Social Psychology Concepts in the Movie Mean Girls - Essay Example

?Social Psychology Concepts in the Movie Mean Girls High school life experiences elicit a wide variety of issues and emotions that contribute to one’s personality development. This was effectively depicted in the 2004 movie Mean Girls directed by Mark Waters. It shows several examples illustrating the concepts of the “framing effect”, the “Polyanna principle” and the “Attribution theory”, among many others. These three concepts have been chosen by the author to be elaborated on for this paper. Myers (2009) explains that framing influences people’s decisions and opinions from the way a question or issue is posed. Words are very powerful in persuading someone to believe in something. One can paint an entirely different picture from what reality is or give facts about something and deliver it in such a way that the response of the listener is favorable to the speaker. In class, demo 1-8 presented a situation requiring the students to make a decision. The situation involved losing a $40.00 ticket to a concert with the owner of the ticket not remembering the seat number indicated in the ticket. This implies that there is no way for management to verify if such a ticket has been purchased. The situation was framed in such a way that the person who lost the ticket cannot prove that he indeed bought a ticket. The last question asked if he would spend another $40.00 for a new ticket. An answer of Yes may mean that the person’s decision was affected by the words in the scenario that he cannot prove the fact that he bought a ticket and will just buy a new one either to save face or because he really wanted to watch the concert at all costs. An answer of No may mean the person did not care if he was thought to be fooling management or may not be as interested in watching the concert anymore. In the movie, framing was applied to behaviors instead of words. Some characters behaved in accordance to how some situations were previously framed. Janis, the queen bee, Regina George’s ex-best friend was framed to be a lesbian, because they had a falling out in their relationship. Since Regina was an influential character in the movie, Janis simply had to be rejected by most of the students. Cady, the lead character, framed herself to be weak in Math although she is a genius in the subject in order to attract Aaron, a boy she likes, thinking being smarter than he is will not make him like her. She also revealed to him later that she was not allowed to talk to him because he was Regina’s “property”, being her ex-boyfriend (Waters, 2004). In this case, Aaron was framed to be off-limits to Regina’s friends. The framing effect may be used to manipulate the way information is presented and made to be perceived in order to influence decision making and judgment of another person (Bradley, 2010). In the examples, the situations were framed in such a way that the characters behaved based on how they interpreted the situations, which may somehow be designed by another person expecting such behavior from them. Another social psychology concept is the “Polyanna principle” based on a character in a best-selling novel that has become a literary classic. Polyanna is a young, naive, optimistic girl who influences others to always think on the bright side no matter what (Porter, 1913). One exercise which reflected the Pollyana principle in class was demo 1-5. Students were asked to think of 10 vegetables and then to rank them from 1-10 based on their preference. This pushed the fact that even if most of them did not like vegetables, there are still some that they like more than others, unleashing the positive qualities of certain vegetables. It would have been a lot easier if the students were asked to rank their favorite foods since these are all inherently positive for them. Another exercise for demo 1-5 is thinking of 10 antonym word pairs. After noting them all down, the students were asked to check which word they wrote first, the positive or the negative word. More optimistic people tend to write the positive word before the negative one. Cady showed her Pollyanic side when she tried to console Karen, who was a girl known as a “dumb blonde”. She told her, “You’re not stupid, Karen”, and even if Karen admitted that she was indeed stupid, Cady pressed on, “There must be something you’re good at”.. and she prompts Karen to think of something she may be good at (Waters, 2004). Her encouragement made Karen feel that she did have a talent for something, even if normally, it was not considered a talent by most people. She claimed she had psychic powers and her breasts had a way of predicting the weather. Even such illogical claim was accepted by Cady just to keep Karen’s optimism up (Waters, 2004). Another example is Gretchen’s claim that they were not in the Burn Book because everybody loved them even if her group was responsible in writing the book which noted all the negative things about each student in their school. Gretchen was under the false illusion that she was well-loved even if her group was actually despised by most of the girls in school (Waters, 2004). The Polyannic Principle makes a lot of sense in terms of achieving happiness and well-being. The pursuit of happiness was a strong motivation in the founding of a new branch of Psychology called Positive Psychology (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). It is a science devoted to the cultivation of personality strengths of people and honing their optimistic approach to life instead of dwelling on human frailty and other negativities (Lawson, 2004). Finally, the Attribution Theory is another concept defined by Myers (2009) as the theory which explains why people behave the way they do, attributing it to some internal disposition such as enduring traits, motives and attitudes, or some external situation which affects their behavior. Demo 3-1 presented two stories about people’s life situation. It chronicled how each person strived to achieve the success he or she was enjoying at present, enumerating the factors that contributed to it such as education, hard work, and personal qualities. Then the students were asked to rate some given factors such as ability, motivation, talent or luck and its contribution to the success of the individual, then compared it according to the gender of the characters in the stories. Results indicated that the female’s success was attributed to luck and motivation while the male’s success was attributed to ability and talent. In the movie, when Cady was failed by her teacher, Ms. Norbury, she was upset and reasoned that her teacher failed on purpose because she did not join the Mathletes, the group representing the school in a Math competition. She also attributed her teacher’s behavior to her pathetic divorce, even selling drugs on the side just to make ends meet. Another example from the film was Mrs. Norbury’s statement to the girls that calling each other sluts and whores makes it ok for boys to call them sluts and whores, so such labeling is attributed to their own doing (Waters, 2004). As early as 1958, Heider proposed the attribution theory that people tried to understand other people’s behavior by attributing it to some cause, and piecing together such information helps them come to a conclusion. The identified attributions drive people to behave in a certain manner. Attributions can be blamed for some motivations like behaving desperately due to rejection or killing someone accidentally because of a chemical imbalance that caused such untoward behavior. In such examples, such negative behaviors were attributed to rejection and chemical imbalance. It is heartening to realize that a teen movie such as Mean Girls can illustrate social psychology concepts. The three concepts discussed in this paper are just a few examples. It goes to show that teen issues reflect such concepts because teenagers are in the delicate stage of forming their personalities in high school. References Bradley, S. (2010). The Framing effect: Influence your audience by setting the context. Retrieved on 26 November, 2013, from http://www.vanseodesign.com/web- design/framing-expectation-exposure-effect/ Heider, F. (1958). The Psychology of interpersonal relations. New York: Wiley. Lawson, W. (2004) The glee club: Positive psychologists want to teach you to be happier. Can they succeed?. Psychology Today. 37, 1. Myers, D. (2009) Social Psychology (10th ed.). McGraw-Hill. Porter, E.H. (1913). Pollyanna. L.C. Page Seligman, M., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2000). Positive psychology. An introduction. American Psychologist, 55 Waters, M. (2004) Mean Girls. Paramount Pictures. Read More