His argument boils down to nerd kids being exceptionally smart, and caring much more about being smart than being popular, hence failing at the latter.
I think this argument is overly general, as it can be applied to any kind of excellence: jock kids are exceptionally athletic, and they care much more about being athletic than being popular, hence, according to Graham’s argument, they should be failing at being popular, while in the American school system they succed.
I wonder whether this “popular jock, unpopular nerd” phenomenon is specific to the American, and perhaps to a lesser extent Western, culture. AFAIK, in East Asian cultures such as Japan and South Korea, school popularity is positively correlated with scholastic performance, probably with good reason, since in these countries scholastic performance is highly correlated with future income and social status.
The closest Japanese equivalent to the Western ‘nerd’ or ‘geek’ is the ‘otaku’. The word otaku typically refers to social ineptitude, an excessive fixation on pop culture items such as manga, anime, videogames and associated paraphernalia, and general tendency to withdraw from normal social interactions and escape to a fantasy world.
While perhaps many Western nerds can be considered otaku or near-otaku, Japanese otaku are not, in general, nerds, in the Western meaning of “socially awkward smart person”. I don’t know about IQ scores, but AFAIK, otaku usually have lower-than-average scholastic performance.
I suppose that escapism is the result of social isolation, which results from being underperforming in whatever measure of success your local society values. Different societies value different things.
I think this argument is overly general, as it can be applied to any kind of excellence: jock kids are exceptionally athletic, and they care much more about being athletic than being popular, hence, according to Graham’s argument, they should be failing at being popular, while in the American school system they succed.
It’s true that athletics are very demanding (I remember vividly the absurd amounts of time my high school’s football team demanded of its members), but in practice, athletics does seem to somehow escape the double-bind of ‘you cannot serve two masters’.
Is it general physical fitness and attractiveness? Yes, I bet that’s part of it (although it makes one wonder if there’s a causation/correlation confusion). Is it immediate advantages from intimidation due to physical size? I remember the football players at my highschool benefited a bit from this, from simply being huge, but it doesn’t seem adequate. Is it the tribal nature of sports, in warring against the enemy school, where athletics short-circuits the need to earn popularity the hard way by players wrapping themselves in the proverbial flag? It’d explain why the competitive sports like football seem to elicit the most admiration of its athletes (and huge donations from alumni), and various track and field events ignored by most students. I like this as the biggest factor.
If I were going the correlation route, I’d probably appeal to the same excuses universities make in choosing on non-academic merits: the kids who do aggressive sports are generally more likely to succeed spectacularly in business or life and earn lots of money which they can donate back. (Consider the Terman study which found massive lifetime income returns to being extraverted.) So when the girls flock helplessly around the football team, making them ‘popular’ even though they are specializing in football and not ‘being popular’, they are executing an effective choice of future allies and boyfriends. (How many football stars marry their highschool sweetheart and go on to success...?)
I wonder whether this “popular jock, unpopular nerd” phenomenon is specific to the American, and perhaps to a lesser extent Western, culture. AFAIK, in East Asian cultures such as Japan and South Korea, school popularity is positively correlated with scholastic performance, probably with good reason, since in these countries scholastic performance is highly correlated with future income and social status.
I can only speak from my extensive anime-watching experience (he said, self-mockingly), but I get the impression that athletics is a great way to popularity and girls in Japan as well. Yes, the ‘ideal student’ archetype will be great at sports and academics, but that’s true in the US as well, and it seems that if you can’t have both, better to go with sports.
I wonder whether this “popular jock, unpopular nerd” phenomenon is specific to the American, and perhaps to a lesser extent Western, culture.
FWIW, it did not exist at the schools I went to in Edinburgh, Scotland, in the 1960s, nor at university (Edinburgh and Oxford) in the 70s. There were sports; some excelled in them and some didn’t, like anything else. In my later years at school, one of the options for sports (a compulsory subject for all) was chess. From over here, the jock/nerd thing looks like an exclusively American phenomenon that only exists elsewhere, where it exists at all, by contagion from the original source. “Jock” is an American word. I don’t see it used here.
For that matter, the idea of the “popularity totem pole” didn’t exist either. Everyone had their own circle of friends. There was no such thing as being “popular”. I have no idea what it’s like in British schools these days, but “popular” in that specific sense isn’t a concept I hear used.
His argument boils down to nerd kids being exceptionally smart, and caring much more about being smart than being popular, hence failing at the latter.
I think this argument is overly general, as it can be applied to any kind of excellence: jock kids are exceptionally athletic, and they care much more about being athletic than being popular, hence, according to Graham’s argument, they should be failing at being popular, while in the American school system they succed.
I wonder whether this “popular jock, unpopular nerd” phenomenon is specific to the American, and perhaps to a lesser extent Western, culture. AFAIK, in East Asian cultures such as Japan and South Korea, school popularity is positively correlated with scholastic performance, probably with good reason, since in these countries scholastic performance is highly correlated with future income and social status.
The closest Japanese equivalent to the Western ‘nerd’ or ‘geek’ is the ‘otaku’. The word otaku typically refers to social ineptitude, an excessive fixation on pop culture items such as manga, anime, videogames and associated paraphernalia, and general tendency to withdraw from normal social interactions and escape to a fantasy world.
While perhaps many Western nerds can be considered otaku or near-otaku, Japanese otaku are not, in general, nerds, in the Western meaning of “socially awkward smart person”. I don’t know about IQ scores, but AFAIK, otaku usually have lower-than-average scholastic performance.
I suppose that escapism is the result of social isolation, which results from being underperforming in whatever measure of success your local society values. Different societies value different things.
It’s true that athletics are very demanding (I remember vividly the absurd amounts of time my high school’s football team demanded of its members), but in practice, athletics does seem to somehow escape the double-bind of ‘you cannot serve two masters’.
Is it general physical fitness and attractiveness? Yes, I bet that’s part of it (although it makes one wonder if there’s a causation/correlation confusion). Is it immediate advantages from intimidation due to physical size? I remember the football players at my highschool benefited a bit from this, from simply being huge, but it doesn’t seem adequate. Is it the tribal nature of sports, in warring against the enemy school, where athletics short-circuits the need to earn popularity the hard way by players wrapping themselves in the proverbial flag? It’d explain why the competitive sports like football seem to elicit the most admiration of its athletes (and huge donations from alumni), and various track and field events ignored by most students. I like this as the biggest factor.
If I were going the correlation route, I’d probably appeal to the same excuses universities make in choosing on non-academic merits: the kids who do aggressive sports are generally more likely to succeed spectacularly in business or life and earn lots of money which they can donate back. (Consider the Terman study which found massive lifetime income returns to being extraverted.) So when the girls flock helplessly around the football team, making them ‘popular’ even though they are specializing in football and not ‘being popular’, they are executing an effective choice of future allies and boyfriends. (How many football stars marry their highschool sweetheart and go on to success...?)
I can only speak from my extensive anime-watching experience (he said, self-mockingly), but I get the impression that athletics is a great way to popularity and girls in Japan as well. Yes, the ‘ideal student’ archetype will be great at sports and academics, but that’s true in the US as well, and it seems that if you can’t have both, better to go with sports.
FWIW, it did not exist at the schools I went to in Edinburgh, Scotland, in the 1960s, nor at university (Edinburgh and Oxford) in the 70s. There were sports; some excelled in them and some didn’t, like anything else. In my later years at school, one of the options for sports (a compulsory subject for all) was chess. From over here, the jock/nerd thing looks like an exclusively American phenomenon that only exists elsewhere, where it exists at all, by contagion from the original source. “Jock” is an American word. I don’t see it used here.
For that matter, the idea of the “popularity totem pole” didn’t exist either. Everyone had their own circle of friends. There was no such thing as being “popular”. I have no idea what it’s like in British schools these days, but “popular” in that specific sense isn’t a concept I hear used.
See the comments to this post.