High school is a cesspool of hierarchies. And we now have the network science to prove it. In a paper posted to the arXiv, researchers from the University of Michigan show how results from a social network survey in a high school can be used to examine unreciprocated ties. Unreciprocated ties—friendships that only go in a single direction—are no doubt the bread-and-butter of teenagers, and can be exploited to yield a clear ranking of the students in the school: "We find that students can be ranked from low to high such that most unreciprocated friendships consist of a lower-ranked individual claiming friendship with a higher-ranked one."
Similarly, "rankings are correlated with other characteristics of the participants that are traditionally associated with status, such as age and overall popularity as measured by total number of friends." Here is the ranking by grade:
As you can see, the older you are, the more popular you are. This should not be a surprise to any freshman.
I leave a social network analysis of each of the characters from Mean Girls as an exercise to the reader.
Top image: Parker Michael Knight/CC/Flickr
