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The Plastics, And Social Psychology In Mean Girls

950 Words4 Pages

The film Mean Girls is an American comedy movie for teens that illustrates the mainstream high school experience in the west. The main character, Cady Heron is a sixteen-year-old girl who is a new student at bob school in Illinois. Cady moved from being home-schooled in Africa, and therefore is unaware of the environment and lifestyle at a public high school. Cady then meets Daemon and Janis, who are part of an outcast group. Janis and Damien expose Cady to the norms of their school, talking her through cliques, and most importantly introducing her to “the plastics”, a group that Janis and Damian hated. “The plastics” were the leading group of the school, consisting of three popular, attractive girls, Regina, the leader of the group and two other girls, Karen, and Gretchen. “The Plastics” then scouted Cady since she had been attractive, and got the attention of popular boys, in which Janis and Damien originally supported in order to manipulate and plan to destroy “the plastics” through Cady. Cady’s exploration with social psychology is shown through her being unaware of everything at her new high school; social psychology concepts that are shown throughout this storyline are implicit personality theory, norms and group schemas, gender roles. Implicit personality theory is the inference of co-occurrence of personality traits based on another personality trait. This can be shown by the halo effect, where one infers that someone is generally good based on a few RUNNING

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