As goals pertaining to one’s power position in the peer group are important predictors of bullying perpetration (Hensums et al., 2023; Lansu van den Berg, 2024), improving our understanding of youth’s motivations and cognitions regarding popularity seems necessary in order to combat bullying. Therefore, this preregistered study disentangles various (un)popularity motivation and beliefs subconstructs, and examines how they are related to youth’s own popularity, and their bullying and prosocial behaviors. This is examined among 202 students from Dutch 4th-6th grade classrooms. Results showed that motivations pertaining to high popularity are distinct from those pertaining to low popularity, and that the newly introduced concepts of popularity disinterest and popularity instability threat are empirically distinct from related motivation and belief measures and can be measured reliably. Moreover, youth high in popularity more strongly valued having high popularity status, and were motivated not to lose the status they already had, rather than seeking to further increase it. Bullying perpetration was associated with avoiding unpopularity and low tolerance for a low popularity position, with bully-assistants additionally also striving for high popularity, and having little disinterest in popularity. This whereas prosocial behavior was associated with a higher tolerance for having a low popularity position. Future work should further explore the role of these novel popularity motivation and context belief subconstructs, such as desired absolute levels of popularity, disinterest in popularity, tolerance for having a low popularity position and popularity instability threat belief, in social behavior toward peers.
Lansu et al. (2025) studied this question.