2/21/13
Journal Entry # 3
Stereotypes and the Halo Effect
My friends and I make references to
the movie, “Mean Girls” pretty frequently, so today I was re-watching a few clips
from there and remembered the scene where the main character, Cady, and her
crush are in their math class...
The backstory is that Cady is super
infatuated with this guy, and becomes giddy every time he talks to her. After
several instances of a few exchanged phrases, Cady finally figures out a way to
get her crush to talk to her for an extended period in time: play dumb. This
part is actually a little sad because Cady feels like a good way to keep her
crush around is to get him to “help” her with class when she doesn’t need it at
all. She’s brilliant, but hides it. This brought up the question for me – where
in the world did this stereotype that girls are bad at math come to be?
Moreover, when did girls get the idea that you should pretend to be less
intelligent than you are so that guys will swoop in and take care of you?
Stereotypes in general are used by
people to quickly figure out someone’s personality based solely on what they
look like. How they dress, what color hair they have, their ethnicity, and what
kind of car they drive are all examples of cues one might use to determine what
kind of person someone is without really knowing a single true fact about them.
Someone may drive a Fiat 500 or a Porsche 911, and we will think to ourselves, Wow, they must be super rich to drive that
kind of car. Although in this particular example, it is likely that either
the person or their close family has a lot of money; it’s possible that the
driver actually just won a contest and happened to win this car, while every
other aspect of their life stayed about average.
To go back to “Mean Girls” – Cady
is a pretty person too, and by playing herself down, she is conforming to
another stereotype that a single person cannot be both pretty and smart. This
belief seems to be held for girls more often than for guys in my experience. I
think it’s strange because this belief goes against what is known as the “Halo
Effect” (basically the understanding among people that things that are
beautiful are quintessentially good and perfect). The attractiveness of the
person just increases the goodness of all the person’s other traits. For
example, attractive people tend to be thought of as more intelligent. The “stupid
pretty girl” does not fall under the Halo Effect whatsoever, but why is this?
One would think that because a girl is attractive, she would be thought of as a
brighter person, but in real life, we see the opposite effect.
Where did this stereotype for girls
come from? When I think of “stupid, but pretty”, I tend to picture someone in
high school or middle school, and I would guess that most others would too. I
think the Halo Effect still applies to elementary school girls, because I
picture a cute little elementary schooler and think, Yeah, that adorable little kid is probably brilliant. What happens
on the road to middle school then? Do girls continue to fulfill these
stereotypes because they want boys to like them, and so have the desire to be
rescued to be from a dire situation like math?
It would be great if someone could
do a correlational study on what ages this particular stereotype comes into
effect. One could test both girls and boys at grades 5, 7, 9, and 11, so that
you could see whether the stereotype develops right before middle school, in
middle school, or at some point in high school. Though once getting results,
one would have to determine whether the stereotype has developed as an effect
of the type of school the student is in (elementary, middle, or high school),
or whether it is purely an age factor. With further reflection I think these
two variables are impossible to separate. I would be curious to see whether boys and
girls feel the same way about that stereotype. I wonder if both sexes would be
conscious of it at the same time, or if one sex would endorse the stereotype at
an earlier age than the other.
If any psychologists are reading
this post, feel free to take this idea and run with it. It could be expanded and
I would love to see what kind of results a correlational study like this would generate.
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