have become each other’s best friend now because we are the only ones who really understand one another. In that sense, Graham’s suggestion that family helps teenagers through these troubles resonates (it also doesn’t hurt that I’m Italian).

Also, the Straight Dope Message Board has been such a vital, vibrant virtual community for me as an adult, I get warm fuzzies thinking of the psychological helping hand it extends to unpopular teenagers. Graham said that nerds released into adult society will seek each other out and bond. The Straight Dope community is Exhibit A. This is as good a place as any for them to find understanding and empathy from tons of folks who know what it’s like. I’ll never forget what Geobabe said to me the first time we met: We Dopers are the kids who were brainy and unpopular in school, and now we’re celebrating our survival and our brains together.

25

I disagree with the article. It was written by a nerd, trying to explain his nerdishness.

I went to a high school that was entirely acidemically selective. You had to do a test before you could attend, and there were very limited places offered each year. We were all ‘nerds.’

But you know what? Our school still settled out into social stratas. Their were the popular kids, the freaks, the geeks, the people who you look back on and say “who?”- we were all there as if we were just your standard average high school. Socially, we were.

Academic ability has nothing to do with popularity (although lack of it may indirectly affect it), and in my opinion, looks have very little to do with it, either. I knew many people who were popular and could not be considered by any means attractive. When a friend from another school met one of the ‘nerds’ she told me she thought that he was quite attractive (something that had never crossed any of our minds, because, well, y’know… he’s a nerd).

But what all the nerds had in common was that they were antisocial. They just didn’t relate to other people very well. They weren’t very conversational, they often over-reacted to things and they (quite probably as a response to their unpopularity) developed an air of snobbish arrogance, which as you can imagine, didn’t endear them to anyone.

I know, - I used to be one of them. But when I started being more extroverted, when I taught myself to relate to other people, I became more popular. Every nerd who’s ever looked at himself in the mirror and thought ‘they only hate me because I’m smarter than they are’ is deluding himself. We live in a society, and the people who are most popular in that society are the people who can relate to others the best. Simple as that.

26

Hence, I am not a nerd, just a geek :smiley:

27

whiteboy I have to disagree. I went to Stuyvesant High School in new York City, a school populated by 3000 nerds (it is a specialized science high school. It’s public, but you have to take an entrance exam to get in).

While there were, I suppose, “more and less popular” groups, there was no vicious backstabbing. There were basically just lots of different groups (people with different interests) peacefully coexisting.

Honestly, it was a pretty ideal high school experience.

28

I have to add that his descriptions of “teenaged life” in the Middle Ages are… let’s just say specious to be polite. The idea of “teenaged years” is a social phenomenon tied to the 20th century. The word “teenager” wasn’t even coined until the 1940s. Comparing the 14 year olds of today to the 14 year olds of the 1400s is ridiculous.

I seem to recall a famous quote by an ancient Greek philosopher complaining about how the young people have no respect for their elders. Can anyone help me drum it up?

29

Hello Again, my high school experience was exactly like that. And it wasn’t even a specialized science high school.

I think it was because we were all jokers.

30

The article is pretty stupid.

The real problem is the Cult of Stupidity being bred into American culture. People really, really do hate smart people. This includes high school teachers. Teachers play a key role in perpetuating social grouping.

Clothes have nothing to do with it. Many of the “soc” kids in my high school didn’t have the money to buy nice clothes, etc. Some of the people who dressed the nicest were social pariahs.

Note on my experience: Definitely a computer geek. (My programming class was only the second time programming was taught in high school in our state.) But for various reasons I had friends in all social classes. By graduation, I was on quite friendly terms with almost every one of the 400+ people in my class. This didn’t classify me as a “soc” but definitely not a social outcast at all.

31

Hmm, I thought that was exactly his point – that when you don’t regard teenagers as a separate category from adults, with no useful role in the adult world and little contact with anyone outside of their immediate age group, they don’t act the way teenagers do in our society. I agree that he romanticizes the past to some extent, but the basic point seems perfectly valid.

32

At the school I go to (I’m a sophomore in an inner city high school), I’d have to go even farther from A-E, because (watch me get flamed for this) there’s really two different hierarchies: one mostly of black people, one mostly of white people. As there are far more people in the “black” group, they are more popular by default. So assuming 1A-1E for the “black” group, and 2A-2E for the “white” group, I would say that I am about low 2A/high 2B.

Of course, I am also someone who could be called a geek (not a nerd, though. Nerds stay home and study instead of going to parties, geeks go to the parties but end up talking to other geeks in the corner), but most of the people in the “white” group are also fairly geeky. I’m not even sure we have anything as low as a E group, actually. Everyone in the “white” group seems to be pretty equal.

(And it must be admitted that I am hopelessly white, and thusly no next to nothing about the “black” group)

33

No, my point is that by definition a nerd is unstylish, unattractive or socially inept. If a person meets those criteria then that person must be a nerd. Sorta like “a nerd is a nerd is a nerd” type of thing. I never said or believed that a nerd was lazy or shiftless. Inept means that someone is not skilled or ineffective and I don’t know how to make nerds skilled and effective. I was simply saying that if someone dressed like a nerd, and acts like a nerd then they must be a nerd. The reason that I left out unattractive is that IMHO if someone is stylish and socially adept their appearance improves accordingly.

I see a lot in this thread about not wanting to conform or being subject to peer pressure. Well there is a price being paid by those that confirm and let their peers determine how they act. If you don’t want to pay that price, that is fine (maybe even great), but if that is the road you take you have to remember that there are trade-offs. :smiley: [sup]No such thing as a free lunch[/sup]

Saw right though me. :wink: [sup]It was late so I skipped the article, but I did hit a nerve.[/sup]

34

I can’t really comment about race relations, because I went to high school in Minnesota and Montana, two of the whitest states in the union. :slight_smile:

Also, I didn’t live the life others in this thread did. I was never picked on. I was never popular, but I was never picked on.

I was intelligent in High School and open about it. I took advanced math and AP English (where we read Faulkner, to my immense boredom) and drama (incidentally, I picked up my love of Shakespeare in that drama class). In short, I was the nerdiest I could possibly be. :smiley: (I even have a speech impediment, in fact.)

But I was unshakably semi-popular. I wasn’t very popular, or even popular like a moderately good sports player would be, but people who knew my love of knowledge and my geek nature would still be polite to me and compliment my intellect. I did make a few freak friends, but I didn’t beome a freak (I went though my freak phase in elementary school, when I read a lot of Poe and dressed in black.) and I have never used any drug other than caffeine.

My God, I even went over to a Suspected Gay’s house to play Dungeons&Dragons (while living in small-town Montana, mind you) and nobody so much as insulted me.

I don’t really know why. I don’t even have a good guess.

I agree with the article fully and I agree with the conclusions he reaches, but I haven’t been there.

35

Personally, i think putting people in “classes” is very degrading but these are my thoughts:

I, like Derleth, was never picked on and wasnt nerdy or a jock or anything (just an average guy who had above-average intellegence), but when i got into high school i got an entire new perspective on things. I noticed that everyone liked me - jocks, nerds, cheerleaders, etc and that the most unpopular people were the jocks. This is because they only hung around other jocks of their type (soccer players with soccer players, baseball with baseball, etc). Assuming that the definition of popularity is how many people know you then, i was one of the most popular kids in school.

36

You may be thinking of a quote attributed to Socrates by Plato bemoaning the youth of “today”. Look like it might be suprious.
Disrespectful Youth

37

I used to be at the bottom of the social ladder at my school…eventually towards the end of my days there I got more accepted, in fact I got the biggest shock of my life when a girlfriend’s sister checked up on what people thought of me - it turns out that lots of my classmates really admired me for not giving a damn what people thought of me…exactly what I was persecuted for back in the early days!

Although it has to be said, back then I was short and fat and couldn’t play sports…

By the end I was average height, toned and seriously into martial arts which kinda scared a lot of people :slight_smile:

I think the major change though was work…I used to do nothin but work, then I thought blow this, I stopped working yet continued to get high grades, whihc kinda supports the theory that nerdism is less to do with brainpower and more to do with the amount of effort put into the work…

just my 2c…hey, pretty good value for 2c eh?

38

dang.

39

Well, I for one, didn’t really care about being Popular (capital P). I basically went through high school with the following goals:
-get good enough grades to get into a decent college
-look like a normal guy (clothes, hair, etc)
-hang out with people I liked and respected
-try different things

That pretty much worked for me. I could pretty much go to any high school function and shoot the shit with just about anyone - jocks, dorks, stoners, cheerleaders, whoever. I actually enjoy reunions or visiting the old home town because I actually like running into people from high school.
But here is what I’ve noticed about “nerds” and other outsiders
-they suffer from “persecution complexes”. In other words, they get off on the fact that they are outcasts
-they are more stuck up than anyone
-they treat women like objects - “popular girls” are trophys that only the “dumb jocks” win. I know this basketball player guy who dated this cheerleader all through HS. I think they were engaged when I saw them at my 10 yr reunion. Both of them are dumb as bags of hammers but they’re both ok people and they are pretty much made for each other.
-they seem to resent the “popular kids” a lot more than the popular kids resent them. (Why would you care if someone you weren’t freinds with didn’t invite you to a party?)
-they don’t get involved with anything (except maybe other insuler activities with their own kind). I went through my “angry loner” phase in jr high but in high school, as I started getting involved in activities and sports and whatnot it just seemed stupid to do nothing but hang out and bitch about stuff. And I don’t even LIKE sports!