Want to Find Out How Successful You’ll be? Ask Your Primary School Friends…

Get out the phonebook ladies, because it might be time to reconnect with some of your old primary school friends. Why? Well according to some new research your childhood peers could predict how successful you’ll be as an adult. Yes, really.

Researchers at the Concordia University in Montreal, Canada have shown that the evaluation of kids by their classmates can actually predict their success as an adult in a fairly accurate manner. In fact, evaluation by classmates is even more accurate than self-evaluation.

The study, which was known as the ‘Concordia Longitudinal Risk Project,’ was originally started in 1976, but carried on over the years in order to form a firm conclusion.

What did the study involve? Well over two years, students between the ages of five and ten completed evaluations of their classmates and rated them in terms of popularity, drive and how outgoing they were. The students also did self-evaluations so that the results could be properly compared.

Over the next 20 years, the children were followed by the researchers who used various studies to track their progress as they got older.

Follow-up surveys were conducted between 1999 and 2003 with 700 children from the initial study.

“We were able to compare peer and self-perceptions of the childhood behaviours to these adult personality factors,” said Alexa Martin-Storey, a member of the Concordia-based Centre for Research in Human Development.

“We found the evaluations from the group of peers were much more closely associated with eventual adult outcomes than were their own personality perceptions from childhood. This makes sense, since children are around their peers all day and behaviours like aggressiveness and likeability are extremely relevant in the school environment,” she added.

Is it time you started ringing up your old school friends?

To put all of this into context, the researchers discovered that children who were thought of as popular by their peers grew up to have more agreeable and conscientious personalities. They were also less neurotic.

“Adult personality traits are associated with a lot of important life factors, such as health, mental health and occupational satisfaction,” said Lisa Serbin, from the Department of Psychology at Concordia University.

“The information from our study could be used to promote better longitudinal outcomes for children by helping kids and parents develop effective mechanisms for addressing aggressive or socially withdrawn behaviours and promoting more pro-social behaviour,” she added.

So if you want to find out where you’ll be in five or ten years’ time, it might be worth ringing up your old primary school bestie and getting her to make a few predictions – you never know, they might come true!