Smearing Miss Congeniality

A new story, published in Child Development Magazine, says that popular kids do things that make them uncomfortable in order to fit in--things like, shoplifting, vandalism, and smoking pot!

Hey, isn't that what all of us unpopular losers were doing?

In fact, the life of popular teens isn't all drugs and crime:
Overall, the researchers found, popular adolescents were more well-adjusted than their less popular peers on many dimensions, including the quality of their relationships to their parents and their overall level of social skills.
But nearly all the headlines listed on Google--"The Dark Side of Popularity," "Study Cast Chill on Cool Teens," for example--emphasize the rather commonplace downsides of popularity noted in this study.

I can only surmise that this is because we journalists (and fake journalists) were for the most part unpopular in high school (otherwise we'd have become politicians), haven't fully recovered, and desperately need a moment of schadenfreude every now and then, some vague reassurance that the popular kids weren't nearly as happy and sexed-up as they looked. Sigh. Or, it's just that a study showing that popular teens are well-adjusted and happy in their fake tans and flirty OP shorts wouldn't exactly be newsworthy.