Easy A social psychology final paper

Words: 1331
Pages: 6

Easy A
12/6/13
SOPS 101
Professor Wight

The movie I chose was Easy A because there are many psychological concepts this movie that relate to real-life events and it covers many theories we learned about in this class. Easy A was released in 2010 and directed by Will Gluck. It’s about a teenage girl named Olive who accidentally admits to her friend Rhi that she was having sexual relations with boys. She felt pressured into lying since her friend had already engaged in sexual acts with her boyfriend. A rumor then spread and many people in the school then ignored Olive because they thought what she did was an immoral act, but the guys started giving her more attention. I feel that this applies to many

Olive began to look the part by wearing risqué clothes like corsets and tight revealing shirts. She even sewed an “A” on her clothes as a reference that she was being portrayed as Hester Prynne, the main character from The Scarlett Letter who was deemed to be adulterous and that was very inappropriate at the time. By presenting herself this way she is going with Cooley’s Looking Glass Self that says we acquire our view of ourselves from the views of others. (DeLamater, 69) By all of her classmates viewing her as promiscuous she started to view herself as that and changed the way she usually dressed to be more racy. This change in style and behavior lead to self-discrepancy which is when a component of the actual self is the opposite of a component of the ideal self or the ought self. (DeLamater, 82) This is seen when Olive goes out in public and portrays herself in a different way than what she believes her actual self as because she is more concerned with social interactions than what her actual self believes. This whole change of self was to boost her self-esteem because she knew if she didn’t change the way she looked to fit the part she would be embarrassed and humiliated and her self-esteem would be lowered.
Throughout this movie you can she the deviant behavior and how she violates the social norms of people her age. She dressed scandalously, she acted promiscuous, she acted out and got a rebellious attitude. These rebellious things Olive was doing