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Popularity

In sociology, popularity is how much a person, idea, place, item or other concept is either liked or accorded status[1][2] by other people. Liking can be due to reciprocal liking, interpersonal attraction, and similar factors. Social status can be due to dominance, superiority, and similar factors. For example, a kind person may be considered likable and therefore more popular than another person, and a wealthy person may be considered superior and therefore more popular than another person.

For the 2006 indie album, see Popularity (album).

There are two primary types of interpersonal popularity: perceived and sociometric. Perceived popularity is measured by asking people who the most popular or socially important people in their social group[3] are. Sociometric popularity is measured by objectively measuring the number of connections a person has to others in the group.[4] A person can have high perceived popularity without having high sociometric popularity, and vice versa.


According to psychologist Tessa Lansu at the Radboud University Nijmegen, "Popularity [has] to do with being the middle point of a group and having influence on it."[5]

love/hate (Middle East, Mediterranean, Latin America);

approval/criticism (United Kingdom, Canada, Scandinavia, Germanic countries);

esteem/contempt (Japan, Eastern Asia); and

responsiveness/rejection (the United States).

Effects of popularity in the workplace[edit]

Importance[edit]

More tasks in the workplace are being done in teams, leading to a greater need of people to seek and feel social approval.[7] In academic settings, a high social standing among peers is associated with positive academic outcomes.[27][28] Popularity also leads to students in academic environments to receive more help, have more positive relationships and stereotypes, and be more approached by peers.[7] While this is the research found in schools, it is likely to be generalized to a workplace.

Benefits[edit]

Popularity is positively linked to job satisfaction, individual job performance, and group performance.[7] The popular worker, besides just feeling more satisfied with his job, feels more secure, believes he has better working conditions, trusts his supervisor, and possesses more positive opportunities for communication with both management and co-workers, causing a greater feeling of responsibility and belongingness at work.[29] Others prefer to work with popular individuals, most notably in manual labor jobs because, although they might not be the most knowledgeable for the job, they are approachable, willing to help, cooperative in group work, and are more likely to treat their coworkers as an equal. If an employee feels good-natured, genial, but not overly independent, more people will say that they most prefer to work with that employee.[30]

Contributing factors[edit]

According to the mere-exposure effect, employees in more central positions that must relate to many others throughout the day, such as a manager, are more likely to be considered popular.[7] There are many characteristics that contribute to popularity:[31]

The popularity of objects as a consequence of social influence[edit]

Information cascades[edit]

Popularity is a term widely applicable to the modern era thanks primarily to social networking technology. Being "liked" has been taken to a completely different level on ubiquitous sites such as Facebook.


Popularity is a social phenomenon but it can also be ascribed to objects that people interact with. Collective attention is the only way to make something popular, and information cascades play a large role in rapid rises in something's popularity.[34][35] Rankings for things in popular culture, like movies and music, often do not reflect the public's taste, but rather the taste of the first few buyers because social influence plays a large role in determining what is popular and what is not through an information cascade.


Information cascades have strong influence causing individuals to imitate the actions of others, whether or not they are in agreement. For example, when downloading music, people don't decide 100% independently which songs to buy. Often they are influenced by charts depicting which songs are already trending. Since people rely on what those before them do, one can manipulate what becomes popular among the public by manipulating a website's download rankings.[36] Experts paid to predict sales often fail but not because they are bad at their jobs; instead, it is because they cannot control the information cascade that ensues after first exposure by consumers. Music is again, an excellent example. Good songs rarely perform poorly on the charts and poor songs rarely perform very well, but there is tremendous variance that still makes predicting the popularity of any one song very difficult.[37]


Experts can determine if a product will sell in the top 50% of related products or not, but it is difficult to be more specific than that. Due to the strong impact that influence plays, this evidence emphasizes the need for marketers. They have a significant opportunity to show their products in the best light, with the most famous people, or being in the media most often. Such constant exposure is a way of gaining more product followers. Marketers can often make the difference between an average product and a popular product. However, since popularity is primarily constructed as a general consensus of a group's attitude towards something, word-of-mouth is a more effective way to attract new attention. Websites and blogs start by recommendations from one friend to another, as they move through social networking services. Eventually, when the fad is large enough, the media catches on to the craze. This spreading by word-of-mouth is the social information cascade that allows something to grow in usage and attention throughout a social group until everyone is telling everyone else about it, at which point it is deemed popular.[38]


Individuals also rely on what others say when they know that the information they are given could be completely incorrect. This is known as groupthink. Relying on others to influence one's own decisions is a very powerful social influence, but can have negative impacts.[39]

Peer group

School bullying

Self-esteem

Social influence

Social status

# Donna Eder; Sociology of Education, Vol. 58, No. 3 (Jul., 1985), pp. 154–165; American Sociological Association.

"Interpersonal Relations Among Female Adolescents"

# Dr. A. L. Freedman; PopularityExplained.com, retrieved July 19, 2015.

"How to be Popular"