Why Nerds are Unpopular -->

February 2003

When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map<br>of the school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easy<br>to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same<br>popularity. We graded them from A to E. A tables were full of<br>football players and cheerleaders and so on. E tables contained the<br>kids with mild cases of Down's Syndrome, what in the language of<br>the time we called "retards."

We sat at a D table, as low as you could get without looking<br>physically different. We were not being especially candid to grade<br>ourselves as D. It would have taken a deliberate lie to say otherwise.<br>Everyone in the school knew exactly how popular everyone else was,<br>including us.

My stock gradually rose during high school. Puberty finally arrived;<br>I became a decent soccer player; I started a scandalous underground<br>newspaper. So I've seen a good part of the popularity landscape.

I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell<br>the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart<br>and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between<br>being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you<br>unpopular.

Why? To someone in school now, that may seem an odd question to<br>ask. The mere fact is so overwhelming that it may seem strange to<br>imagine that it could be any other way. But it could. Being smart<br>doesn't make you an outcast in elementary school. Nor does it harm<br>you in the real world. Nor, as far as I can tell, is the problem<br>so bad in most other countries. But in a typical American secondary<br>school, being smart is likely to make your life difficult. Why?

The key to this mystery is to rephrase the question slightly. Why<br>don't smart kids make themselves popular? If they're so smart, why<br>don't they figure out how popularity works and beat the system,<br>just as they do for standardized tests?

One argument says that this would be impossible, that the smart<br>kids are unpopular because the other kids envy them for being smart,<br>and nothing they could do could make them popular. I wish. If the<br>other kids in junior high school envied me, they did a great job<br>of concealing it. And in any case, if being smart were really an<br>enviable quality, the girls would have broken ranks. The guys that<br>guys envy, girls like.

In the schools I went to, being smart just didn't matter much. Kids<br>didn't admire it or despise it. All other things being equal, they<br>would have preferred to be on the smart side of average rather than the<br>dumb side, but intelligence counted far less than, say, physical<br>appearance, charisma, or athletic ability.

So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are<br>smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that<br>they don't really want to be popular.

If someone had told me that at the time, I would have laughed at<br>him. Being unpopular in school makes kids miserable, some of them<br>so miserable that they commit suicide. Telling me that I didn't<br>want to be popular would have seemed like telling someone dying of<br>thirst in a desert that he didn't want a glass of water. Of course<br>I wanted to be popular.

But in fact I didn't, not enough. There was something else I wanted<br>more: to be smart. Not simply to do well in school, though that<br>counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write<br>well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to<br>make great things.

At the time I never tried to separate my wants and weigh them<br>against one another. If I had, I would have seen that being smart<br>was more important. If someone had offered me the chance to be<br>the most popular kid in school, but only at the price of being of<br>average intelligence (humor me here), I wouldn't have taken it.

Much as they suffer from their unpopularity, I don't think many<br>nerds would. To them the thought of average intelligence is unbearable.<br>But most kids would take that deal. For half of them, it would be<br>a step up. Even for someone in the eightieth percentile (assuming,<br>as everyone seemed to then, that intelligence is a scalar), who<br>wouldn't drop thirty points in exchange for being loved and admired<br>by everyone?

And that, I think, is the root of the problem. Nerds serve two<br>masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even<br>more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in<br>your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an<br>American secondary school.

Alberti, arguably the archetype of the Renaissance Man, writes that<br>"no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you<br>want to excel in it."<br>I wonder if anyone in the world works harder<br>at anything than American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALs<br>and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison. They<br>occasionally take vacations; some even have hobbies. An American<br>teenager may work at being popular every waking hour, 365 days a<br>year.

I don't mean to suggest they do...