The dumb jock and the science nerd - stereotypes associated with thinking - The Popular Condition - Column

Humanist, Sept-Oct, 1996 by Todd Jones

Two stereotypes that can be found everywhere in American culture are the "dumb jock," brawny and stupid, and the weak, bespectacled "science nerd." Americans also grow up with stereotypes like the "dumb blonde," who can get any man she wants with a toss of her curls, and her counterpart, the bookish, brainy (and dateless) "librarian." Throughout popular culture, we find innumerable cases where thinking people tend to be stereotyped as 98-pound weaklings, while strong or powerful people are characterized as dullards. I want to suggest here that these stereotypes are centered around a single general idea: the link between contemplative behavior and power-lessness.

In many ways, stereotypes linking thoughtfulness and weakness are as surprising as they are ubiquitous. After all, a basic tenet of common sense is to "look before you leap." Thoughtfulness is supposedly considered a virtue: if a person buys a car or strikes his or her employer on impulse, he or she is labeled childish and undisciplined. Why, then, are the studious, thoughtful people commonly stereotyped so negatively? Why do pundits persistently characterize Bill Clinton's tendencies to take time and weigh options on issues like Bosnia or health care as examples of "wishy-washiness" rather than prudence, open-mindedness, or thoroughness?

I believe the solution to this puzzle lies in people's experiences with their own thinking. The activity of thinking is quite commonly something only done when one is currently powerless to effect the world and must, as a result, take the time to consider various ways in which the world or one's actions could be different. Consequently, people come to associate the activity of thinking with powerlessness. I suspect that a host of popular stereotypes result from this association. While it is certainly illegitimate to infer weakness from thoughtfulness, our experiences make it very easy to hastily make just this inference.

What is thinking? To see how contemplation and powerlessness can easily become linked in people's minds, we need to look first at what the activity of thinking is. When we say something like, "Don't talk to me now, I'm thinking," what we usually mean is that we are engaged in performing some type of mental simulation. When we think, we do imaginary experiments on the world in our minds and watch what happens. Quite often in life, we find ourselves confronted with situations in which we don't immediately know what is going to happen if a certain course of action is taken. In these situations, we often take some time to try to find out what could happen by doing an activity called thinking. When we think, we put together some type of model of the world in our heads. We then ask, "Okay, what would happen if X, Y, and Z were different? What else would change? If I did action A, how would person P react?" We try to get answers to these questions by making these changes in our imagined worlds and then watching, in our imaginations, what happens when these changes are made. The prototypical example of trying to plan actions by performing mental simulations like this is the activity of novice chessplayers. In chess, we tend to plan our next moves by imagining what our opponents would be likely to do if we moved our queen two squares forward. These kinds of mental simulation are done all the time, by everyone, in situations ranging from trying to figure out what clothes to buy (by imagining situations in which you are wearing them) to trying to figure out which exam questions to write (by imagining how students will reason).

In what circumstances do people tend to perform this sort of mental simulation? In general, it's when they don't believe they can immediately get what they want without stepping back for a moment and doing some kind of "if...then" calculation. Many times we find ourselves in situations in which we feel we are unable to satisfy our various wants unless some large changes are made in ourselves or in the external world. At these times, we wonder how we can bring about these changes, and we wonder what various results may ensue from such changes. "Would my money give me a higher rate of return if I transferred it to a money market fund?" "Would Mary like me better if I wore neckties?" And so on.

Notice that, a great deal of the time, we are spurred on to engage in this kind of activity by feelings of immediate powerlessness. If Mary already liked you, you probably wouldn't be spending a lot of time wondering whether she'd like you better if you wore ties more often. Many times it's when our money isn't getting enough return that we think about putting it somewhere else. We sit and ponder a chess move when the right winning move doesn't immediately come to us. We sit and agonize over how to write papers, trying out this phrase or that one, when the prose doesn't just flow. An artist sits and contemplates when he is not moving his brushes across the canvas in a fit of inspiration. A karate expert calculates exactly where to strike a crippling blow if she doesn't feel confident that she can vanquish her foe with a furious attack.