A few semesters ago I was grading papers from my Developmental Psychology course, and came across the following sentence (and yes, this is the kind of writing we get from college juniors):
Crick et al. tell us what is totally obvious, that girls are more manipulative and backstabbing than guys are.
My students had been assigned an article by Nicki Crick and her colleagues. It was a study of overt and relational aggression among elementary school children, in which the authors had found significant gender differences in both forms of aggression. My student clearly thought this was no news at all, and spent a good portion of his paper suggesting that not only was this research a waste of time, but that I was extremely lame for requiring my students to read such nonsense.
Those of us who study aggression encounter this kind of misconception all of the time. Boys fight, girls gossip. Boys “get it all out in the open” (how many times have I heard this phrase?), duke it out, and move on, while girls get angry with each other, steal each other’s friends or spread nasty rumors, and then hold a grudge for years. This is immutable law.
Except that it’s not.
There are quite a few studies that find girls to be more relationally aggressive than boys. What might surprise people, though, is that there are just as many studies showing no gender differences–in other words, that boys engage in relational aggression just as often as girls do.
One of the key differences in the studies that find gender differences and the studies that don’t has to do with age. Studies of elementary school-aged kids are more likely to find gender differences favoring girls. When researchers study adolescents–especially high school students–they are much less likely to find gender differences at all. (Some studies of children also fail to find gender differences, though!)
The age trend suggests a number of possibilities. For example, girls’ verbal skills (which mature sooner than boys’) might allow them to become relationally aggressive earlier. Relational aggression also requires some social savvy and an accurate awareness of the social hierarchy, not to mention the ability to know how to “hit” someone where it hurts. Maybe girls develop these social and interpersonal skills earlier than boys do, as well.
Regardless of what’s driving the inconsistencies in the research, the stereotype of relational aggression as a purely female domain should be put to rest. There are enough studies piling up that don’t find a gender difference–and even one or two that have found boys to be more relationally aggressive than girls.
That’s not to say that gender doesn’t play a role in relational aggression, how it develops, and how it plays out in the social arena. For example, research that Toon Cillessen and I have conducted found that popular relationally aggressive girls are often strongly disliked, but popular relationally aggressive boys are usually pretty well-liked. There’s something going on there that we really don’t have a handle on yet, and gender (and gender stereotypes, and gender roles) probably plays a big role.
But “Mean Girls”? Only “Mean Girls”? Nah. Make a movie called “Mean Boys”–and base it on the same premise–and I bet it would be just as good. And ring just as true.
So I recently visited one of my favorite high schools (Harding Charter Prep in Oklahoma City), where I talked a little bit about my research to some AP Psychology students. Their teacher, Tom Kindinger, is kind enough to invite me each semester, and I really get a kick out of it. Not only do I get some great questions from his students about peer relationships, popularity, and getting ready for college, I get to ask actual teens what they think about the kinds of topics I study. Not in a research-y way–I’m not there to study them–but in a “Why do you think teens do that?” kind of way. I get some kind of cool idea for a study almost every time I go.
A couple of years ago, I got a question that totally floored me, because it made me realize how easy it is to get the wrong impression about research (and how important it is for researchers to explain their work as carefully as possible, to avoid misunderstandings). After I described how peer relations researchers use classroom- or grade-based sociometric assessments–peer nominations or ratings–to study peer status, a guy raised his hand and asked how kids handle being told that they’re rejected. He interpreted my explanation to mean that researchers go back into the schools to inform participants of their peer status. Yikes.
While I’ve only gotten that question once, I know better than to think that he’s the only person who has ever wondered that same thing.
So, for anyone who has ever wondered: No, we do not share individual research results with our participants. To do so would be not only terribly unethical and just plain mean in many cases, but it’s also a potential threat to the reliability of the data.
I think a lot of people assume we share our results with the kids because we’re psychologists–we’re supposed to be helping, right? And maybe “helping” involves letting kids know how their peers really see them, so that they can make decisions or changes based on that information. But in this case, that information would rarely be helpful, and would often be harmful. Thus, we don’t disclose individual results at all, unless we are concerned about the safety of a participant (and 1) this is rare, and 2) it’s a whole other post).
Many (most?) people don’t realize that the majority of psychologists don’t provide any kind of direct counseling or other services at all—thousands of us are academic psychologists, with careers aimed at understanding thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and brains. We do research. (And teach. Also another post.) Indirectly, we are helping, because we’re doing the research that leads to the development of therapeutic techniques, or prevention or intervention programs, or educational practices, or child welfare policy. But we leave the direct helping to our clinical and counseling psychology colleagues, who are specially trained to provide counseling services. And that’s the way you want it. You definitely don’t want me telling your child that 60% of his peers nominated him as “someone I like the least.” But you do want me studying your rejected child (or your popular child, or your average child, or your bullied child)—because it’s my research, and the research of my academic colleagues, that will ultimately teach us how to help children feel safe and happy at school. And that helps everyone.
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I talk a lot about popularity here without really taking the time to explain what I mean. Not that most of you don’t know what popularity is–we know it when we see it?–but in my field of research, these days, you don’t utter the word “popular” without qualifying it somehow. There’s more than one definition, and things start to get confusing.
So, without further ado, A Popularity Primer.
Chapter 1. Sociometric Popularity, aka Social Preference or “Likeability.”
This is old-school popularity, the original term for high social status that was coined by developmental psychologists back in the 1980s when research on peer relationships really started to take off. Sociometric popularity referred to kids who had a lot of friends, were well-liked by many and disliked by few, who were nice to other kids, with good grades, and who were on an even keel emotionally. When you heard the word “popularity” used, it meant all positive things. Popular kids were all-around good kids. This is not to say that well-liked kids never have problems–of course they do. But compared to some other children, like the victims of bullies and kids who are rejected by their entire peer group–well-liked kids are doing really, really well.
Chapter 2. Perceived Popularity, aka Being “Popular” or “Cool” or “In”
Sometimes I wonder what your average 13-year-old would have thought if she were to have picked up a few issues of Child Development in the 80s and read some articles about popular kids. She would either have assumed things at her school were totally messed up, or she would have rolled her eyes and made some comment about how adults just.don’t.get.it. (Eye roll.) Enter a few studies done in the late 90s: It started to become obvious that when kids themselves said the word “popular,” they meant something very different than the researchers did.
These days, popularity refers to the kids at the top of the social ladder. Everybody knows who they are, and lots of people want to either A) be them, B) be friends with them, or C) date them. (There’s also D) stay as far away from them as possible, but for some reason, the research hasn’t gotten around to those kids yet. Note to self.) Popular kids are a conundrum, a complex mix of nice and mean, prosocial and aggressive, trustworthy and manipulative. They’re thought to be socially savvy and good at understanding others, but they sometimes use these skills to hurt. Some popular kids fall heavily on the good side of things, some on the bad–and some are a pretty even mix of both. Some stay away from trouble, but others seek it out and flirt with danger, drinking too much and engaging in sex too young. We don’t see the same outcomes in likeable kids.
So, that’s the deal. Two different types of high status, two different sets of attributes and outcomes. I should also mention here that just because it took a while for developmental psychologists to get smart about what “popularity” means doesn’t mean that other fields hadn’t already figured it out–sociologists had been studying the cool kids for quite a while when peer relations people joined the party. We’re indebted to our sociologist colleagues; until popularity research reached a critical mass in our own field, the work of sociologists was almost all we had to go on!
Given the evidence that supports the long-term importance of strong early attachments, it’s surprising and perhaps disturbing that so little has come of it. It’s a rare policy or practice that has been directly inspired or informed by attachment theory or the research in its tradition, despite the decades of published research. You’d think that such a powerful body of work would make waves in all kinds of areas, from parenting to professional child care, but…..not so much.
So much of the disconnect between research and policy stems from a lack of communication between the laboratory and the real world. Parents, teachers, and legislators aren’t exactly devouring the latest issue of Child Development (jeez, I can barely keep up with reading it these days, and it’s my own field’s flagship journal), and scientists are rarely skilled at seeking publicity for their research findings. So when I came across a reference to the National Scentific Council on the Developing Child, I got very excited.
The NSCDC is a panel of experts who are charged with condensing relevant child development research into manageable, understandable bullet points for use by policymakers and the lay public. They have published working papers on a variety of issues, including one entitled Young Children Develop in an Environment of Relationships that is based partly on research in attachment. Among the points they make are the following:
When I read this brief, all I could think was–YES! Finally! Now maybe issues like family leave, working mothers, and subsidized child care can become informed discussions of what’s best for children, rather than oversimplified political talking points. (Of course, this brief was written in 2004, and I haven’t exactly seen my colleagues all over CNN. Yet. Small steps….)
(And trust me, I’m not as naive as I sound–I understand the financial implications of the programs that brief is alluding to. But I’d like to get scientists in on that part of the discussion, too–a discussion of the financial costs versus the costs in children’s mental health, and the long-term implications of policies that ignore the child in favor of the budget.)
So, the gap is narrowing. Science is doing its job–we’re making the breakthroughs, we’re looking for the answers (and publishing them, at least when they answer big enough questions). Groups like this Council are delivering the results to the doors of the people who make the big decisions, who write the legislation, and who decide what issues to take on in their election campaigns. Will they listen?
As any parent can tell you, there are (far too) many people, books, websites, and magazine articles offering child-rearing advice to the new parent. Much of the advice is related to topics that, frankly, really don’t matter-trust me, the difference between swaddling my daughter “properly” versus swaddling her in my own highly incapable and messy way was undetectable at 4 a.m.; she cried either way.
The big issues, though-that’s where things can get scary. Take, for example, the following advice to late-19th-century parents, which was published as part of a pamphlet called The Care and Feeding of Children by Luther Emmett Holt:
It is tempting to dismiss this kind of bad advice as simply uninformed by more recent advances in research with infants (and in this case, it’s a reasonable assumption-infancy research was virtually nonexistent in 1894). Surprisingly, though, parents are still taught child care techniques that are inconsistent with psychological research with infants and children. Take, for example, the following blog post about cry-it-out techniques from a parenting blog called Partners in Parenting:
“What does this (sleep training) method entail? It’s pretty simple: put the baby down asleep at bedtime and don’t return to the room until the end of the sleep period. So, at nap-time, you put the baby down cooing and gurgling, walk out of the room, close the door, and don’t return for two hours — even if your baby is crying the entire time. Same thing at nighttime.”
This is advice given to parents by many pediatricians, nurses, sleep experts, and parenting gurus. There are lots of variations on the theme, but the gist is the same: Babies will learn to put themselves to sleep, and will go to sleep without a fuss, if parents will stop rewarding the infant’s cry with a response (comforting, rocking, feeding, etc). I can’t emphasize enough how common this advice is-there are numerous books on the topic, child care websites recommend it, and at every single well-baby visit I took my infant daughter to, we were encouraged to “train” Lily to sleep by letting her cry in her crib if need be. (In case you’re curious, we managed to teach Lily to fall asleep without leaving her to cry alone.)
Thoughts? We’re talking about attachment this week in class. Is this advice consistent with fostering secure attachments?