Intelligence, curiosity, and grit: important traits for success in school and life. But so is popularity, argues this working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Tapping Wisconsin Longitudinal Study data for 4,300 males from 1957 (the year they graduated high school) through 2005, authors evaluate characteristics associated with “popularity” and the effects of being well-liked on lifetime incomes. To gauge one’s popularity, authors tallied “friendship nominations,” both the number of friends a student lists and the number of times he is listed by his peers. Overall, authors found that students who are older than their grade-mates and have higher IQs are more popular. (Strong maternal and sibling relationships are also closely connected to social status; so is exposure to larger peer groups, as experienced by increased extracurricular activities.) But one’s family income had no effect on popularity. Linking these findings to one’s own lifetime income data, the analysts report that men in the top quartile of high school popularity have a 10 percent earnings premium over those in the bottom quartile. Moreover, increased social skills (by one decile, based on author calculations) are associated with a 2 percent wage advantage thirty-five years later—roughly 40 percent the return accrued from an additional year of schooling. The authors speculate why: High school “social interaction…provides the bridge to the adult world as [students] train individual personalities to be socially adequate.” There’s much to unpack in this short paper—including its dense methodology. But it does provide a boost for the benefits of extracurricular activities—and the adolescent social interactions they foster.
SOURCE: Gabriella Conti, Andrea Galeotti, Gerrit Mueller, Stephen Pudney, “Popularity” (National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, October 2012).
