So these were results that were done in the early 90s.
Of course it's been a while since then and there's been a lot of research and
theory to suggest maybe there's a way in which we can understand in
a more sophisticated fashion, how is it that kids who are rejected or
kids that are popular show these dramatic differences even years later?
And one of the ways that people have looked at that
is looking at something referred to as a transactional model.
So let's talk about this for a second.
A transactional model is referring to the idea that
we as humans transact with our environment.
So in other words, we elicit information from our environment, and
our environment elicits responses from us.
And that's a mutual reciprocal dialectic.
If you walk into a room and you engage in certain behavior,
people will change the way they were going to interact with you
based on the types of behavior you presented when you walked in the room.
Transactions can happen within an instant, or
they could happen over the course of years.
What you can see here on this figure is the idea that
how it is that we're behaving,
how we're developing our behavior, is something that changes over time.
So you can see that arrow pointed to the right,
showing you that that is going to develop over time.
But also, what you can see is that our environment changes over time.
I don't mean that there are different people in your environment,
although sometimes there are.
I mean that your environment expects different things from you.
They expects you to behave differently, they respond to even
the same behavior in different ways depending on how long they've known you or
how old you are in the case of children and adolescents.
So there is this mutual interaction that's occurring between your own behavior and
how the environment works.
So let's think about how that might apply to understanding
the effects of popularity, and specifically, rejection.
So what the theory suggests is that it might be that when we engage in social
behavior, like for instance, if you're very popular, if you're very good at
leadership and likability, and people really enjoy your presence.
And that social behavior is going to lead to you becoming high status, popular.