How a 15-year-old comedy explains the spiral of silence
Since it came out in 2004, the movie Mean Girls has become somewhat of a classic. Constantly referenced everywhere in the media from tweets to Buzzfeed quizzes, it features hilarious and endearing moments that many people can relate to. If you’re familiar with the movie, you know it’s not exactly the most serious film. However, some of its scenes reflect a very real theory known as the spiral of silence.
The spiral of silence is a theory that says most people feel uncomfortable stating their opinions or views if they feel like they are in the minority. The result is that those with more unpopular opinions stay silent, and the majority opinion seems even more common than it actually is. We see this play out in Mean Girls when the students at protagonist Cady Heron’s school are too afraid to speak out against “The Plastics,” a group of rich, popular mean girls who socially torment their peers.
In a scene near the end of the movie, the girls of the high school are gathered for an assembly on bullying. They are asked to close their eyes and raise their hands in response to questions, and we can see how they actually feel about issues. When they’re asked to open their eyes again, the girls all look around and quickly lower their hands in fear of being judged.
The idea of this scene is that if the girls had their eyes open, they would have answered dishonestly to try to fit in with what they believed to be the majority response. However, it turned out that what were thought to be controversial ideas were actually very common.
The reasoning for the spiral of silence is called the fear of isolation, which is exactly what it sounds like. People — in this case, the girls at Cady’s high school — think that if they speak up, they’ll be iced out by their friends and peers.
Of course, Mean Girls ends with all the girls making peace after they realize how everyone feels (and after — spoiler alert — queen bee Regina George is hit by a bus), but this isn’t how things go in real life. People can’t be put into an assembly to hash out all their issues. Instead, the fear of isolation remains, and the spiral of silence continues.
The main difference between the spiral of silence as it’s represented in Mean Girls versus how it plays out in real life, though, has nothing to do with a convenient and simple ending. Usually, the spiral of silence happens when the minority opinion really is a minority. In Mean Girls, however, the opinion that was thought to be the minority was actually very popular. Besides this, the assembly scene represents fairly well how people misjudge their peers’ opinions and choose how they act based on fear of isolation.
