Do you ever wonder what happened to that kid at school? Are there classmates with whom you've lost touch, but would love to catch up with? Or does the whole thing fill you with dread? In this week’s podcast, we discuss school reunions.

We start by probing the reasons behind the popularity of the school reunion film trope of the 1970s and 80s, ask whether school reunions are more than just a benchmarking exercise with our peers, and question the impact of social media on getting together with our schoolmates. Finally, we attempt to guess what our fellow podcast participants were like during their school days.

A few things we mentioned in this podcast:

• The Impossibility of The Big Chill Today
• Google Books Ngram for ‘School Reunion’
• Just before COVID-19, American migration hit a 73-year low

For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email [email protected]

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast, produced by me, Fraser McGruer, for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Chris Wragg and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights, and this week we're discussing school reunions. I'm really looking forward to this one. Nick, lead us in, please.

When you could finally get with that girl.

you say seems to match your personal experience, right? But the other puzzle is why did they

that they, school unions just did not exist. They existed, but let's say they weren't the sort of

cultural phenomenon that they were considered to be in some way. I mean, they definitely existed going back quite a long time. And I know I've seen like during my research, I found like letters from the 19th century of people being invited to class reunions and things. So the concepts definitely existed. But the phenomenon really took off, you know, which seems to tie in with

Yeah. Well, so that's interesting data, which I wasn't aware of. And I think I'm going to a theory, which is that the school reunion or what a school reunion does, there has been and there is an enduring requirement for that type of thing, right? I'll come on to that in a minute. But I think the reason why it might not have existed prior to the time period Nick was looking at, well, I guess a range of things to do with technology, geographical mobility. So for example, if you lived in the house next door to the people you went to school with, because nobody moved away from town, what's the point of a reunion? Because you know them anyway. But also, I wonder whether sort of more modern means of communication, sort of facilitated school reunions in some way. If you're able to telephone round all your friends or whatever, then perhaps that was something where you could advertise it in the local newspaper by some means or whatever. So yeah, I wonder whether technology and cultural changes have happened. But I think what a school reunion does, which there probably was previously a requirement for and there still is a requirement for, relates to a whole range of things. One of which is the idea of benchmarking your progress against peers, which is an obvious one where you want to know, well, how are people like me getting on? And then I think there's another one which is related, I suppose, which is about your school year, your graduation year or whatever, being in some way a sample of the population at large, depending on what kind of institution you went to or that can be more or less diverse. But essentially, it's a way of you sort of finding out information about the world, what has happened to people like me who had similar experiences to me, where should I be in relation to them and so on. So I think fundamentally it's about benchmarking and it's about discovery of

what's going on in the world. Yeah, I think you're onto something there. I liked what you said about technology because also the technology, when you talk about telephones, for example, that could support a sort of growth in reunions. But of course, technology can then sort of have another effect that might lead to their decline, which I suspect we'll come onto later. However, I think, and in terms of the motivations for them, I think as I sit here listening, I think there's one thing actually as well, why we're, they're super emotive for people, right? Because we're talking about our formative years, right? And if we think, and also the victories and the humiliations that we all, I'm sure, experienced at school, and it's all tied up with these sort of, also when our egos are so strong in our lives at that age, and then combining that with, as you're saying, sort of a benchmarking, it's just a really rich ground for, and you can see why there've been films about it and possibly literature as well, because, yeah, it's all to do with our own narrative, our personal narratives as well. Nick? Yeah, I think that's a great theory. I

Okay, so there's a bit of a grouping there.

About the boomer generation, which makes them more attached to that particular period of their youth, which other generations just don't have as much of. So I'm thinking, if you think about what was the 60s all about, what is that generation all about? They're unified by things that happened in the 60s. The music, teenage stuff, stuff that you do when you're that age. What's the generation before them unified by? Second World War. It's not to do with what age you were, it's to do with an

experience you went through. And they obviously had veterans, or those that fought in the war had veterans events, but that was around a different experience.

Yeah, so that could be part of it, that actually youth is just particularly important to the boomer generation in a way that it isn't to older generation.

Well, and also, I wonder as well, further speculating on your speculation, that the erosion of it could also be underpinned by some sort of social changes like Reaganomics and Thatcherism, where it's like, who cares where you've come from, it's where you're going. And actually, do you want to go back to the crappy town you lived in when you've now, you know, got your Porsche? Probably not. The whole idea of nouveau-richism was celebrated. So I wonder whether people were much less nostalgic.

Is it too early to talk about social media? No, I think we talked about possible reasons why it appeared as a phenomenon in that particular era. So let's talk about why it might be dying out.

I mean, everyone, what's the point of a school reunion when you can recontact everyone on Facebook?

I struggle to find any reason why this isn't just the obvious answer.

Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting one, because obviously, you know, like a lot of people would think about a school reunion, could I do it surreptitious? You know, they wouldn't necessarily want to actually go and meet those people, but they would want to effectively observe them. Because if my hypothesis about you using it to benchmark is true, you're not trying to maintain that contact. What you want to do is turn up and say, where am I in relation to other people? And you are no longer in contact with those people. So presumably, if you wanted to be in contact with them still, you would have made an effort to do so. And so, you know, you probably still have some school friends, but you don't keep in contact with all the people you're at school with. So I suspect that's a reason. Does everyone remember Friends Reunited? Yeah, yeah. Yes. Yeah.

I was going to mention that myself, but yeah.

And I remember on my entry on there, because I think one of the big things about it was very difficult to communicate, actually. You could post, but communication was not easy. But I remember in my post, I put, oh, I'm just about to get married to my Brazilian girlfriend, right? And so it definitely ties in with this benchmarking thing. Yeah, you remember that spotty geek with no mates? Get a load of me.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, so I think what's interesting about Friends Reunited is it's always cited as an example of kind of missing the point of this technology that you just invented, or that users will have a need that you've accidentally met. And it was very much pitched as a here's a way of catching up with and perhaps maintaining contact with. Or meeting again, people you were at school with. But they accidentally invented social media. They'd actually invented keeping in touch with anyone, and actually using it as a, like one of the main platforms to keep in touch with people. And actually schools are neither here nor there. And I feel like the interesting thing, as Chris mentioned, there was this, it was like a bit of a meteor, you know, it lit up the sky, the internet skies for a very brief period and then faded away. And that's because there's basically not that much air in the room of school reunions. I mean, you have them, let's say, once every 10, 20 years. Maybe that's about right. Maybe there's one evening every 20 years worth of fun in a school reunion. And the problem is Friends Reunited and Facebook and the likes of that don't have to go very far to suck all the air out.

Yes.

And there's just not much left. As Chris said, what's the point? You know, when you've got most of the information that you want, you know, they're really the only thing you would be getting is what people aren't sort of telling you on social media, which is probably quite a lot. In some people's case, you know, you're seeing a curated version of their life, but you'd be seeing a curated version of their life at a school reunion anyway.

So look, we still got a little bit of time on this episode, but it feels to me that we've kind of put this to bed. Or have we? First off, because I feel quite satisfied. And I think we're kind of all in agreement with one another with the causes of the rise and fall of school reunions. One. Two, boring, grumpy old man sort of thing. It is a shame because the one thing that something like Facebook can't deliver is that sort of a nostalgic snog with Sharon behind the bike sheds. Right.

And they had this set of reunions the year I was there. I think they did every year. But I helped out on the bar because I thought it might be quite fun to meet some old Camden girls. And so they had this thing where they sort of did reunions for every 10 years. So effectively, when I was there, it would have been the class of 85, the school leavers of 85, and the school leavers of 75, and the school leavers of 65 on successive weekends. And I kind of turned up. And for the 85 people, you know, I thought it was just really interesting. I went up, had a sort of chat with these, you know, impossibly sophisticated, ancient women in their late 20s, you know, and it was just so exciting chatting to these people who were like going out and doing these exciting lives. And I was like, I can't wait for 10 years time. I'm going to be doing this exciting life. And you know, I'm going to meet up with people like this and all of my generation will have gone off and done all these interesting things. And we're all going to get together and discover all these interesting things that we've done. And yeah, I mean, two disappointments. One, your life. And secondly, secondly, well, yes, I mean, the point is that actually, it has become commonplace to know about that stuff. Yeah. It is, it's, you know, the internet has done for, you know, it's done to school reunions, what, you know, the Wikipedia has done to the Encyclopedia Britannica or whatever, which wants this highly prized thing, where you could reach up onto the shelf and find out information which was otherwise inaccessible. And now, you know, it just, and it's not that interesting when you look at it.

I sort of disagree. I sort of disagree. Because I recently went to, let's call it a school reunion. It wasn't a reunion. And it wasn't my school. Right. Okay. But it was... But it met all the other criteria. Yeah. It was a university reunion, in effect. And actually, it was a mate's 50th birthday. And in effect, it was kind of like what you had described, you know, a self arranged reunion. And one thing actually, sort of thinking about social media is that, first of all, some people use it more than others, right. And so there are some there who I kind of know what they're up to through Facebook, just vaguely keeping an eye on it. There's some that I see every now and again anyway. But there were some who I had not seen for 30 years. And so it did deliver that information, right, that was missing.

Well, come on, spill the beans. Who was hot? Who was not? Well, I was hot. But were you the bright star? Were you the kind of prodigal child who'd gone off and achieved enormous success?

Yes, I was. Yes. Which tells you everything about the failure of my cohort. And the second thing is, and it's an obvious thing to make, you know, just hugging people and seeing the lines and, you know, and just that human contact. Yeah, you can't put a filter on real life, can you? No, and no, quite. And getting drunk and messing around. And for that, I did something for a year, which I hadn't done for years, which was smoking some weed. And it was great, basically. And dancing tonight in a really excruciating manner, dancing in an overly enthusiastic manner to early 90s. Throwing some shapes. Exactly. So it was wonderful. So what's my point is that actually, it's a shame, because I think we're right. It's for things like social media that reunions don't happen as much. And it's a shame because actually meeting up in person is wonderful, you know. And also, and it's surprising. And actually, I was very nervous going to the event. And I don't know why I was nervous. And lots of people I hadn't seen in years. And I think an element of it is, oh, how am I doing compared with others? How am I aging compared with others? And also, but it's those emotions of the people that I liked, and then we fell out. And then, because I'm always falling out with people, unfortunately. But it turned out that others had been feeling the same, you know.

Yeah, I mean, I'm quite a keeping in touch kind of person, really. I tend to try and keep in touch with people throughout my life. So like my university friends, I see them all. I've lost touch with a couple of people, but they're the people I wasn't really that bothered with. School friends, you know, still in touch with the ones who, you know, I wanted to keep in touch with. And other people sort of on the periphery who I occasionally see anyway. I fear that if they even if there had been a school reunion, the ones you're really interested in probably wouldn't turn up. That's the problem. Yeah, well, exactly. I mean, there is there. Well, there was. Yeah, there was the guy from my school who did end up going to Orange County jail. It's a story for another podcast. But, you know, and he was one of the one of the really mean kids as well. So it all tallied. But the point is that people who, you know, perhaps felt that their life hadn't gone very well would would be much less likely to turn up. And I think, you know, that you wouldn't really get that juicy feeling of superiority. But also, you're the people who are kind of, you know, have vanished and not much. They're going to remain unmanaged. Yeah, I think so. They're going to remain vanished. Yeah. So. So, yeah. And it was slightly backed up. And I checked on Reddit. I looked for sort of tell us some terrible things that happened at your school reunion. And 90 percent of the stories were. Well, it wasn't like a school reunion at a school like in the films. It was we just went to a bar and out of a class of 300, about 30 turned up and it was OK. You know, that was what most of the stories were. It was like, you know, it was all right.

OK. Look, I mean, it's been a very uncontentious episode. There are a couple of questions I want to move on to. But before I do, Chris, anything to add?

Well, yeah, I'm just wondering sort of a little bit more about why that period of our of our lives is so interesting to us and why we like to to revisit it and why we're interested in how people who we knew at that period and why you don't sort of go, oh, I wonder how the children I was at nursery with are doing or I wonder how. Yeah, well, perhaps. But but but there's a we have a particular answer that at the beginning. Go on. Keep going. Well, yes. But I think I think there's actually there's actually a bit of science to that as well. You know, this idea that that that is a formative period of our of our lives that, you know, when they've looked at things like teenage memory formation and effectively there was a study done by Columbia University where they were looking at sort of reinforcement learning. So, you know, when you're shown a particular stimulus, a certain thing happens. Do you learn to associate that? And can teenagers perform better than adults do at that at that kind of task? And so they were sort of supposing that this was to do with the striatum, the part of the the brain that's to do with reinforcement learning. But it actually turned out that it was really more about the the hippocampus, which relates to the laying down of memory and what effectively they established was that memories that you form as a teenager have more kind of impact on on your subsequent decision making than memories that you form as a as an adult. So you attribute more value to effectively more value to memories that you you lay down as a teenager than you do as an adult. So you sort of learn more from them, I suppose, at that time in your life.

Yeah, I guess the world's world gets or let's say the social world, which I suppose you're discovering by yourself at that age just becomes less informative because you've kind of you've learned the basics. And that's the period where you learn.

And so I think at that stage, when you're at your sort of, you know, high school, that's when you learn what a bad person is or what an attractive person is or what a friend is or all of those sorts of things. And so I think there's a as well as this idea of how am I getting on? There's also a sort of drawback to this world that was was foundational in the person you've become a little bit.

So, yeah, I suspect there's also an issue of if we think about kind of what period would it be most interesting to sample and then, say, resample a person after 10 years? That would be the optimal spot, I think. Like if you think about when the most change happens, it would be just sort of just before you've left school, where you're about to go to university and then choose a career and all that stuff. But before you have done all the settling down stuff about, you know, getting married and having kids. And I suspect that, you know, if you sample someone between 30 and 40, they're going to look a lot more similar than two people sampled at 15 and 25. Got a brilliant idea. And we're going to pitch this to TV production shows.

We could visit someone when they're, say, seven. Right. Yeah. And just every seven years, we could revisit them. Right. And see how they're doing. Yeah, that sounds like an awesome idea. Let's do it. We'll pitch this to ITV.

Yeah. So we need to have started about 50 years ago, though.

That's the downside. But that idea that there's more variability from being a high school person to being a 25, 35 year old than there is any sort of other point in your life, I think, is interesting because all those, you know, those American booklets that they produce, like Most Likely To Be. I wish we had yearbooks in Britain. So my wife's school did have a yearbook. And, you know, I had a look through it. And it's not terribly interesting. What was she the most likely to do? Yeah, well, she wasn't she wasn't mentioned. I don't know. I guess there were 250 kids and there were like five categories or something. But the point is, I think you're right. That's maybe part of the fascination about a school reunion is you make those predictions. But actually, they're probably at their most uncertain at that time. And, you know, if you look at things like, you know, the relationship between grade performance and, you know, and long term career earnings, then they're not terribly well connected. So you think, oh, this person's going far. And actually, you know, there's lots of variability in that kind of data. But probably if you looked at somebody's earnings at 35 and their earnings at 45, you're not going to go too far wrong. You're already on that.

Hence, I think that the fascination and popularity of the Where Are They Now? montage, which you get in, you know, things like Animal House or the History Boys and all those things at school. Everyone wants to know the answer. We're at the end of it. You're like, yeah, but what happened to them? And that's why you've got to have the Where Are They Now? montage. Yeah, absolutely. Okay.

I think that, yeah, that was really interesting. I really enjoyed that. Okay. So I've got a couple of questions I want to ask. Let's see. Actually, but before I ask those questions, we've talked about how I kind of went to a reunion recently. We've talked about Nick's. Chris, have you been to any reunions? I imagine that you, you know, seem like a reunion. Shun them. He shuns them. Shuns them.

Yeah. Having said that, the people that I was at school with who I wanted to keep in touch with, I still know and still see. Okay.

Okay. All right. Okay. By the way, the elephant in the room that you always say this with a straight face whenever you mention it, Nick, is the fact you went to Camden Girls for School for Girls, which let's not even go into that. Let's just leave that out there. Leave that as a question. As you wish. Yeah. So actually, I was going to ask you, hey, what were you like at school? But actually, I'm going to ask Nick, what do you think either Chris or me was like at school? What do you think people would say about Chris or me?

I think by Chris's own admission, he was a bit of a scumbag at school. Yeah. I think Chris would have been scary at school. Do you think he was a bit nasty? I was basically like Draco Malfoy. Yeah. I suspect he'd have been, I wouldn't have got on very well with him at school.

So actually, in all seriousness, Chris, do you think other people would have bad memories of you at school? And they would say he was horrible to me and he made my life hell?

Or I don't think I would have been viewed as vindictive. But I don't think I went after the same person consistently and made, you know. Spread it around a bit. Spread it, spread the love around. Why is this Chris? Difficult to know.

Well, one bullying victim is, you know, a tragedy, but a whole class full is just a statistic.

Yeah, no, I'm not really at all proud of it. But there's a bit of me that maintains that it was probably better to be a bully than to be bullied. So there may have been a bit of sort of self-pity. And it wasn't physical bullying. You know, I wasn't the biggest person. It was just more emotional. It undermined them emotionally. Yeah. And use other people to do the physical bullying.

Like my crab and boil. Completely unsurprising, really. I mean, this is what makes him such a great asset to the company. It's the same set of skills.

I think I'm a reformed character.

But I don't understand. I'm sorry. I don't want to, you know, delve in. But I don't understand because I think you're a nice guy, Chris. But I also think there's definitely a hard side to you and maybe lacking in emotion or not the most emotional of people.

Right. Is it connected to that? Maybe. I think that idea of lack of empathy and so on, perhaps. But yeah, I've been a very different person since I met my wife.

Right. OK. This is a story of redemption. I like this. Like Vader. Like Vader. He's underneath it all. Yeah. It's nice, really. He just wants to be loved. OK. So tell me, Chris, what was I like at school?

I reckon you were... Well, I was going to say you were gregarious and so on and so forth. But I've got a friend who's a bit like... Who reminds me a bit of you in terms of their personality. And they were actually quite shy and retiring at school. And then subsequently sort of went through, you know, through their late teens and university years, went through a bit of a personality transformation. Almost, I guess, in some sort of compensation for that. The butterfly coming out. But the butterfly or like, I'm not happy with the way that that life was, I'm going to be I'm going to make myself new. So I'm going to I'm going to say maybe you were actually quite, quite retiring as a, as a, you know, 15, 16 year old, maybe a little bit shy.

I think there's some truth, some accuracy in what you've said. I mean, what I would say is my school life was a very imposing kind of place and it was easy to get crushed there by both the system and the people that are generated within that system. And so I was kind of I was actually I was quite garish and quite a loud, irritating git. Okay. But I was also quite shy and not exactly bullied. But, you know, I wasn't one of the popular people. And there might even be people at my school wouldn't even remember me kind of thing. So maybe a little bit shy. So you haven't changed that much. And so somewhere in between and certainly leaving school and going on to university just was just such a breath of fresh air for me. Yeah, I feel like it's like putting a brick on a sponge. Soon as you take the brick off, sponge bounces back to its natural shape. There you go. I'm a sponge. But and so university was just a revelation to me. Just partly I should be myself and people were nice and normal and friendly, you know. So, yes, that's kind of yeah, I think there's some definitely some accuracy in what you've said. Nick, I think he was incredibly studious and annoying. And I doubt he was like one of the popular kids. But I think within his I definitely think he's I think he's one of those geeky teenagers who found his people and he found his interests. And within that group, he definitely has some solid friends. But he would have been like one of the cool geeky guys kind of thing, as it were.

No. Well, definitely the latter bit. Like I wasn't ever one of the kind of alpha kids for sure. But I also wasn't very studious. Were you not? No, I didn't. I was very bad at doing homework. I was getting I got into trouble an awful lot of school. But always for cheekiness or not doing my homework. It was never for graffiti or pooing on the teacher's desk or anything actually sort of crazy like that. So, yeah, I think. But to be honest, I really don't feel like I've changed very much almost since I was at nursery. And I feel like I'm basically the same person. So I don't think I would have been that different at school. I didn't. I've never gone through one of those big sort of, you know, personality change moments. But yeah, no, I wasn't correct about the sort of having a small group of friends. That's always been true. But I wasn't geeky. I wasn't one of the geeky kids. I mean, you knew the geeky, the geeky kids at my secondary school, the City of London. They were in the A stream. We had an A stream and everyone else was B stream. And I was in the B stream. Were you? I'm astonished. The A stream were just all these little they were usually half the size of the B streamers and they had big thick glasses and they were, you know, chronically introverted. And they were studious. As you say, they always used to do their homework and double underline with a ruler and all of that. And that was not you? Never like that. No. Okay. No, I like being naturally brilliant rather than having to work at it.

Same with me. Good. Yeah. Actually, I presume academically we all did kind of okay. I was very up and down, but I had moments of brilliance, moments of genius. That's how I describe it.

Just like this.

Yes, exactly. All right. So we're going to draw things to a close there. I enjoyed that. I mean, that wasn't one of our sort of shouty sort of. No, no, it's consensual. Yeah. Which is a nice change. Nice and smooth.

Consensual three way. Yeah.

At a school reunion. Yeah. What could be better? Yeah. All right. We'll stop there. Thank you, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Nick Hare and Chris Wragg of Aleph Insights. Until next time. Goodbye.