New Directions for Popularity Motivation Research in Youth: Novel and Unique Popularity Motivations and Their Associations with Popularity, Bullying and Prosocial Behavior

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 popularity motivations is crucial for combating bullying. Therefore, this preregistered study examines motivations geared toward desirable popularity outcomes (promotion focused) and geared toward avoiding undesirable popularity outcomes (prevention focused) while disentangling general, priority, change, and absolute level popularity motivations as well as popularity disinterest. It is examined how they are related to youth’s own popularity, and their bullying and prosocial behaviors among 202 students from Dutch 4th-6th grade classrooms. Results showed that motivations pertaining to high popularity are distinct from those pertaining to unpopularity, and that the newly introduced concept of popularity disinterest can be measured reliably. Moreover, youth high in popularity had stronger popularity promotion and prevention motivations, except for general avoiding of unpopularity. 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 subconstructs, such as not wanting to lose popularity, disinterest in popularity, and tolerance for having a low popularity position, in social behavior toward peers.