'Those memories are being brought back out all the time': Why you never really get over high school

Popularity, one of the defining fixations of adolescence, seems to be seared into our consciousness for decades after we leave school.

Before I was friends with Georgia*, I was scared of her. 

One incident sticks in my mind. We were 14, and my best friend at the time was throwing a party – the kind that takes place in a rented church hall and where practically the whole school year turns up. But there was one group of people that my friend had neglected to invite.

Georgia and her posse strode towards us across the playground, observers turning to stare. She was a terrifying bolt of fake tan, peroxide hair extensions and luminous sportswear – what could she possibly want with the likes of us? We froze as she came to a halt. 

"We're invited to your party, yeah?" Georgia demanded of my friend. "Yes, of course," my friend managed to stutter back. Satisfied, Georgia turned on her heel and marched away. Another girl nearby murmured, "You don't have to invite them if you don't want to." But we all knew that yes, yes she did.

You probably have similar high school recollections – of finding yourself at the sharp end of playground politics. Maybe you have memories of your own Georgia, a popular kid who could induce fear at a glance. Maybe you were a Georgia yourself.

Either way, you probably remember it well. After speaking to hundreds of people about their experiences of high school, Mitch Prinstein, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the US, found that people's memories of those who once ruled over the school corridors – the queen bees, the prom kings, the star athletes – were remarkably potent.

Even decades after leaving school, most people are able to effortlessly recall the name of the most popular kid in their year – more so than the names of teachers and other classmates, wrote Prinstein ​i​n his 2017 book Popular: The Power of Likability in a Status-Obsessed World.

And it's not just the memories that stick. We might be inclined to think that the high school hierarchy becomes irrelevant once we step beyond the school gates for the last time. But it turns out that it can exert a strange and persistent hold over us. 

Research shows that how popular and well-liked we were as teenagers can influence our lives for years to come in everything from how we make sense of our social interactions to the strength of our romantic relations, our life satisfaction and even our health. 

Rethinking popularity 

It was American psychologist John Coie who changed the way researchers thought about popularity. 

His now-seminal studies in the early 1980s began by asking school kids two simple questions about their classmates: Who do you like the most? Who do you like the least? In the childish handwriting scrawled across hundreds of scraps of paper, Coie would trace new insights about human social behaviour. 

You might think that children would be either broadly liked or disliked by their peers. In fact, Coie and his colleagues found kids can be both liked and disliked by different students, or neither liked nor disliked. Some children were named a lot by their peers – they were highly visible, like tiny celebrities. Others were barely mentioned at all.

For the first time, Coie used the kids' answers to propose five social categories. "Accepted" and "rejected" for those who were widely liked or disliked respectively. "Controversial" for those who got a high number of both "likes" and "dislikes". "Neglected" for those who were hardly mentioned either way. And "average", for kids who weren't too extreme in any one direction (though most leaned towards one of the categories).

Many studies have confirmed the usefulness of these labels. They generally find that about 40% of kids are "average" and 60% fit into one of the remaining four categories. 

The most liked kids tend to be seen by their peers as kind, encouraging and supportive, while "neglecteds" tend to be quiet and withdrawn. "Rejected" kids are likely to be either aggressive and to bully others, or unassertive, socially anxious and the victims of bullying themselves. "Controversials", the rarest group, split the crowd – they're typically seen as class clowns or rebels.

Remarkably, Coie found that children's labels largely stayed the same when they were introduced to new peer groups. And while the initial research was on primary school kids, many studies have replicated the findings in adolescents. One found that around half of kids maintain the same label they had at primary school five years later in high school. 

"I'd had such a bad experience in primary school, and I always remember my mum saying 'It'll be better when you go to high school'," says Connie*, another friend I've asked about her high school experience. "But I think once you've been bullied, or if you have something that makes you visibly different… it was like I was easy pickings." 

After being targeted by bullies in the first few months of high school, for reasons including being mixed race at a predominantly white institution, Connie switched schools. At her new school however, she soon encountered a similar pattern. (Read about the powerful new ways being discovered to fight bullying.)

The 'Regina George effect'

While the labels stay the same, the social dynamics shift dramatically between primary school and high school. In primary school, the "popular" kids are simply those who are best liked – often those who are well-behaved and excel at school, because at that point, kids values typically align with their adult........

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