"My Boy's Wicked Smaht"

Whether it be because of my Boston roots or my undeniable love for Ben Affleck, I, for some reason, find myself able to watch the movie Good Will Hunting at any hour of any day. No matter what mood I’m in, or how recently I’ve watched it, I never seem to turn down the opportunity to join Casey Affleck in reciting the line “My boy’s wicked smaht” or laughing along as Matt Damon asks, “How do you like them apples?”. It’s only fitting, then, that discussion about stereotypes brought Will Hunting to mind. Will, who comes from an abusive and troubled past, lives in a low class area of Boston and works at M.I.T. as a janitor. While at work, he comes across a difficult math problem that a professor posted on a board in the hallway as a challenge for his students. When the professor who posted the problem sees Will working on it, his stereotypes are immediately put into use as he yells, “That’s people’s work, you can’t graffiti here!”. A stereotype is a generalization about a group of people that assigns certain traits to all members of the group while disregarding actual variation among the members. Based on Will’s status as a janitor, the professor immediately assumes Will is up to no good and is simply vandalizing the board rather than solving the given problem — he uses his current schemas to quickly make judgments about Will. The reality of it is, however, that Will is a highly intelligent man who successfully completed the problems that were seemingly impossible to the students in the professor’s class. 

Stereotypes, whether positive or negative, exist frequently within society. Because of our limited mental capacity, we often use shortcuts to form judgments and to understand the world around us. In a study conducted with college students, participants listened to a 20 minute audio recording of a basketball game while paying special attention to the player “Mark Flick.” After listening to the recording, they were given a folder containing this player’s information, half of which contained a photo of an African American male and half of which contained a photo of a white male. When asked to rate Flick’s performance, those who believed he was African American reported him as having more athletic ability and having played a better game, whereas those who believed he was a white male ranked him as having greater hustle and basketball sense. The results from this study show that our stereotypes about different groups of people affect how we interpret their behavior and how we form judgments about them. Just like the understanding that Mark Flick was African American lead participants to believe he was more athletic, Will’s status as a janitor caused the professor to classify him as destructive and uneducated. Stereotypes of any kind, whether positive like the basketball experiment or negative like Will’s experience, hold the potential to create damaging impacts to the target by creating expectations that may or may not be satisfied, by falsely attributing negative attributes to individuals, and by minimizing people’s individuality.

Meaghan Mahoney

 Jeff Stone , W. Perry & John M. Darley (1997) "White Men Can't Jump”: Evidence for the Perceptual Confirmation of Racial Stereotypes Following a Basketball Game, Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 19:3, 291-306