The story of Joe Odd is clearly a case of social 'In and Out' groups, where in society groups emerge where people have more influence than others. Clear evidence from the text proves my statement:

"People who lived in the boxes thought Joe was very strange because they all watched television. At first they said, "...why don't you live in a house like us?" but Joe didn't want to. So they broke his windows and made up bad stories about him"

We can learn from this extract above that there is an element of 'labeling', and the fact that poor Joe Odd once labeled, is prone to increased labeling. Labeling is a very powerful which tends to stick to that person it has been attached (unless he/she adapts to the social norms which society labeled that person with.)

"Then another social worker wrote a report about how Joe had lived in a hut with the door and windows barred up. So the doctor hung another label round his neck saying 'Persecution Complex'...and gave him some pills because they made him feel

The idea of 'stereotyped expectations' (Banuazizi and Mohavedi, 1975), the idea of which people are given a situation, and because of conditioning that they have had with that particular experience, which could have been influenced by many different means (media or learnt through people) the person will act and take on the deemed suitable role according to the situation.

Psychological evidence can be given for all of the above extracts and evaluations to back up my points. The experiment which was conducted by H.Tajfel was based around the 'In and Out' groups. He proved that "easy to trigger off""outgroup discrimination" could be. The experiment showed how a group of boys would rather end up with less money, rather than allowing another group to have more money than them.

Szasz (1972) claimed the medical model was wrong and made criticisms, and said people cannot be mentality ill at all. He suggested that the human brain had more of a decease than disease of the mind. When related back to Joe Odd, we see might assume that the 'normal' people misdiagnosed Joe Odd, penalty of which lead to him being wrongly labeled. The 'normal' people however could not acknowledge their mistake, instead increasing the number of labels on Joe Odd to try and equate for his character.

The society itself, is made up of people, and in the story of Joe Odd, these people all had the same views and did the same activities. If the society was going to improve, those monotonous people in the society would have to understand why Joe Odd is the way he is. Media and education have a

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Approximate Word count = 1073
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)