‘Wait, I’m goated?’: Psychology 512 students experiment with being popular for a day – The Daily Tar Heel
“Wait, I’m goated?”
Those were the words that students in Psychology 512: Popularity, Friendship, and Peer Relations chose for the design of the bright pink T-shirts they sported for a social experiment on Sept. 24.
The course, taught by Mitch Prinstein, John Van Seters Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at UNC, explores why some people are more popular than others. It also looks at what the effects of popularity are on one’s life and peer relationships like friendships, bullying, victimization and peer influence, Prinstein said.
“Popularity is something that predicts so many of our outcomes even more than our IQ, more than our socioeconomic status, more than the grades that we got,” Prinstein said. “But no one talks about it as much.”
Popularity has a large impact on people’s lives, as people tend to have transactional relationships with their environments, Prinstein said.
“So in other words, if you’re popular, then people give you a lot of attention, and they notice you, and they send positive effects your way,” Prinstein said. “As a result, if you spent the entire day with people kind of waving at you and smiling at you, and expecting good things from you, that would change the way that you behave in response.”
Prinstein said the goal of the experiment was to make his students popular for a day on campus and analyze how it made them feel and how other people responded to them.
“They took a snapshot of their own thoughts, feelings and behaviors at several times in the day, and then they did it on a control day when they were wearing just whatever they normally wear,” Prinstein said.
Madison Mitchell, a senior in the class double majoring in human development and family sciences and psychology, said the objective of the shirt design was to pick something funny that caught people’s eyes. She said the class decided on the “Wait, I’m goated?” idea via a class poll.
“It’s something that would just, I feel like, kind of bring people joy by seeing something hilarious on a shirt that a bunch of people are wearing,” Mitchell said.
Mitchell expressed feeling more confident on the experimental day because of all the engagement she was getting from her classmates.
“Because there were a lot of people who asked, like, ‘Oh, what is this for? I want a shirt. How much was the shirt?’” Mitchell said. “So I was having conversations with people and speaking to people that I may or may not have seen before, and I was holding full conversations with them based on what the experiment was about, where we got the shirts from, things like that.”
Sabreen Qaisar, a junior psychology major, had a similar experience wearing the shirt.
She said that doing the experiment with a large group of students increased her confidence in wearing the shirt as opposed to doing it alone.
“The crowd component definitely played a role in being more confident because when I was watching myself, I was not so comfortable because people would be just staring at you and thinking, ‘Oh okay, like who do you think you are?’” Qaisar said.
For onlookers like senior Na’Khiya Ellis, Professor Prinstein’s goal of making the PSYC 512 students popular seems to have been effective.
Ellis saw students wearing the pink shirts multiple times throughout her day, and it caught her attention.
“I guess it was popular because from then on, I was looking for more people who had that shirt for the day,” she said.
Senior Anna Nguyen, a business and psychology double major, realized through the experiment that popularity is not always desirable.
“I think throughout the experiment, I realized that I’m definitely more of an introvert and would rather not be in the light, or would not attract as much attention as the shirt did throughout the experiment,” Nguyen said.
Like Nguyen, Prinstein also acknowledged that popularity is not always a good thing, and it comes in multiple forms.
“There are two different kinds of popularity. One is how much kids are well liked, and that’s a good thing. The other is who’s cool and prom king and queen, that actually predicts negative outcomes in our life,” Prinstein said.
Nguyen also said that she thinks the experiment sheds light on the effect of an individualistic, bold fashion sense on one’s personality.
“I think there are a lot of psychological principles that come along with that, especially through cognitive psychology, peer relations psychology,” she said.
