Early neural attunement to peer status predicts future social network position and popularity in adolescents

Abstract

Popularity is a key marker of social status, yet the phenomena that support its emergence within newly forming social groups remain unclear. We combined functional neuroimaging and longitudinal school-wide social network analysis to track adolescents throughout their first year of high school, examining whether early neural responses to peers of varying social status predict later popularity. Here, we show that greater neural differentiation when viewing the faces of unpopular versus popular peers, particularly in the hippocampus, forecasts greater perceived popularity at the end of the school year. This relationship is mediated by midyear social network centrality, especially in-closeness centrality, which reflects being more easily reachable by peers. These findings suggest that early neural attunement to the status of their peers shapes how adolescents become embedded in their social networks, which in turn contributes to later gains in their own perceived popularity. More generally, these findings reveal how neural and social network-level processes jointly drive adolescents’ navigation of evolving social landscapes and attainment of social status.