It probably seems obvious to most people that being likeable and having good friends could be valuable in life. Since most economists are neither likeable nor have good friends, it is an idea that hasn’t been studied by economists until now.
My friend Gabriella Conti and a host of co-authors try to quantitatively measure the association between high-school popularity and wage earnings 35 years later in a new research paper.
“What a 1957 friend could do for you might be very different than what a 2009 friend can do for you.”
They use data from roughly 4,000 male respondents in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. In a 1975 survey, they were asked to name up to three of their closest friends when they were in high school back in 1957. Conti et al. then use the number of other people who named a specific person as a friend as their measure of that person’s popularity, and they compare that to a person’s current earnings.
They find that each extra close friend in high school is associated with earnings that are 2 percent higher later in life after controlling for other factors. While not a huge effect, it does suggest that either that a) the same factors that make you popular in high school help you in a job setting, or b) that high-school friends can do you favors later in life that will earn you higher wages.
Before you get on the phone to call your old high-school pals to complain that they’ve never done one darn thing to earn you more money, a few caveats are in order about the study.
First, out of necessity (because the authors want to look at earnings later in life) the data on friends is very old. What a 1957 friend could do for you might be very different than what a 2009 friend can do for you. Second, if I understand it correctly, people are asked to name their high-school friends 18 years after high school. I could easily imagine that there is a bias toward naming people who have been successful since high school as friends. For instance, I would imagine that if you went back and surveyed the people who went to high school with Barack Obama, his name would appear on the list of close friends a lot more today than it would have 20 years ago. Third — and this is quite interesting in its own right — popularity is highly correlated with other traits that prove to be very valuable in the labor force. For instance, people with high I.Q.’s and who planned to go to college are much more popular in their data. People with high I.Q.’s and lots of years of education also earn higher wages. While the 2 percent wage premium associated with popularity attempts to control for these other factors, to the extent that the authors aren’t able to control for everything, it is likely that their estimates will overstate the importance of popularity.
This is a very interesting study, especially when put side-by-side with Roland Fryer‘s work on the “acting white” phenomenon among African-American teens. Roland finds that — unlike whites — among African-Americans, the students who are most successful academically in high school are punished by their peers when it comes to popularity. That finding has inspired Roland to institute a number of programs in the New York schools to try to make it “cool” to do well in school. In light of this new paper by Gabriella Conti and co-authors, I am even more eager to find out if Roland’s programs are working.
(A brief write-up of the Conti et al. research recently appeared in the London Times.)
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an interesting idea- I remember all of my classmates (there were around 27 of them), but was not one of the popular ones. social skills were quite weak at the time. Looking back though, I must admit there was something I liked about every one of my class mates and were I to do it all over again, I would have had each one as a friend. So the school did something right- I still have 3 buddies from high school. Academically, with a B- average I was just about at the bottom of my class. What does all this mean? Who knows?
About acting white– that african americans who do well are punished by their peers- why call it acting white if one does well- my African American students lashed out at me this week– assumed Max Weber was a racist- When I told them that a black man was the source of his thought of studying the protestant ethic and that Weber and this man were friends, they still thought I was a racist- so much for trying to overcome reverse discrimination.
Goldstein, 2009
I am surprised that the figure they calculated was only 2%. To me, this is more likely to reinforce the position that nothing about social life in high school really matters down the road.
Another question to be raised on the sample would be whether the sourcing of subjects from a small-economy state like Wisconsin would reflect the same outcome as someone who went to high school in Long Island, NY, Seattle, WA, or San Francisco, CA.
When success is measured largely by prominence in a local economy, I don’t doubt that personal contacts enable advancements that would otherwise be harder to make. In cities where there is competition from a migratory, high-earning workforce, the benefits of high school popularity that would emerge would presumably be less of the 6-degree nepotism and more of what would be attributed to those with a sense of socially-adaptible people skills.
I think this is only an advantage up to a point. People who’s primary job skill is gladhanding may earn more in prosperous times, but in a downturn, when companies shed jobs, they are going to keep their people with hard skills and real productivity a lot longer than the people that are skating through on the force of their personality.
Co-relation doesn’t equate wth causality. I believe the real link is due to looks. Both have an impact on the other attributes. Good looking people are more popular in school and have better job prospects later in life, because they find it much easier to be hired, initially and subsequently get promoted. This is the real link.
To assume the link you discuss, one would have to believe that employers have an interest in whether you were popular in school, when the real factor they are looking for is readily apparent to them.
Two percent is very weak, considering that most people would read the expression “extra close friends” to comprise a very small group of “close friends”, and an even more select group of mere “friends.”
It’s almost certain that those the more sociable group would average say $2,200,000 in their lifetime and the less sociables would average $2,155,000, simply because the less sociables include the acutely shy, sociopaths, charmless people and others who bring down the number.
And of course, we only get a view of the group, not the individuals. The less sociables may disproportionately include uniquely successful and uniquely unsuccessful people. Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and Steve Jobs, to name three, weren’t popular. Kobe Bryant has no known friends. It could be that hugely successful people actually have had relatively few extra close friends, but that. . .
No, let me summarize: Being likeable is generally a good thing. It may make a small difference in your income. It may not.
compelling, so adolescent accumulation of close relations has cost beneficial effects later in life BUT in ‘marginal’ communities (black as stated in this blog) they seem to correlate with increased isolation (with the obvious if not cliche correlation of increased responsibility on the ‘under performing’ black students.
I think this applies to non-racial situations, especially when a friend of mine was ‘advised’ to only work at 80% of his full potential once in the job place, either as a protective strategy when work will and always does increase or to not threaten those currently working at sub-par levels. It would seem this deliberate work pace has everything to do with the visibilities of available opportunities and incentives for success (often not made apparent in black communities).
if the 2% increase in salary is based on the number of ‘close friends’ then I would assume an implicit skill set with a common goal is compounded. But would this mean that these close friends imply trust or at least the popular student to be capable of imparting trust to his new associates which in highly competitive fields fosters an alliance?
Thank you.
Unsurprising result since “cognitive ability” is a restrictive and controversial measure and “popularity” would be a cognitive measure under at least some of the multiple intelligences ideas. The study actually may say that; a quick read says to me that after controlling for “cognitive ability” they had this measurable effect and that might be taken by the multiple intelligences community as a rough but effective measure of the effect of that additional form of intelligence. (And of course an evolutionarily oriented researcher would then say the family factors show the trait is inherited.)