Popular

The Power of Likability in a Status-Obsessed World

De: Mitch Prinstein

Narrado por: Mitch Prinstein

A leading psychologist examines how our popularity affects our success, our relationships, and our happiness—and why we don’t always want to be the most popular

No matter how old you are, there’s a good chance that the word “popular” immediately transports you back to your teenage years. Most of us can easily recall the adolescent social cliques, the high school pecking order, and which of our peers stood out as the most or the least popular teens we knew. Even as adults we all still remember exactly where we stood in the high school social hierarchy, and the powerful emotions associated with our status persist decades later. This may be for good reason.

Popular examines why popularity plays such a key role in our development and, ultimately, how it still influences our happiness and success today. In many ways—some even beyond our conscious awareness—those old dynamics of our youth continue to play out in every business meeting, every social gathering, in our personal relationships, and even how we raise our children. Our popularity even affects our DNA, our health, and our mortality in fascinating ways we never previously realized. More than childhood intelligence, family background, or prior psychological issues, research indicates that it’s how popular we were in our early years that predicts how successful and how happy we grow up to be.

But it’s not always the conventionally popular people who fare the best, for the simple reason that there is more than one type of popularity—and many of us still long for the wrong one. As children, we strive to be likable, which can offer real benefits not only on the playground but throughout our lives. In adolescence, though, a new form of popularity emerges, and we suddenly begin to care about status, power, influence, and notoriety—research indicates that this type of popularity hurts us more than we realize.

Realistically, we can’t ignore our natural human social impulses to be included and well-regarded by others, but we can learn how to manage those impulses in beneficial and gratifying ways. Popular relies on the latest research in psychology and neuroscience to help us make the wisest choices for ourselves and for our children, so we may all pursue more meaningful, satisfying, and rewarding relationships.

Mitch Prinstein is my hero

This book should be required reading for every teenager and adult, and the concepts should be taught to kids beginning in 2nd grade if not earlier.

Great Parent Read

This book will help parents as they guide children. I wish there was more information about the effect of popularity in the workplace.

Great info

This is a great book, it has a lot of great information, but the Story telling can get boring at times. I would still recommend it.

Worth it

Very healing and insightful book. I found his summary of the 5 types of people (average, controversial, neglected, rejected, and popular) to be extremely useful. The difference between status and likability and what that means for our futures is also very applicable to every day.

As someone who earlier in life alternated between neglected and rejected, and who now has moved into an average or even popular position, it makes sense that I still mess up, and I can see how I mess up more clearly with this book's help. Also I can see why I often feel a need to seek status (which I've learned isn't healthy). I can also see why I often feel so insecure in my position, like my friends could abandon me. It's all training from early life (which is guessable, but you might not guess that is changeable). Hearing the stories makes this all so obvious to me. It's nothing to fret over, it's natural and possible to overcome. I can feel an internal shift of truly believing this in my deepest core. And that is a relief.

It is a shorter audiobook, which I prefer so I can move onto the next topic. Yet the information isn't the most dense even given the short length, I listened at 2.5x speed most of the way through. I am very glad I listened and very grateful to the author and for the audiobook production team for making this book available in such a digestible format. Listening to this book is likely to change my life tbh.

I got this book on sale, but it worth a whole credit, for me anyway

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Ok but much better material out there

This book was ok. There were some really good points but the author also made some silly and almost outrageous claims- like some popular girls on high school ended up with cervical cancer and statements of the like that are just ignorant. In my opinion he exaggerates some of the negative aspects of popularity and status to make his point. I bet the summary of this book is much better and much more worth it than the book itself.