the pecking order pays

If you, like me, were in the lower half of the pecking order in high school, you don't need to be told that many benefits accrue from being a "cool" kid.

But it's not just tangible perks like getting to date the hotter guy or getting invited to the in parties; high status kids (and their adult counterparts) get the advantage of the Midas touch - everything they say and do is, be definition, gold.

In the classic Robbers Cave experiment, a group of sociologists in the 50's tested the power of being popular on two groups of unsuspecting boys (who just thought they were spending a couple of weeks at camp). Creating a controlled version of Lord of the Flies, the experimenters observed the boys jockey for status as they participated in team building activities over a few days. Once their pecking orders were somewhat set, the experimenters suggested the boys prep for a softball game with a little competition: each kid would throw a ball at a target 25 times - and the others in the group would rate his performance. After tallying up the performance grades from peers and comparing them with a more objective estimation of how well the boys threw the ball, the results were clear. If you were a cool kid, your peers thought you threw the ball better than you actually did. And while the popular boys got grade inflation, the losers got grade deflation.

So for all of us geeks who suffered through high school thinking that in the eyes of our peers we could never do anything right (and, conversely, that the cool kids could do no wrong) - we weren't imagining things.