The study is titled: Aggression, Exclusivity, and Status Attainment in Interpersonal Networks.
I'm pretty certain its findings tell us something about how political hierarchies form and how these are in turn cemented in constitutional and statutory law.
From the article:
In order to determine who the schools’ “elite” were, Faris scoured old yearbooks, plucking out kids who had been part of the “homecoming court,” prom royalty, or were a “notable”—voted girl with “prettiest eyes,” “biggest flirt,” “most likely to succeed,” etc. He then defined the next highest status category as “friend of the elite”—someone who the elite had mentioned as a friend. The students in the next tier, cruelly named the “hangers-on,” were those who had named a member of the elite as a friend but hadn’t received a friendship nomination back.
In all, the elites represented 5% of the schools, their friends and hangers-on 14%, with the rest of the benighted 81% struggling to break into the top tier. While this social elite was exclusive, it wasn’t a closed system. Over the year, kids moved in and out of the top tier. Faris’s question was simple: what is the best strategy to rise through the ranks?
The sociologist found that being connected to more students actually decreased the likelihood of becoming an elite. Kids who “bridge otherwise distant peers” were far more likely to enhance their social status, but simply having a bunch of friends who all had their own collection of friends was no way to become prom queen. “Elite status is maintained through selectivity, not connectivity, and by denying rather than accumulating relationships,” he writes.
He also found that aggression was a useful tactic. Violence was still seen as antisocial and undesirable, but “reputational aggression”—the teasing, rumour-mongering, gossiping, ostracism, and other non-physical means through which high-school kids ruin one anothers teenage years—actually doubled the chances of a student becoming a friend of the elite, particularly if the aggressor attacked a high-status individual or someone who was close to them socially (your friends, of course, are your biggest adversaries). Victims of aggression, meanwhile, were half as likely as regular kids to join the elite or second tier. Being an asshole enhances your social status at the expense of your victim.
