Do Popular Students Set the Norm for Cross-Ethnic Friendships?
As a graduate researcher at UCLA, I had the opportunity to work closely with Dr. Jaana Juvonen, a leading scholar in adolescent development. Under her mentorship, I explored a question that has stayed with me ever since:
In diverse schools, do popular students shape what’s “normal” when it comes to cross-ethnic friendships?
In a country where race and ethnicity have long structured opportunity and separation, this question isn’t just theoretical. It’s about how young people learn, day by day, whether connecting across difference is safe, valued, and “cool”—or socially risky.
Why Cross-Ethnic Friendships Matter
Even though legal school segregation ended decades ago, students in the U.S. are still separated along racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines. And even in diverse schools, we see “micro-segregation”:
students tracked into different classes,
lunch tables that are mostly same-ethnic,
and friendship groups that rarely cross racial lines.
Research is clear on two things:
Cross-ethnic friendships are powerful.
They reduce prejudice, increase empathy, and are linked to benefits like better leadership skills, higher peer acceptance, and lower tolerance for exclusion.Diversity alone isn’t enough.
Just putting students from different backgrounds in the same building doesn’t guarantee they’ll connect. Some students form meaningful cross-ethnic friendships; others don’t—even with the same opportunities.
That raised a question for me: If opportunity is there, what nudges some students to actually cross those lines?
My Focus: Popular Teens as “Social Referents”
Adolescence is a time when peer norms are incredibly powerful. Teens are finely tuned to:
what’s admired,
what gets ignored,
and what gets you rejected.
Popular students—those who are widely seen as “cool” and powerful—play a special role here. They are what social psychologists call social referents: people whose behavior is highly visible and therefore shapes what seems normal or desirable.
We already know that popular teens can set norms around rule-breaking and other risky behaviors. I wanted to know:
Do popular students also set norms around cross-ethnic friendships?
In other words, when popular kids have diverse friend groups, does that encourage their classmates to form more cross-ethnic friendships and feel more positively toward outgroup peers?
What I Studied
The Sample
I drew on data from a large longitudinal study of 5,991 students (52% female) attending 26 ethnically diverse public middle schools in California. Students were followed from:
6th grade (the transition year into middle school)
through 7th and 8th grade.
The sample reflected the diversity of California: Latinx, White/European American, East/Southeast Asian, Black/African American, Multiethnic/Biracial, and other groups were represented.
Identifying “High-Status” Youth
To find the popular students, I used peer nominations. Students were given a list of grademates and asked:
“Who is cool?”
“Who has the most power—everyone notices and pays attention to them?”
I transformed these nominations into standardized scores within each school and identified the top ~10% as high-status peers. These were the students who were widely seen as both cool and influential.
Because popularity networks at this age are often gendered, I analyzed boys and girls separately.
Measuring Friendship Diversity
At each wave, students listed their “good friends” in their grade. For each student, I calculated:
Proportion of cross-ethnic friends –
out of all the friends they listed, how many were from a different pan-ethnic group?
I also calculated friendship diversity for the high-status group in each school, using an index that captures how ethnically mixed their friend networks were.
Measuring Outgroup Attitudes
By 8th grade, I looked at two kinds of attitudes:
Outgroup affect
– how much students said they liked, trusted, respected, and felt comfortable around peers from other ethnic groups versus their own.Behavioral intentions
– how willing they were to do things like eat lunch with or hang out with peers from other groups.
Both were scored so that higher values meant more bias in favor of one’s own group.
I controlled for:
students’ own cross-ethnic friendships in 7th grade,
the ethnic makeup of their school,
their own ethnicity,
and parental education (as a proxy for socioeconomic status).
What I Found
1. Popular students’ friend diversity predicted classmates’ friend diversity
First, I tested whether the friendship diversity of high-status peers in 6th grade predicted how many cross-ethnic friends other students had in 7th grade.
It did.
In schools where popular boys had more diverse friend groups, other boys went on to have a higher proportion of cross-ethnic friends a year later.
The same pattern held for girls: when popular girls had diverse friendships, female classmates formed more cross-ethnic friendships over time.
This was true even after accounting for:
how many potential cross-ethnic peers were available in the grade,
students’ ethnicity,
and parental education.
In other words, popular students’ friend choices modeled what was socially acceptable—and their classmates followed.
2. For boys, popular youths’ friendship diversity predicted better outgroup attitudes
Next, I asked whether popular peers’ friendship diversity in 6th grade predicted how boys and girls felt about outgroup peers in 8th grade, above and beyond their own cross-ethnic friendships.
Here the pattern was more nuanced:
For boys, greater friendship diversity among high-status peers predicted:
less bias in how warmly they felt toward outgroups, and
less bias in how willing they were to interact with outgroup peers.
For girls, popular peers’ friendship diversity did not significantly predict outgroup attitudes once I accounted for girls’ own cross-ethnic friendships.
One possible explanation is that girls, on average, may be more attuned to social desirability when asked explicit questions about prejudice and inclusion, which could blur the unique effect of popular peers’ modeling. In that sense, behavior (actual friendships) might tell us more than explicit self-report for girls.
3. Cross-ethnic friendships themselves still matter
Across both genders, students who personally had more cross-ethnic friends in 7th grade showed:
less ingroup bias in feelings, and
less ingroup bias in behavioral intentions in 8th grade.
So the classic story still holds: having cross-ethnic friends is good for reducing prejudice. My study adds that who models those friendships matters too.
Why This Matters
These findings suggest that in diverse schools:
Popular students act as informal “ambassadors” of what’s cool and acceptable.
When their own friendships cut across ethnic lines, they are not just enjoying those benefits personally—they are quietly shifting norms for the entire grade.
That has some powerful implications:
It means we don’t always need huge, top-down programs to reduce prejudice.
Sometimes, changing the behavior of a small number of highly visible teens can ripple out into the broader school culture.
Limitations and Future Directions
Like any study, this one has limitations:
I focused on middle school; it would be valuable to see whether these influence patterns hold during the transition to high school, when students enter new social worlds.
I used friendships as my main behavioral indicator of intergroup contact. That’s a fairly “strict” measure; some students might be positively influenced by popular peers but still struggle to form deep cross-ethnic friendships, especially if they face anxiety or lack social skills.
The analytic models aggregated high-status peers’ behavior at the school level. More advanced modeling could treat each popular teen as its own “cluster” and examine who is influential for whom (for example, whether popular same-ethnic role models have special weight).
Even with these caveats, the patterns are clear enough to point us toward practical steps.
What This Means for Schools and Interventions
If we want schools where students feel safe, included, and connected across difference, we need to pay attention not only to who shares classrooms and hallways, but also to who shares lunch tables and friend groups—and who sets the tone.
This research suggests that:
Identifying and engaging high-status students can be a strategic lever for change.
When those students are supported and encouraged to build genuinely diverse friendships, their choices can legitimize cross-ethnic connections for everyone else.
Combined with broader equity efforts, this kind of bottom-up norm change can help create school cultures where inclusion is not just taught—it’s modeled.
As our youth population continues to diversify, how young people learn to relate across difference will shape not only their own lives, but the social fabric of the communities they grow up to lead. Popular students may seem like just the “cool kids,” but in reality, they’re also powerful carriers of norms—and that power can be leveraged in the direction of greater belonging and social cohesion.