Being popular tends to look, from the outside, like a straightforward win, more attention, more social capital, less to worry about. Two studies that measured actual stress hormones rather than just asking people how they felt suggest the opposite is often true, that occupying the top of a social hierarchy carries a real, physiological cost of its own.
The clearest evidence comes from a 2006 study by Tara Gruenewald, Margaret Kemeny, and Najib Aziz, published in Brain, Behavior, and Immunity. The researchers had 81 college students living in the same dormitory rate their own subjective social status relative to their dorm-mates, then randomly assigned them to complete a performance task either with or without social evaluation, while measuring cortisol levels through saliva samples before and after. Students who saw themselves as higher status showed sizable, statistically significant cortisol increases, both in immediate peak response and in how long it took levels to return to normal, when facing the socially evaluated version of the task. Students who saw themselves as lower status showed no significant cortisol response at all to the same evaluative pressure. This was the reverse of what the researchers had predicted going in, higher perceived status didn’t buffer people from social stress, it appeared to make them more physiologically reactive to it.
A second study helps show that this pattern shows up in real school hierarchies among teenagers, not just in a lab setting. In a 2010 study by Patrick West, Helen Sweeting, Robert Young, and Sarah Kelly, published in Social Science and Medicine, the researchers surveyed 2,824 fifteen-year-olds across 22 Scottish secondary schools, having each student rank themselves on peer, academic, and sports status ladders, then collected two morning cortisol samples from saliva. For the peer-popularity hierarchy specifically, boys at the very top of the ranking had significantly higher cortisol than boys ranked below them, and among girls, only those at the very top showed elevated cortisol at all, everyone else measured lower. Family socioeconomic status, by contrast, showed essentially no relationship to cortisol levels in this large sample, meaning where a teenager stood in the peer popularity hierarchy mattered more to their measured stress physiology than how much money their family had.
Together, these two studies suggest that popularity functions less like a straightforward social cushion and more like a position that has to be actively maintained, at a real physiological cost. Gruenewald and colleagues’ research shows that perceiving oneself as high status made people more, not less, reactive to social evaluation, exactly the kind of situation popularity is often assumed to protect against. West and colleagues’ research shows the same pattern holding up in real teenage social hierarchies, where being at the very top of the peer pecking order was tied to measurably higher stress hormones than being comfortably in the middle, and mattered more than family wealth. Between the two, popularity looks less like an unqualified advantage and more like a position that comes with its own built-in vigilance, a heightened sensitivity to the possibility of losing it.
It’s worth being honest about what these two studies don’t establish. Gruenewald and colleagues’ research measured subjective, self-perceived status within a single dormitory setting using a lab-induced stressor, so the size and consistency of the effect may look different in other real-world high-status positions. West and colleagues’ research is correlational, and while the pattern held across a large, representative sample of Scottish teenagers, it can’t fully rule out that some other factor tied to being at the very top of a peer hierarchy, rather than popularity itself, contributed to the elevated cortisol observed.
Within those honest limits, the research offers a genuinely useful correction to the assumption that popularity is simply a comfortable position to occupy. Sitting at the top of a social hierarchy, whether in a dorm or a classroom, appears to come with its own real physiological vigilance, evidence that the effort of holding a high-status position is doing real, measurable work on the body, even when it looks effortless from the outside.