Crowds are large groups of adolescents socially connected by a shared image and reputation,[1] especially within the setting of a single school.
Specific stereotypes vary from place to place, but many remain consistent, based on peer status, socioeconomic status, residential area, activities, social characteristics, or a combination of attributes (jocks, nerds, populars, and druggies are among the most commonly observed).
[6] Usually, however, adolescents embrace their crowd affiliation, using it to define themselves and advertise where they fit in their peer group's social structure.
[7][8] Crowds serve an essential purpose in adolescent identity development, shaping individual values, behavior, and personal and peer expectations.
These norms encourage adolescents to interact with some people while avoiding others and reward certain behaviors while discouraging others, a process of normative social influence.
The basic, recurring crowd divisions (jocks, geeks, partiers) have been most often studied in predominantly white high schools, but they also exist for minority students.
While crowds are structured around prototypical caricatures of their members, real adolescents rarely match these extremes.
[6] Accordingly, adolescents who change crowd membership (a process known as "crowd-hopping") tend to have lower self-esteem, perhaps because they have not yet found an environment and peer group that supports them.
[9] Early crowds are often based on social status, especially among girls, with a small group of well-known children being "popular" and the rest "unpopular."
[9] The stereotypes on which crowd definitions are based change over time as adolescents shift from grouping people by abstract characteristics rather than activities ("geeks" rather than "the kids who read a lot").
[19] Adolescents also develop more multifaceted self-concepts and reject crowd labels as simplistic attempts to describe an entire personality.