Stereotypes and Social Influence: A High School Experience

One experience during my four years at my Catholic high school is incredibly applicable to the content of Psych 280 especially the lectures about Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Discrimination and Social Influencing. Us female students had to participate in “skirt checks”. Basically, the school secretary would go to each of the classrooms and tell us girls to go in the hallway. She would then make us get on our knees and proceeded to measure the distance between the bottom of our skirts and the ground. If this length was less than a certain number of inches, our skirts were deemed too short and we would get a warning (a certain period of time to adjust our skirt length). If we did not do this on time or if we refuse to take part in the check itself,

Stereotypes themselves consist of presumed beliefs and characteristics about all members of a certain social group (people who share a common characteristic that is meaningful in some way). They can also be positive or negative and can be either true or false (depends on the person currently being scrutinized). The entire premise of my high school skirt checks is a stereotype. The administration believes that all of the girls in my high school who wear skirts are so immodest that they will be a “distraction” to the male students. Immodesty, is a typical characteristics of the female students. It is so prevalent that every girl needs to have her skirt checked, according to my high school administration. By interpreting the skirt checks in terms of stereotyping, it is revealed that the administration views female students in quite an overarching light. Our merit is based on a single assumption that may or may not be true. As a result, we are all clumped together in a single social category, despite the fact that we have multiple differences between us, clothing-related or

Obedience occurs during an unequal power relationship between an authority figure and a less powerful individual. The individual then submits to a demand that the authority figure makes. The less powerful person has no choice but to submit to the demand in fear of negative consequences. The skirt checks are quite obvious examples of obedience. First of all, it is the authority figures that set the rules and give the demands. The school administration set the requirements about skirt length and the consequences of breaking school policy. The orders that the school administration give are straightforward demands with negative consequences; if you refuse to have your skirt checked or if your skirt is too short, you get a detention. In short, if you do not follow or refuse to follow the rules, you will be punished. It is that simple. Obviously, large-scale instances of obedience have proved detrimental to the well-being of the world such as the Holocaust. Placing the skirt checks in the same general category as the Holocaust is clearly jarring and unnecessary, given they do not have too much in common. However, like the two other terms previously mentioned, framing the skirt checks in the context of obedience gives them a harsher tone than what the school administration wants us to believe. They are not just preventative measures to lessen distraction and to increase modesty, they are a