A Psychological Analysis of Mean Girls (2004) Anonymous College

Films, like other works of literature, often apply psychological concepts to explain real-world phenomena. This is the same case with Mean Girls, a 2004 American teen comedy film based on Rosalind Wiseman’s 2002 nonfiction self-help book Queen Bees and Wannabes. Written by Tina Fey and directed by Mark Stephen Waters, the film is an account of Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan), a teenage girl brought up in Africa, who returns to America and gets admitted at an Illinois high school where she joins a group of popular, naughty girls known as the “Plastics.” While Mean Girls (2004) utilizes several social psychology concepts, the most prominent one is the fundamental attribution error.

The movie scene to be analyzed is the Sweatpants on Monday scene. In this scene, the Plastics (Gretchen Wieners, Karen Smith, Regina George, and Cady Heron) are having lunch on a Monday afternoon. According to the group’s unwritten rules, sweatpants are supposed to be worn only on Fridays. However, in this scene, Regina, the group’s “queen bee,” is wearing sweatpants to the irritation of the other members of the “Plastics.” As a result, the girls gang up on Regina and accuse her of breaking the rules. Although she explains that sweatpants are the only...