photo credit: grant ruof
“High School Musical”, “Mean Girls”, “Breakfast Club” and “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”: All of these movies involve small groups of people who have shared beliefs or other things in common, who spend time together and often exclude others around them. They are often associated as bullies, nerds or some group of people who are associated with a certain stereotype that usually involves excluding others from joining their friend group.
Socially, these are also known as a term called cliques.
Cliques are small groups of people, with shared interests or other features in common, who spend time together and do not readily allow others to join them, according to the National Institutes of Health.
The idea of the “status quo” and cliques in high school promotes exclusion, but also a sense of belonging for people inside the group. However, that sense of belonging is still caused by conforming one’s beliefs and hobbies to be accepted by a certain group.
We, as a staff, believe there are many negative effects on people outside of cliques. According to Psychology Today, cliques can create exclusionary pressures and demands on nonmembers who can feel intimidated.
Cliques, by definition, exclude others. Right off the bat, this is not beneficial for anyone outside of the group. High school should be about building a community and being open to letting others help build a stronger community.
Cliques also create a “mob mentality”, which is the tendency to adopt new behaviors and beliefs in a group to feel acceptance, according to Courtroom Sciences. Whether it occurs consciously or unconsciously, individuals have a tendency to align their attitudes and behaviors with those around them.
This is terrible for students because throughout high school it’s an important time to figure out one’s identity, and conforming one’s opinions and beliefs with others makes it even harder to do so. We, as a staff, believe this can create a loss of identity, when someone is trying to fit it by going along with this mentality.
This mentality or the need to become a follower to a certain group can create a toxic school environment as a whole. Cliques deliberately exclude non-members from conversations, activities and inside jokes, making others feel invisible, unimportant and unwelcome. For example, if one person in a group dislikes and bullies someone outside of the group, the rest of the group will follow that behavior.
This toxic environment creates anxiety in students, according to Educational Consulting. This toxicity causes anxiety, depression and self-harm. Students struggle with focus, emotional regulation and feel lost. We, as a staff, believe that this creates struggles for students outside the group to create friendships because of the constant anxiety that people already have in their group.
Along with all these impacts on the people outside of cliques, there are also many effects from people inside the group. According to the National Institutes of Health, cliques often establish power dynamics where some members feel superior and others feel undervalued or controlled, leading to decreased self-esteem.
We believe that in friend groups, there should not be a hierarchy or leader. Friendships should be equal and create a state of mutual trust and respect. If one doesn’t respect the other as much, it creates an unhealthy power dynamic that should not be occurring in a friendship with someone you care about.
This pressure to exclude others creates limited perspectives. When one has all of their attention on a specific group, it creates a lack of diversity of other opinions outside that group. This makes it harder to make new friends for people in the group because the clique creates an “us vs. them” mentality.
Most importantly, forming cliques affects students in the long-run. According to Psychology Today, cliques lose social power as adolescents, creating a lack of independent freedom and worldly experience to grow.
When students rely on a group for acceptance, it creates them to have a lack of self-esteem and independence, which will lead them to depend on others instead of experiencing their identity and beliefs on their own.
We believe that students in adolescence need to understand what it’s like to be independent to understand that they can be friends with someone and lean on them once in a while, but never depend on people because of the fear of being accepted.
Individuality in adolescence is valid, and cliques prevent that by conforming beliefs, excluding others, creating power dynamics and lack of independence in the long-run. When we feel good about ourselves without having the need to exclude others because of the pressure to do so, we can truly thrive and discover who we are.
