In Simple Terms
Lots of people may know you at school, but that does not mean you have someone you can trust. Studies suggest that close, supportive friendships may matter more for later well-being than being noticed or admired by a crowd. These studies followed people over time, but they cannot prove that popularity itself causes later problems.
Two Different Measures of Social Success
Rachel Nar led the study with University of Virginia psychologist Joseph Allen, and the findings were published in Child Development. The team followed participants every year from age 15 to 25. Rather than treating friendship and popularity as the same thing, the researchers measured them separately at the start of the study, when participants were 15.
To assess friendship, the researchers did not rely only on teenagers’ views of their closest relationship. They also asked each participant’s best friend for their perspective and looked at the degree of closeness, support, and personal sharing in the relationship. In other words, they examined the quality of the bond between two people—not how many acquaintances someone had or how visible they were at school.
Popularity was measured differently. The researchers asked classmates how many of them would choose the teenager as someone they wanted to spend time with. This measure captures how much others wanted to spend time with the person and how much attention they attracted within the group. But on its own, it cannot explain why others wanted to spend time with that person: the answer might reflect warmth and likability, status and influence, or some combination of the two.
The two measures were not strongly linked. Some teenagers had close, dependable friendships without being among the best-known students in class. Others attracted attention from a wider group without having an equally intimate relationship. That distinction matters because it challenges a simple view of social life—one that asks only, “Are you popular?” It also allows researchers to consider how each kind of experience may relate to later outcomes.
Differences That Take Time to Emerge
The study did not find major short-term changes in mental health associated with either measure. The clearest differences appeared as participants moved into their twenties. By age 25, those who had been more sought after by classmates at age 15 reported higher levels of social anxiety. By contrast, better-quality close friendships were associated with lower social anxiety, higher self-esteem, and fewer depressive symptoms.
This does not mean that every teenager who is popular at school will later struggle with anxiety, or that everyone with a close friend will grow up free of depression or self-doubt. The results describe broad patterns among a particular group of participants over the years they were followed. The published study summary also did not report effect sizes, so the available information does not show exactly how large the differences were or how they compare with the influence of other factors in participants’ lives.
It is also important to distinguish between one experience happening before a later outcome and that experience directly causing the outcome. The researchers followed people over time, but they did not randomly assign them to groups of “popular” and “not popular” teenagers. Nor did they establish that pursuing popularity caused anxiety. Differences that existed earlier—for example, in personality or family circumstances—could have shaped both participants’ relationships and their mental health.
Being Liked Is Not the Same as Having Status
Work by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill psychologist Mitch Prinstein helps explain why the word “popularity” can be hard to interpret. In his 2017 book and in a discussion of research in this field, Prinstein distinguished between being someone others enjoy spending time with because it makes them feel valued and accepted, and being prominent, influential, or high-status in a group. The two can overlap, but they are not identical.
According to this distinction, people may be liked because they listen, encourage others, and make them feel welcome. Status, on the other hand, may come from visibility, influence, or an ability to command attention. Prinstein argues that being liked for the way you treat people is linked with better outcomes over many years, while high status has been associated in some research with later risks that include anxiety, depression, and addiction.
That framework does not tell us exactly what the Virginia research measured. Counting how many classmates wanted to spend time with a teenager cannot neatly separate genuine likability from influence or a striking social presence. So we should not treat the study by Nar and Allen as a direct test of the difference between being liked and having status. It examined a particular social measure and raises an important question about what that measure represents.
Prinstein also notes that some children with high status are not necessarily liked by their peers to the same degree. Maintaining an image as an influential person can become a continual effort. Status that depends on other people’s opinions may feel unstable, leaving someone afraid of losing it or driven to seek even more. This is one possible way to interpret behavior; it does not show that everyone who seeks status has the same experience.
When Trying to Look Older Becomes a Risk
In an earlier study, Allen’s team examined social status through behaviors that may help teenagers gain it. The researchers followed 184 teenagers from public schools in urban and suburban areas of the southeastern United States, from age 13 to 23. They collected information from the teenagers, their peers, and their parents.
The team focused on a pattern the researchers called pseudomature behavior: teenagers trying to seem older in pursuit of attention and popularity. Examples included starting romantic relationships early, minor delinquent behavior, and placing great importance on spending time with peers considered physically attractive. At age 13, classmates viewed teenagers who showed these behaviors as more popular.
But the picture looked different about a decade later. At age 22, these young adults received lower ratings from their peers for their ability to manage relationships. They were also more likely to have serious problems involving alcohol and drugs and to have become involved in criminal activity. The study of this trajectory was published in 2014.
Allen suggested that maintaining an image as the “cool person” might lead some teenagers to escalate their behavior to keep attracting attention. However, the data do not prove that every early behavior of this kind inevitably leads to those outcomes. The broader point is that behavior that quickly brings status among teenagers does not necessarily build the skills adults need for stable relationships, such as listening, understanding one another, and mutual trust.
Goals That Follow Us Beyond School
The issue is not limited to the school years. In a study published in 2009 in the Journal of Research in Personality, researchers from the University of Rochester—Niemiec, Ryan, and Deci—followed 147 graduates from two universities. They surveyed the participants during their second year after graduation and contacted them again one year later.
The researchers compared two groups of goals. The first group consisted of external goals, such as wealth, fame, and the image a person wants to project. The second group consisted of internal goals, such as building deep and lasting relationships, personal growth, helping others, and taking part in the community. Their findings suggested that graduates tended to make progress toward the goals they valued, whether those goals were internal or external. But the relationship between progress and mental health differed between the two groups.
Progress toward internal goals was associated with better scores on measures of psychological well-being, while achieving external goals was associated with signs of distress. In the University of Rochester’s account of the findings, graduates who had achieved goals related to fame or appearance reported more negative feelings, including shame and anger, as well as physical signs of stress such as headaches, stomachaches, and low energy.
The researchers offered more than one possible explanation. A constant focus on status and image may take time away from family and friends. And comparing yourself with someone who seems more successful can make your own achievements feel inadequate, no matter how much you accomplish. Still, this was a relatively small, educated sample, and the follow-up lasted only one year. It should not be treated as a definitive picture of all graduates or of everyone who hopes to become wealthy or famous.
Why Close Relationships Deserve Attention
These findings take on added significance alongside the long-running Harvard Study of Adult Development, which began in 1938 and included 724 participants. Its director, Robert Waldinger, reported that satisfaction with relationships at age 50 predicted health at age 80 better than cholesterol levels did. This is an observation about how well relationships predicted later health in a long-term study. It does not prove that one relationship guarantees excellent health or that cholesterol is unimportant.
The common thread across this research is not that having lots of friends is bad or that people should avoid being socially visible. Rather, the studies highlight the difference between having a wide network and having someone you can count on, and between being admired from a distance and being known well by another person. Someone can be both popular and close to a friend, just as someone can be well liked without having high status. People’s social lives do not follow a single fixed pattern.
The limits of the evidence matter. The three studies discussed here were observational: they followed what happened naturally and cannot establish cause and effect. Their US samples were also relatively small: 169 teenagers in the Virginia follow-up, 184 in the pseudomature-behavior study, and 147 graduates in the research on goals. Relationships and mental health may also be affected by factors the studies did not measure, such as personality differences or family environment. In addition, some of the details available come from university summaries and research abstracts rather than full presentations of all the study data.
The Bottom Line
Studies following people from adolescence into adulthood offer a reason to rethink how we measure social success. In the University of Virginia study, which followed 169 young people from age 15 to 25, peer status was later associated with greater social anxiety. Close friendship, by contrast, was associated with higher self-esteem and lower levels of depressive symptoms and social anxiety. Other research suggests that some ways of gaining status may accompany later difficulties in relationships or health, while goals centered on connection and personal growth are linked with better psychological outcomes than a focus on fame and image.
These findings do not justify judging popular teenagers, and they do not prove that popularity directly causes problems. They support a more careful, straightforward idea: being known by many people is not a substitute for being known by someone close who will stand by you. The deeper value of relationships may have less to do with how many people notice us and more to do with having someone we can trust when we need support.