Popular
The Power of Likability in a Status-Obsessed World
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Narrated by:
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Mitch Prinstein
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By:
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Mitch Prinstein
About this listen
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, 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.
©2017 Mitch Prinstein (P)2017 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Between what can be learned from evolutionary psychology and cognitive science a picture emerges. In Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life, social psychologist Douglas Kenrick fuses these two fields to create a coherent story of human nature. In his analysis, many ingrained, apparently irrational behaviors—one-night stands, prejudice, conspicuous consumption, even art and religious devotion—are quite explicable and (when desired) avoidable.
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Rather dated and self-aggrandizing
- By Laurie Frick on 07-21-11
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You Are Now Less Dumb
- How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself
- By: David McRaney
- Narrated by: Don Hagen
- Length: 8 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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You Are Now Less Dumb is grounded in the idea that we all believe ourselves to be objective observers of reality - except we’re not. But that's okay, because our delusions keep us sane. Expanding on this premise, McRaney provides eye-opening analyses of 15 more ways we fool ourselves every day. This smart and highly entertaining audiobook will be wowing listeners for years to come.
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Not a lot of guidance
- By A. Yoshida on 02-08-14
By: David McRaney
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The Attachment Effect
- Exploring the Powerful Ways Our Earliest Bond Shapes Our Relationships and Lives
- By: Peter Lovenheim
- Narrated by: Graham Winton
- Length: 8 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Attachment theory is having a moment. Recently covered in the New York Times Magazine, New York magazine, and elsewhere, it's also the subject of popular relationship guides. Why is this 60-year-old theory, widely accepted in psychological circles, suddenly in vogue? Because people are discovering how powerfully it sheds light on who we love - and how. Fascinated by the subject, award-winning journalist and author Peter Lovenheim went on a years-long journey to understand it from the inside out.
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Failed to Attach
- By Danielle SeCheverell on 07-21-20
By: Peter Lovenheim
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The Science of Happily Ever After
- What Really Matters in the Quest for Enduring Love
- By: Ty Tashiro
- Narrated by: Chris Chappell
- Length: 7 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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In this playful and informative exploration of the science behind how to choose a great mate, acclaimed relationship psychologist Dr. Ty Tashiro explores how to find enduring love. Dr. Tashiro translates reams of scientific studies and research data into the first audiobook to revolutionize the way we search for love. His research pinpoints why our decision-making abilities seem to fail when it comes to choosing mates and how we can make smarter choices.
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Simplistic advice...
- By R. Steiner on 02-14-17
By: Ty Tashiro
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The Psychopath Inside
- A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain
- By: James Fallon
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 4 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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The memoir of a neuroscientist whose research led him to a bizarre personal discovery, James Fallon had spent an entire career studying how our brains affect our behavior when his research suddenly turned personal. While studying brain scans of several family members, he discovered that one perfectly matched a pattern he’d found in the brains of serial killers. This meant one of two things: Either his family’s scans had been mixed up with those of felons or someone in his family was a psychopath.
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Entertaining story with some quick neuroscience
- By smarmer on 09-21-14
By: James Fallon
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Oddly Normal
- One Family's Struggle to Help Their Teenage Son Come to Terms with His Sexuality
- By: John Schwartz
- Narrated by: John Schwartz, Joseph Schwartz
- Length: 6 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Three years ago, John Schwartz, a national correspondent for the New York Times, got the call that every parent hopes never to receive: His 13-year-old son, Joe, was in the hospital following a suicide attempt. Mustering the courage to come out to his classmates, Joe had delivered a tirade about homophobic and sexist attitudes that was greeted with unease and confusion by his fellow students. Hours later, he took an overdose of pills.
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The Effect of Parental Caring
- By Wiliam on 01-16-13
By: John Schwartz
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How Children Succeed
- Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character
- By: Paul Tough
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 8 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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The story we usually tell about childhood and success is the one about intelligence: success comes to those who score highest on tests, from preschool admissions to SATs. But in How Children Succeed, Paul Tough argues that the qualities that matter most have more to do with character: skills like perseverance, curiosity, conscientiousness, optimism, and self-control. How Children Succeed introduces us to a new generation of researchers and educators who, for the first time, are using the tools of science to peel back the mysteries of character.
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Article based on interviews
- By Anonymous User on 10-24-24
By: Paul Tough
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The Boy Who Loved Too Much
- A True Story of Pathological Friendliness
- By: Jennifer Latson
- Narrated by: Heather Auden
- Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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What would it be like to see everyone as a friend? Twelve-year-old Eli D'Angelo has a genetic disorder that obliterates social inhibitions, making him irrepressibly friendly, indiscriminately trusting, and unconditionally loving toward everyone he meets. It also makes him enormously vulnerable. Eli lacks the innate skepticism that will help his peers navigate adolescence more safely - and vastly more successfully.
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Williams Syndrome
- By Sharlotte on 09-20-19
By: Jennifer Latson
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WHY Do They Act That Way?
- A Survival Guide to the Adolescent Brain for You and Your Teen
- By: David Walsh, Nat Bennett
- Narrated by: Kaleo Griffith
- Length: 9 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Even smart kids do stupid things. It's a simple fact of life. No one makes it through the teenage years unscathed - not the teens and not their parents. But now there's expert help for both generations in this groundbreaking new guide for surviving the drama of adolescence. In WHY Do They Act That Way? nationally renowned, award-winning psychologist Dr. David Walsh explains exactly what happens to the human brain on the path from childhood into adolescence and adulthood.
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LOVE!!
- By Amazon Customer on 05-11-23
By: David Walsh, and others
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The Upside of Your Dark Side
- Why Being Your Whole Self - Not Just Your "Good" Self - Drives Success and Fulfillment
- By: Todd Kashdan, Robert Biswas-Diener
- Narrated by: Jeff Cummings
- Length: 8 hrs
- Unabridged
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In The Upside of Your Dark Side, two pioneering researchers in the field of psychology show that while mindfulness, kindness, and positivity can take us far, they cannot take us all the way. Sometimes, they can even hold us back. Emotions like anger, anxiety, or doubt might be uncomfortable, but it turns out that they are also incredibly useful.
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Boring and learned nothing
- By Taryn on 07-25-16
By: Todd Kashdan, and others
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Rethinking Narcissism
- The Bad - and Surprising Good - About Feeling Special
- By: Dr. Craig Malkin
- Narrated by: Kiff VandenHeuvel
- Length: 6 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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In Rethinking Narcissism listeners will learn that there's far more to narcissism than its reductive invective would imply. The truth is that narcissists (all of us) fall on a spectrum somewhere between utter selflessness on the one side and arrogance and grandiosity on the other. A healthy middle exhibits a strong sense of self.
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Great info, but proceed with caution
- By Caterina M. Platt on 11-16-17
By: Dr. Craig Malkin
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Emotional Intelligence
- By: Daniel Goleman
- Narrated by: Barrett Whitener
- Length: 13 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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It is the tenth anniversary since the first publication of Daniel Goleman's groundbreaking bestseller, Emotional Intelligence, which maps the territory where IQ meets EQ, where we apply what we know to how we live. Spending over a year on the New York Times bestseller list, Emotional Intelligence provided the evidence for what many successful people already knew: being smart isn't just a matter of mastering facts; it's a matter of mastering your own emotions and understanding the emotions of the people around you.
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Good info, hard to listen sometimes
- By Stephanie on 04-16-03
By: Daniel Goleman
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Curious?
- By: Todd Kashdan
- Narrated by: Todd Kashdan
- Length: 6 hrs and 4 mins
- Abridged
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Dead cats. That's the image many people conjure up when you mention curiosity. An image perpetuated by a dusty old proverb that has long represented the extent of our understanding of the term. This book might not put the proverb to rest, but it will flip it upside down: far from killing anything, curiosity breathes new life into almost everything it touches.
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Transformative & Engaging
- By Hans on 04-29-09
By: Todd Kashdan
What listeners say about Popular
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- Abby A.
- 12-10-18
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.
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- Dawn A. Franks
- 11-01-17
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.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Enrique Camacho
- 06-06-19
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.
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- Julie Crenshaw
- 12-06-18
Full of good information but…
There’s a lot of good information in this book, and lots of things that make you think. Lots of good evidence-based conclusions about popularity. The thing that I kept waiting for that never happened was the concrete examples of how to become more likable. Maybe I was just looking for a list that wasn’t there? So much of the evidence seems to draw really negative or depressing conclusions about how your entire existence is based on how popular you were in high school. OK, I buy it, but where are the concrete action steps to move past it and create a better future? I don’t necessarily struggle with this myself. I consider myself a fairly likable person, but the book overall just seemed a little depressing. There were good suggestions on parenting tactics. Thank goodness my kids were the age examples he talks about in the book. But there were no examples of how to course correct if you had maybe done it wrong in the first place. What if someone’s children were older than early elementary age? What should they do? The book kind of seemed to create more questions than give answers… I did enjoy what it had to say, it just felt like a huge chunk of information was missing.
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5 people found this helpful
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- T. Anderson
- 12-12-18
"Nice" works!
Pretty good; a light treatment for general audiences. Mitch Prinstein describes clearly what we remember from high school: there are two kinds of popular; the "glamorous" kind, with high status that must be maintained and enforced; and there's the "nice" kind -- you know, the kids who get along with everybody and who don't stoop to bullying the "nerds." What he adds is the observations concerning the early roots of popularity and the consequences associated with the two types. I would recommend this for teenagers who are having issues at school, and I would also recommend it in addition to Robert Sapolski's books and films on primates and stress.
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- A frustrated buyer
- 10-02-21
WOW!!
Needles to say I never liked being not just AN outcast, but the ULTIMATE outcast. The guy who was always left on the bench when the gym class was choosing players. The guy that nobody would sit next to in the lunch room. The one the teachers would ignore when I raised my hand. You get the picture. BUT....I at least now have some basic understanding of WHY these (horrible) things happen, and that's somehow sort of comforting.
When the author tells the story of his experience working at the grocery store I was floored....that exact same thing happened to me. Great book!
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- Ivy Mazzola
- 11-28-18
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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6 people found this helpful
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- Bianca Alison
- 01-10-19
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.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Heather M.
- 04-19-21
A very good book
A good message, delivered well. Glad I read it and I learned how I can help my children as they grow up to learn how to build positive relationships.
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- Tiamo
- 12-23-17
Such a great book!
I think this book seriously makes one consider oneself and one's social interactions up to this point. Additionally, although can be hard to hear ans think about some of these aspects whether you were in fact popular or unpopular growing up, I think it leaves you hopeful for the ability to go forth as a better version of yourself and the possibility of being a better parent.
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