Why does everyone love the alpha girl?

Why does everyone love the alpha girl?

You know the type. Depending on your age and / or preferred pop culture, it is possible to meet her as Rizzo, Cher Horowitz or Regina George, the secondary alpha girl. She was very popular and confident - and certainly beautiful, but appearances were only a part of her appeal. She was also relaxed, tending towards the classic pastime: Class Pass, smoking, drinking, celebrating. Probably his behavior was horrified at his parents and teachers, which is exactly what surrounds him so exciting. For years, social scientists have studied its power. Just what is an alpha girl is so magnetic? Is she born? Or created? And does she remain forever?

According to research, it is no coincidence that alpha girls begin to take over early adolescence. The very definition of popularity begins to change around that time. "In elementary school, children who are really loved and who arenice are also the popular kids," said Amanda Rose, a researcher in psychology at the University of Missouri. "But in college, it starts to change." When high school begins, there are two types of popularity: there are the beloved students and the emergence of a new group, researchers call students - stage - are those who dominate their social groups, who may be voted for the backyard, or Are the captain of the football team.

This distinction - between state and sympathy - is particularly important in understanding the alpha girl of her teenage counterpart. Alpha males tend to be aggressive physical forms to start fighting or pushing each other, while alpha girls are more likely to act aggressively relational, spread rumors or use the silent treatment. But the behavior can be interchangeable; Sometimes the boys and girls are fighting. The most important difference in how they appear to occur in both male and female alpha traits, according to research is how other students react to these acts of aggression.

For girls, "you are more aggressive, you would be less worthy of being loved, but it will make you more popular," said Mitch Prinstein, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of the upcoming popular book. The power of sympathy Read more in this obsessed state World "For the children, many of them can be [high state] and both loved at the same time.but this is not the case of the girls.The correlation between kindness and Situation is approaching zero for girls. "Alpha girls are admired and feared, but they are not usually wanted.

Some alpha girls were born that way. It will not surprise anyone to learn that research confirms that attractive and sporting girls who come from higher income families also tend to be in this high status group. However, others teach themselves how to become alpha, learn social skills from watching adults, or their own experiences at a young age. "Even these early experiences in kindergarten and kindergarten, provided you have a positive social experience, opens the door to new opportunities to learn increasingly sophisticated skills," Prinstein said. They learn to be a bit aggressive to ensure their status, and when to step back and let others get in their way (or at least let others think they have their own way).

But perhaps more importantly, why alpha girls have such confidence in their peers can be explained, at least in part, by the neurological growth experienced by adolescents. Teen brains are adapted to social rewards, especially receiving positive feedback from peers, and popular children - boys and girls - seem to swim in them. "So it makes us want to do everything we can to be like them," Prinstein said. "The sense of identity [a teenager] comes." . If everyone else thinks I'm fresh, I'm fine, "Prinstein said." They can not distinguish between what I think of myself and what everyone else thinks of me - these are synonymous with this age. "But it is not just the opinion of someone who has ... for teens, as you no doubt, the opinions of their peers say everything." The opinion of their parents, however, means nothing, less than nothing. What adults approve of, the better. "There is even research showing that adolescent mice prefer to spend time with other adolescent mice before they are adult mice," Prinstein said.

Hence the attractiveness of the alpha girl. Older teenagers, according to one study, tend to behave the way adults are inappropriate, which other teenagers find fascinating. "They are on the fast track socially," said Joseph Allen, a psychologist at the University of Virginia. "This means that it is children who are involved in relationships rather than their peers, which interfere with minor forms of delinquency." They ignore the class, they use drugs, they go to parties. They are, in a word, fresh. "It intimidates other kids," Allen said. "They make the other kids feel so far behind."

Their aggressive adult, adult-like-but-not-approved behavior is why they affirm the central dominant role of their groups of friends, Allen said. This is equivalent to the notion of autonomy of adolescents. "As a teenager, part of what they are supposed to do is establish the independence of the adult world," he said. So some of these risky behaviors - visiting cool teen sex like sex and drugs and petty crimes like stealing - are ways to say "These are things that little kids do not do." And I do things that my parents They do not like it, which means I can be independent, "Allen continued.

One might suppose, as I did, that the alpha girl at her school has grown to be the Alpha Daughter Office. But every researcher I spoke with said the opposite; Many of them reminded me of a fascinating study by Allen and published in Child Development magazine in 2014, titled: "Children" "What Happened to the Cold" In this paper Allen and his colleagues interviewed a group of teenagers - including "High status", also known as the popular children - when they were in high school, and then followed and retransmitted ten years later. "And a decade later," Allen said, "they do not go so well. They do so well in romantic relationships, they are more likely to have problems with alcohol and criminal behavior."

If you are an alpha in high school, in other words, you are not necessarily alpha for life. Social skills that cool girls (and children) learned in high school tend not to work out very well after they leave. "They have as a reward for this game of skill and this course of action among others [which] bestow on the situation as a measure of value," Prinstein said. "They see everything through a crystalline state, constantly thinking about their relationships in a hierarchical way, is it what I'm missing or not?" Even ten years after graduation, it is said that children are always "constantly looking for these signs and signs, but the world has changed."