'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. 

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.)

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 supervisors.

At high school, that changes. Adults and everything they stand for become woefully undesirable. A conscientious over-achiever might find themselves relegated to "nerd" status, while a rowdier, more divisive kid might find their star unexpectedly in ascendance.

On the phone to the one-time playground terror and my now close friend Georgia, I ask her if she considered herself popular at high school. She tells me she didn't think of herself in this way. "'Popular' makes it sound as if people like you and I don't think we were necessarily liked," she says. "Maybe it was a bit more like, infamous… loud and attention-seeking."

As a young teen, Georgia embodied the "controversial" archetype. She acted out aggressively and was disruptive in class. For all those who loved her, there were probably a fair few who didn't. I tell her that people, including myself, were pretty scared of her at one point. But she's wrong about this making her ineligible for the "popular" label. 

"We start paying attention to who might be getting the most attention, who might be more dominant or 'cool'," says Prinstein. "Those who start becoming more physically attractive, those who are fitting into peer norms, [like] those who dress well or are good at sports." 

Engaging in "pseudomature" behaviour – actions associated with older teens or adults – is another fast track to status. Teens who drink alcohol, take drugs and engage in precocious romantic behaviour are more likely to be considered popular – at least for a time. At around age 15, this behaviour stops conferring status to the same degree. 

As high schoolers begin to mature, overt status-seeking becomes less socially expedient, and "likeability" begins to reassert itself as an important determinant of social standing. But the ripple effects from these early experiences in extreme social stratification can be consequential.

"The experiences that we're having as kids – whether we're well liked, whether we're popular or high status – seem to have an enduring effect on us even 40 years later," says Prinstein. "Likability and status have pretty opposite effects. Likability is good. It generally leads to all kinds of positive health, work, academic and psychological outcomes. 

"High status actually leads to the opposite."

Researchers used to think of high school culture as an immature version of adult society. In the 1960s, they began to understand that this "peer culture" was something much stranger – a parallel world animated by its own quixotic fascinations and sets of codes. 

Rather than a simple hierarchy, the high school social landscape features a dynamic system of cliques. The key archetypes recur across popular culture, from American Pie to The Breakfast Club: the populars, the burnouts, the rejects and the nerds. 

For the first few years of high school, the boundaries between cliques tend to be rigid. "Young people can become remarkably clannish, intolerant and cruel in their exclusion of others who are 'different'," wrote German-American psychoanalyst Erik Erikson in his 1959 book, Identity and the Life Cycle.

This intolerance, Erikson contended, might be "a necessary defence" against the loss of the identity one had as a child, combined with a mystifying onslaught of hormonal changes, and the overwhelming nature of the future, with all its possibilities and choices.

Adolescents help each other through this discomfort "by forming cliques and stereotyping themselves", he suggested. This self-sorting makes it easier for teenagers to navigate their social worlds, because each person's relative "category" dictates how they should be treated.

One thing that is overlooked in popular culture, however, is the large swathe of teens who don't subscribe to any particular subculture. A 1985 study found that about 45% of highschoolers defined themselves simply as "normal". While the popular kids claimed they were all about looking good and partying, self-defined "normals" said things like "I'm just a regular teen".

Being "abnormal" and standing out for the wrong reasons can be socially catastrophic. Connie remembers arriving at her new school aged 13 and finding it impossible to gain a foothold on the slippery social edifice. She describes her attempts to amplify different parts of herself in search of the right clique.

"I remember trying to be friends with the nerdy girls. I remember trying to be friends with the cool girls," she says. "I'd be like, 'Oh, I'm really bookish, I do all my homework.' And then that wasn't working, so it was like, 'Oh, I wear makeup, I do my hair,' that sort of thing. I tried to fit in with the music people. I started playing the trumpet." 

But it was to no avail. "I think I knew in my heart that it just wasn't working," she says. "There was nowhere for me to slot in. By the end, I was just completely ignored by everyone." 

Towards the end of high school, the punishing social hierarchy relaxes a little. 

In the early 1990s, researcher David Kinney carried out an ethnographic research project where he embedded himself in a high school to observe the shifting boundaries of cliques up close. He tracked former "nerds" who managed to transition to "normals". 

The rigidity of early high school cliques might reflect the limited cognitive capacities of young adolescents, he noted. While young teens are increasingly able to self-reflect, many are unable to differentiate between how often they think about themselves (a lot) and how often others do. 

For many of the young "nerds" Kinney spoke to, this resulted in a debilitating self-focus and paralysis in social interactions. Eventually, continued cognitive development meant that former nerds were able to feel less fearful, and to surround themselves with peers who provided positive feedback.

As teens mature, the strictures of conformity begin to loosen. Popular kids might even face threats from alternative, rebellious types. Kinney's study found that in later years, the "trendies" were challenged by students with "outrageous appearance and rowdy behaviour", who "competed with them for schoolwide popularity". 

Some of these subtle shifts must have been underway when, aged 15, Georgia first asked me to hang out with her, but I still remember experiencing confusion and disbelief. At that point, I was a member of a predominantly male group of stoners. Was Georgia trying to play some kind of practical joke on me? Would I be lured out only to be humiliated in some way?

Almost 20 years later, I ask Georgia why she wanted to befriend me, something I've never asked her before. I'm wondering which of my sparkling attributes might have attracted her attention – my wit, my charm? "I guess there was a weirdness that we all shared," she says hesitantly. "Like, none of us were normal." 

Given all its unique quirks, it’s remarkable how often we use high school as a frame of reference for adult interactions. When Lucy Foulkes, a psychologist at the University of Oxford in the UK and author of Coming of Age: How Adolescence Shapes Us, shared a social media post about the "mean girl" effect, she was met with an outpouring of recognition.

"A lot of people were saying, it's not just teenagers, I see this in the workplace… I see this with mums at the school gate," says Foulkes. "It's a human phenomenon that some people achieve more social power and dominance over others. There's just something particularly acute about it in adolescence." 

Foulkes points out that teens are surrounded by the same people almost every day for years in a way "that just doesn't really happen in adulthood, other than in the army or in prison. There is an intensity from the environment that goes beyond what's happening inside their brains."

It's this intensity that partly explains why these experiences stay lodged within us, says Prinstein, shaping how we make sense of social encounters for years to come. 

"We're calling forth those experiences from when we were 14 to use as a kind of a template to see the world through," says Prinstein. He points to studies suggesting that the mental model we use to process our social worlds begins to form in childhood, and that the memory-processing parts of the brain are active when people think about social behaviour.

"Those memories are being brought back out all the time." 

Many of us have likely wondered what happened to the "cool kids" we knew as teens. In a 2015 study, Joseph Allen, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia in the US, sought to find out. His discoveries did not bode well for once-popular youths.

Following 184 adolescents in the south-eastern US from ages 13 to 23, Allen found that status-hungry young people who engaged in pseudomature behaviour in their early teens were at greater risk of long-term difficulties in close relationships and criminal behaviour. 

An early taste for alcohol and drugs was tied to greater vulnerability to substance abuse and addiction issues later in life. And a focus on status at an early age led to shallower bonds and difficulties sustaining friendships and romantic relationships. 

The experience of being rejected can also leave scars. Prinstein's research found that rejected high school students were likely to become more depressed over time. He hypothesised that a negative feedback loop was at play, where the experience of rejection begets more withdrawal, which in turn intensifies feelings of rejection.

By contrast, "likeability" – being "accepted" – in high school and generally, is one of the strongest predictors for positive life outcomes like a successful career, good health and strong relationships, even over and above factors like intelligence and socioeconomic background.

Still, people who experience rejection can also develop important strengths, such as becoming more adept at identifying how others are feeling or being more aware of others being mistreated. Such emotional intelligence has been shown to be helpful in navigating personal relationships and the world of work. 

And a child doesn't have to be "accepted" to enjoy a fulfilling social life as an adult. Studies have found that even just having one or two good friends as a teenager can confer a protective effect and strengthen future relationships.

Most importantly, it's within our power to change how our early experiences affect us.

According to Prinstein, the high-school-honed social scripts we approach interactions with can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. "When we enter into a social context, we may be focusing on those pieces of information that confirm our worst expectations," he says. "Then we will behave in ways that might actually encourage more negative experiences."

By choosing to update these frameworks – for example, deciding that a peer's ambiguous comment was probably not intended to upset us – we can help ourselves to have more rewarding experiences, he says. 

As a reformed "high status" teen who engaged in risky, pseudomature behaviour from a young age, Georgia says, "I kind of have a sadness for my younger self, that I never got to experience just being a normal kid." She tells me that an early experience of seeing a friend beaten up, combined with abusive behaviour at home, convinced her to act aggressively to project invulnerability. 

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She laments the fact that she didn't get more support at that age and was instead typecast by teachers as a "bad kid". "It's completely shaped my career trajectory and my fierce advocacy for vulnerable people," she says.

Connie, meanwhile, says her early experiences of rejection eventually fed into a pattern of self-sabotage. "I think I'd given up on myself in a lot of ways, and I had so many self-destructive behaviours that it then became hard to maintain friendships," she says. This culminated in a period of crisis in her late adolescence, which she has since worked hard to heal from. More than a decade on, she has figured out what she loves – including a creative practice and a fulfilling career – and says she rarely thinks about her high school days. 

Both Connie and Georgia are testament to the fact that the labels we once wore in high school don't have to be a life sentence. 

"People can absolutely turn it around," Prinstein concurs. "The problem is that we don't spend a lot of time talking about this – meaning we are more likely to repeat our patterns." 

* Names have been changed.

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