[mtdewcmu]

I think level of inhibition is too reductive to have explanatory power. My guess is that the nerds are the children who listen to adults and follow rules. The cool kids are the kids that rebel very early, probably because the adults in their lives were not trustworthy. Following the rules and doing what you're supposed to is pretty much a recipe for later life success, as defined by a stable job, stable household, etc. So there's really no upside to being the rebellious child. It might be a source of coolness for a year or two as a teenager.

The famous experiment, where they promised a child two pieces of candy if he or she didn't take the piece of candy in front of her, and found that not taking the candy predicted success, can be interpreted in different ways. Supposedly it measures inhibition, which is taken to be an independent variable, and it showed that children with higher levels of inhibition experience greater levels of success. I imagine the experiment from the perspective of the child. An adult promises to give you extra candy if you do what they say. Should you trust this adult? I suspect that if dad is an alcoholic and makes a lot of promises, and then passes out and doesn't remember, you will not take the adult seriously and try to have some candy while you still can.

[Yunk]

That could be, though I certainly have met outliers who thrive from a childhood of rebellion. Many of them seemed uninhibited but really had a sadistic ability to wait for their opportunities to maximally affect their surroundings.

But I'm not really saying behavior inhibition has an adequate explanatory power, just that it is confounding. Just one quantitative measure like gratification delay is enough to make a qualitative measure like coolness a worthless subject.

[mtdewcmu]

Okay, you didn't try to use it to explain anything. I guess what I meant to say was that I think inhibition is a bogus thing to measure. By purporting to measure it, you implicitly make the assumption that inhibition is an independent input into behavior and can be isolated.

Children don't have much insight into their own decision-making or the words to explain themselves, so, seeing only behavioral outcomes, you could convince yourself that perhaps it's simple, like an electric circuit with a relay. The relay is inhibition; impulses send current; when the current flows, behavior happens. The merit of this model is that it's simple and has quantities that are measurable. You can do the candy experiment, and derive numbers that, you claim, measure inhibition. You find a correlation with a variable later in life, and it makes a neat graph.

The problem is that it's pretty obvious that human behavior is many orders of magnitude more complex than a circuit, and it's probably pretty easy to invent fictitious quantities that are measurable and take supposed measurements that look quite convincing.

[Yunk]

You are hung up on my example over my point which is not that I believe the explanation of the gratification delay tests..

I like your hypothesis, but I also don't care if the gratification test was flawed due to alien possession. They still point to something earlier in development that probably isn't equally distributed among 'cool' and 'nerd' kids nor fully segregated. If there is a socioeconomic component then the relation to this hidden variable would be similar for eye color too.

So the point of the study verse another study using eye color is questionable to me.

[mtdewcmu]

I think your point was that cool kids and nerds are heterogenous groups, i.e. kids could end up in the same category for vastly different reasons. I agree. Practically all social science research suffers from the problem that it can't define the thing it's trying to study. They don't even try to solve problems like defining happiness or coolness. They hope that the numbers the experiments generate will look persuasive and make the exercise look like it was worth doing.

However, they isolated two groups according to some criteria, and they found that it correlated with something objective later in life. So you can speculate on other explanations, and my opinion is that the kids they called cool were troubled and rebelled because the adults in their lives were not dependable. The kids they called nerds were nerds because they followed rules and didn't rebel. They followed rules because the adults in their lives came through on promises and made it seem worth it to work and have faith that you'll get rewarded eventually.

[shanecleveland]

Right. It is generally considered un-cool for a teenager to do things that don't necessarily set you up for real-world success, such as doing homework, getting good grades, staying home on the weekends, etc. And partaking in risky behavior or rebelling may briefly help with popularity but not do much for getting into college or establishing a career.