Month: March 2022

We tend to think of stupidity as being something opposing to high intelligence, but highly intelligent people can still be pretty stupid. There is even a book called Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid published by Yale University Press. The idea of smart people doing stupid things is certainly not new. When we think of smart people doing stupid things, we may think of the brilliant university student who gets really drunk at a party, dances around naked, yells out profanities, then goes to class the next day and gets an ‘A’ on his physics exam. In this scenario, the actions of this person do not necessarily lead to any long-lasting consequences. Sometimes, however, highly intelligent people do stupid things that do have long-lasting and devastating consequences. Highly intelligent people can mess up their own lives with their bad decisions, and they can mess up the lives of those who are unfortunate enough to be affected by their bad decisions. All this can happen while people who are much less intelligent make much better life decisions, become much more productive members of society, and have much better lives and better relationships.

Here, when I say “stupidity”, I refer to a tendency to make bad decisions or adopt false beliefs despite the availability of sufficient information and resources. Many people are inclined to believe that highly intelligent people are less prone to stupidity, but the judgment of highly intelligent people is not always trustworthy. First, highly intelligent people can still be bad people who do not have the best interests of others in mind. Second, highly intelligent people can still be prone to irrational behaviors that can cause potential harm to themselves and/or those around them.

High intelligence offers no protection from irrationality

In an article from Psychology Today, Arthur Dobrin D.S.W. explains how intelligence is not a predictor of good judgment like we may think. Rather, intelligence and rationality are distinctly different mental processes. Nonetheless, our brains are bombarded with large amounts of information every day, and we often have to make decisions without the availability of sufficient information. Our tendencies to jump to conclusions and act irrationally, in other words, may be a coping mechanism that our brains use to allow us to function in everyday life in a sea of unnecessary information where the necessary information may not be available.

Keith Stanovich, who has authored about 300 publications and been cited 43,212 times, is one of the key researchers who coined the term dysrationalia, defined as the inability to think and behave rationally despite adequate intelligence. Stanovich and others argue that IQ tests do not measure one’s level of rationality. In this article, Stanovich defines rational thinking as adopting appropriate goals, taking appropriate actions given the goals and beliefs, and holding beliefs that correspond with evidence.

A prime real-life example of dysrationalia that Stanovich discusses in this article is the case where parents, who were former schoolteachers, pulled their children out of school because the children were being taught about the Holocaust in their history class, and the parents thought that the Holocaust was a myth. The parents even wrote about 6000 letters to local parents and local teachers, and they wrote one letter to each member of Congress, stating that Western civilization should not be continuing to live in such myths. These parents, being former schoolteachers, were presumably college educated. Despite their level of education and intelligence, they had erroneous beliefs and they acted on those beliefs.

A study by (Wagner, 1928) found that superstitious thinking among college freshman had no signficiant correlation with intelligence. In the study, the students were asked whether they had certain superstitious beliefs. Superstitious beliefs and behaviors that students were asked about included tapping wood after boasting; following signs like a falling star; the belief that dropping a food utensil or dish rag brings company; picking up pins for luck; horoscopes; four-leaf clover brings good luck; black cat brings bad luck; psalmists can foretell the future. Men had 6-7 superstitious beliefs on average while women had 11-12 superstitious beliefs on average. The correlation between intelligence (as measured by IQ tests) and the number of superstitious beliefs was -0.12, too small in magnitude to be significant. Instead, the researchers found significant correlations with younger age, being female and being more open to suggestion. Although intelligent people can learn faster, what they learn may not be aligned with reality.

Highly intelligent people are just as prone to preconceived biases as everyone else

We do not hear very often about Democrats becoming Republicans or Republicans become Democrats. We also seldom hear about people who are against abortion changing to being in favor of abortion, or vice versa. The reason is that once people adopt a certain set of beliefs or opinions, it is hard for them to change their minds even when they are presented with new information/evidence that contradicts their prior beliefs.

This article by (Stanovich et al., 2013) reviews the research literature on what is called “my-side bias” defined as evaluating evidence, generating evidence, and testing hypotheses in a manner biased toward our own prior beliefs, opinions and attitudes. (Stanovich et al., 2013) cites prior studies showing that bias in favor of one’s current opinion was the same in high and low intelligence subjects. If, however, study subjects were explicitly told at the beginning of the experiment to decouple their preconceived biases from their conclusions, then subjects with higher IQ scores were able to show less bias than subjects with lower IQ scores. What this means is that highly intelligent people may possess the cognitive capacity to think independently of their preconceived biases, but usually choose not to.

Group think

Group think is a phenomenon where individuals of a group can be reasonably smart, but still adopt beliefs characteristic of their group that defy common sense. The reason is that individuals in a group do not adopt these beliefs by their own independent reasoning, but rather because everyone else in the group has these beliefs. Individuals within a group trust that whatever their group believes, it must be right.

Group think can be dangerous because in some contexts, it can cause people to act upon certain erroneous beliefs despite the moral or ethical implications. Members of a group are sometimes afraid to express doubt of the validity of the group’s beliefs, for fear of being excluded, ridiculed or maybe even persecuted. This article gives 25 historical examples of catastrophes thought to occur because of groupthink. They include the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster, the Salem Witch Trials, and the United States ignoring warnings regarding an imminent attack on Pearl Harbor.

Sometimes the solution to a problem is really simple

People each have their own areas of specialty, and often a person likes to think that his/her area of specialty is more central to everything than it actually is. For example, if we were to ask three different types of engineers what the core functioning of a robot system is based on, we may get three different answers. The electrical engineer may say that the core functioning of a robot system is in the electronics. The mechanical engineer may say that the core functioning of a robot system is in the mechanics. The software engineer may say that the core functioning is in the software algorithms.

The “specialty” of highly intelligent people is in the complicated. Highly intelligent people can understand very complicated concepts that the majority of other people cannot understand. Because of this, a highly intelligent person may assume that the solution to a problem is more complicated than it actually is. When the solution to a problem is simple, the less intelligent people may be more effective at solving the problem than the more intelligent people. The more intelligent people are more likely to over-complicate things and over-analyze.

Wishful thinking

Highly intelligent people can still be prone to wishful thinking where beliefs are formed based on what one wants to be true rather than based on evidence or logic. For example, maybe a smart person will believe in God, not because there is evidence that God exists, but rather because the person feels better knowing that there is an all-knowing and loving intelligent creator watching over everything.

Conversely, someone may choose to believe that God does not exist because he/she does not like the idea of a place of eternal torment awaiting anyone who does not follow this God. Such people may rather live their lives whatever way they want than to live life in obedience to some God. Indeed, people sometimes adopt beliefs to meet some psychological need, and not for the purpose of finding any objective truth.

Arrogance multiplies the stupidity that intellectuals are prone to

As stated in (Stanovich et al., 2013), when highly intelligent study subjects were told to decouple their preconceived biases from their conclusions, they were able to come to conclusions that were less biased. These results indicate that while intelligent people are just as prone to preconceived biases as less intelligent people, they can overcome these tendencies by making a conscious effort to make judgments that are more based on sound reasoning and evidence even if these judgments go against their prior beliefs.

If the highly intelligent person is arrogant, however, such a person will be less likely to be aware of his/her limitations. He/she will be less likely to admit to him/herself that he/she has tendencies to be irrational in some circumstances. When we are in denial of our limitations, our denial certainly does not make those limitations go away! Rather, the impact of our limitations can increase because we are not making the effort to mitigate those limitations. Such is more likely to happen with arrogant people.

When people are of a gifted level of intelligence, they usually know it. Just knowing that they are of gifted intelligence can enhance any already-existing tendencies towards arrogance. In other words, their gifted intelligence gives them an additional “reason” to be arrogant. Their arrogance can then give them a false sense of immunity to irrationality, preconceived biases and other limitations.

In addition to being in denial of their limitations, arrogant intellectuals also have a stunted ability to learn from others. They are generally too busy judging others as being more inferior than they actually are. They do not understand that people less intelligent than they are can still have certain kinds of skills, knowledge and wisdom that they do not possess.

An arrogant intellectual is easy to spot. Arrogant intellectuals, in general, assume that they are smarter than anybody who crosses their path. When working in groups, arrogant intellectuals will often try to take over the project. They believe that their way is the best way and that their ideas are the best ideas. They will often go around telling everybody how to do things even when they do not know what they are talking about. They do not understand that although they are highly intelligent, they do not know everything. People around them, even if they are less intelligent, will still know more about certain things than they do.

This article from BBC discusses some of the problems that can arise when the smartest people are selected for top management positions. Enron is an example of a company that made the mistake of hiring the smartest guys for the management positions, and letting them run the highest-profit divisions in the company. As the article states, “The managers, despite their smarts, were an arrogant, insecure bunch who took wild chances and lost billions of dollars. The company dissolved in 2001.” Safer positions for intellectuals are researchers, analysts and coders who stay in a room working by themselves without the need for emotional intelligence or people skills.

High intelligence can exist in the absence of character

In my opinion, to have character means to be one’s own person rather than modeling oneself after everybody else. People with character are not afraid to be different, and they tend to stand up for their moral principles, even in the face of adversity.

Malcolm from the TV series Malcolm in the Middle is an example of what genius intelligence looks like with little to no character. While it is understandable for a young boy to want to fit in with his peers, Malcolm continues to be obsessed with being like everyone else as he gets older. His obsession with being “normal” is so great that he makes himself easily manipulated by people who are far less intelligent. At one point Malcolm is so obsessed with being accepted by the in-crowd that he almost decides to have sexual intercourse with a girl after she goes unconscious. He was afraid that the other kids may think that he is a wuss.

Malcolm’s mother, on the other hand, has possibly the greatest strength of character that I have seen of any character on television. Yet in Malcolm’s world, she is the crazy lady. To people like Malcolm, being strong-minded and not being afraid to stand up for one’s moral principles against the crowd comes across as lunacy. Malcolm would rather participate in a variety of wrongful behaviors just to fit in.

High intelligence cannot be of much benefit if one just wants to “be like everybody else”. Once we decide to be like everybody else, we place onto ourselves the obligation of conforming to the ways of others, no matter how wrong and stupid those ways are.

The movie Forrest Gump, in contrast, shows how great someone’s life can be even when someone is mentally retarded. Forrest Gump had an IQ not only below average, but below normal range. Despite this, he had a great life. He played college varsity football. He served in the army and received a medal for saving the lives of a number of his comrads. He got to appear on television with President Kennedy. He found his true love, Jenny. He took up running, and he got so good at running long distances that people would gather in groups and run with him. In my opinion, Malcolm engaged in more destructive and “stupid” behaviors than Forrest Gump ever did.

Summary

There are a variety of reasons for why highly intelligent people can still fail at life while much less intelligent people succeed and thrive. High intelligence does not offer protection from irrationality, immorality, group think or preconceived biases. Being highly intelligent also does not mean that one is going to have any more life wisdom than the next person. One can be highly intelligent and still not know what is most important in life or what priorities to set. Forrest Gump, in contrast, may have been mentally retarded, but he had great life wisdom that he learned from his mother. Meanwhile, highly intelligent people may still chase after things that will never make them happy, and may even wind up as losers, as is described in the Planet Loser blog post.

Being highly intelligent does not mean that one will succeed at one’s job. In fact, highly intelligent people can still be horrible people to have on a team in the workplace, especially when they are arrogant. Arrogant intellectuals can dismiss great ideas coming from their teammates and insist on their own ideas even if their own ideas are not the greatest. They can diminish workplace morale and in the long run can ruin productivity.

When I was in driver’s ed class as a teenager, the girls were told that when they have a new boyfriend, and they want to know what he is really like, they should go into the car with him and see how he drives. The idea was that how someone drives says something about his/her true nature. We can learn about someone’s true nature by seeing how he/she interacts with other drivers on the road, how he/she reacts when he/she is cut off by another driver, how aggressively he/she drives, etc. I postulate that the same concept applies to someone’s sense of humor.

Below are aspects of someone’s sense of humor that can offer a glimpse into his/her true character:

• What kinds of things does he/she laugh at or find to be funny?
• What kinds of jokes does he/she make?
• How does he/she react when the other person does not like the joke?

What does the person find to be funny?

I cannot think of that many things that a good person would find to be funny and that a bad person would not find to be funny; but I can think of lots of things that bad people may find to be funny and that good people would not find to be funny. A bad person may laugh at someone getting hurt. A bad person may laugh at someone as a form of ridicule. Sometimes a bad person likes to laugh when two people are fighting. A man may chuckle when he sees two women fighting, muttering to himself about how vicious those women be can to each other. Sometimes bad people are laughing not because they find anything to be funny, but rather because they are insecure, and they want to deflect the attention of other people off of themselves and onto someone else.

Sometimes bad people take such great pleasure in someone being in a state of distress that they may intentionally drive the other person into a state of distress just to entertain themselves. While we should acknowledge that this is wrong, bad people like to fool us into thinking that they are just “teasing” or committing an innocent prank. For example, a person may make a certain noise that he/she knows makes another person upset, just so that he/she can get a laugh out of seeing the other person in a state of distress. A person may also make an insulting comment, and present it as a joke, just so he/she can press the other person’s buttons and watch the other person give off an angry look. That angry look is amusing to a bad person, but not amusing to a good person who does not take pleasure in making others angry or distressed.

Laughing can be a form of mockery and it can convey disrespect in certain contexts. For example, a person may laugh when someone is presenting his/her opinion about something, even though it is obvious that the other person is not joking and wants to be taken seriously. Such behavior is disrespectful, and gives across the message that the other person’s opinion is laughable. Would you like it if you were speaking your mind about something that is important to you, and then suddenly hear the other person just laugh as if you were telling a joke? This has happened to me a few times. It is, in my opinion, mean and thoughtless.

We also can learn about somebody from what he/she does not find to be funny. Let us say that somebody is the only one in the room not laughing at a scene where a person or animal is getting hurt. This scenario would indicate that the person likely possesses moral integrity, and does not go along with the crowd when the crowd is doing something that is wrong.

What kinds of jokes does the person make?

When bad people make jokes, they often place another person as the target of the joke. In other words, the entertainment is at someone’s expense. At the same time, the one who is the target of the joke is expected to just shrug his shoulders and go along with it for the sake of being a good sport. If he retaliates, then he may be called a spoil-sport.

Sometimes evildoers try to justify their mean jokes by claiming that everyone jokes like this, so we should all just get used to it. They want us to accept their mean jokes as the norm even though there are plenty of people who do not place another human being as the target of their jokes.

Many of you have probably watched The Office TV series, and remember the many episodes where Jim and Pam played pranks on Dwight. I admit, I did find many of these pranks amusing to watch, but the truth is that what Jim and Pam were doing to Dwight qualifies as harassment. When a person continues to behave in a certain way towards another person even though he/she knows that the behavior is unwelcome, the behavior becomes harassment. Jim and Pam know that Dwight does not like their pranks, but they continue playing pranks on Dwight anyway. They are using Dwight as their personal source of office entertainment, at Dwight’s expense, and without any compensation to Dwight for the trouble they cause him. Now I admit that Dwight is not exactly the nicest person either, and he did get vicious when he sought revenge against Jim and Pam later in the TV series, but Jim and Pam’s pranks are still wrong.

So does this mean that Jim and Pam are bad people? While the TV series presents Jim and Pam as being nice and likeable people who have a blossoming romance, upon closer inspection we see that they are not always nice. Numerous articles describe Jim as a bully, analogous to the good-looking jock who picks on the nerdy outcast, which is analogous to Dwight. Other viewers have noted Jim’s bad treatment of women, and his superiority complex. Pam, on the other hand, is described by some as being passive aggressive.

When good people tell jokes, their aim is most often to bring laughter and joy to others. In the 1998 film Patch Adams, Dr. Hunter “Patch” Adams specializes in making patients laugh. Keep in mind that many of these patients have quite serious diseases such as cancer. When patients in the hospital are prone to feeling glum with their serious diseases, Dr. Adams cheers them up and makes them laugh.

A bad person would not want to do what Dr. “Patch” Adams does. A bad person may say he does not want to use his sense of humor to cheer up seriously ill people because he finds being around seriously ill people to be depressing. He would rather be around people who are already happy and/or content so that he can suck the happiness out of them by “pushing their buttons”, and have that be the joke.

While good people often use humor to bring joy to others, bad people, in contrast, often use humor to entertain themselves, and maybe also to impress their friends. Unfortunately, the jokes of a bad person are often at the expense of someone else.

How does the person react when the other person does not like his/her joke?

In general, bad people do not react graciously when the other person does not like the joke. To the bad person, the other person who does not like the joke is always the problem. Nothing is ever wrong with the joke.

Bad people often like to judge other people who do not like their jokes. If you express disapproval of a joke that a bad person makes, the bad person may judge you as being excessively serious, no fun or perhaps one of those “practical” people, while the bad person considers him/herself to be the fun and goofy one. To justify him/herself, the bad person may try to place you into a special category of people who are serious and who don’t know how to have fun. He/she may tell him/herself and others that you are a grouch and never seem to laugh or smile. Meanwhile, the bad person most likely does not want to face the reality that nobody in his/her right mind would be happy in his/her presence.

Sometimes if you try to explain to the bad person how inappropriate the joke is, the bad person may say “ouch!” as if you said something really hurtful — and certainly we don’t want to be hurtful! Here, the bad person is trying to put you on a guilt trip in order to manipulate you into tolerating his bad behavior. The bad person may even tell you that his jokes are a big part of his personality, and that by not being allowed to tell jokes, he cannot be himself.

So how would a good person react if the other person does not like his/her joke? The good person may get a little embarrassed, or may apologize. It can be awkward when the other person does not like the joke, but it is no excuse to act as if the other person is the problem. The other person has the right to decide for him/herself what he/she finds to be funny and what he/she finds to not be funny. We have no right to tell someone what is funny and what is not, and good people know that.

Laughter as a form of ridicule

When we think of laughter as a form of ridicule, we may think of the kid that gets made fun of at school. We may think of a group of bullies laughing at the kid that they are terrorizing. What we may not think of is laughter as a subtle form of ridicule from one adult to another in a seemingly friendly conversation.

A wicked person’s laughter can occur in regular everyday conversation as a way of conveying disrespect. For example, you may be speaking your mind on something that is important to you. Just when you thought you made a great point on something, the other person just laughs. It is obvious that you were not making a joke. Instead, you feel disrespected and mocked. Yet the other person tells you to just chill out, and that laughing is just a part of every day casual conversation.

While laughter is a normal component of everyday conversation, what is not a normal component of conversation is putting people down and making fun of people for the sake of entertaining oneself and for the sake of feeling better about oneself. Yet, as if often the case, the evildoer just wants the other person to believe that he/she is just being too sensitive and needs to lighten up.

Joking too excessively can make someone unpleasant to be around

I have met a few people whose sense of humor is so annoying that they actually are more pleasant to be around when they are in a bad mood! It is sad, but true. The reason I did not like their sense of humor was that they would smother me with one joke after the other, and I did not find the jokes to be that funny. Yet they seem to be oblivious to the fact that nobody laughs when they tell this stream of jokes. They are obviously entertaining themselves, but their captive audience gets a obnoxious stream of silliness. The few people I knew who behaved this way were not very good people.

I think it is easy to say that a bad sense of humor is worse than no sense of humor at all. In my opinion, the most pleasant and enjoyable people to be around are not the ones who crack the most jokes. They are kind, considerate, empathetic and they take an interest in other people besides themselves.

Nonetheless, having some sense of humor is a good thing. They say that laughter is the best medicine.

Does having a dark sense of humor make you bad?

One time when I was a kid, I was thinking about how funny it would be if someone driving a car saw a Christmas lights display so beautiful and mesmerizing that she gets distracted and crashes her car. This is an example of a fictional scenario that may be funny to someone with a dark sense of humor.

So what is the difference between a dark sense of humor and a sense of humor characteristic of bad people? I believe the difference is that for the bad person to laugh, something bad has to actually happen to the person who is the target of the joke, whether it be physical or psychological harm. The person with a dark sense of humor, on the other hand, just needs to hear a story of the bad thing happening. The story certainly does not have to come true for people to laugh. Furthermore, when we laugh at a story that ends in a person crashing a car, we can always imagine that the person is perfectly okay afterwards and that the car can be repaired. In other words, we are not necessarily laughing at the thought of someone being harmed.

Recall a previous blog post on Treatment of Women on Television and Popular Culture where I discuss attempted rape scenes that are presented as funny. Does this qualify as just a dark sense of humor, or something more? Where we draw the dividing line, in my opinion, is in whether the unfortunate event includes substantial harm to a person and whether the wrongful act is portrayed as normal and okay. Note from the previous blog post that in two of the four attempted rape scenes I described, the woman was in a state of mental distress while the man was trying to rape her. In one of the other two attempted rape scenes, the attempted rape was successful. Though the woman was not in any mental distress, she did react to the rape in a way that no woman in her right mind would. She looked upon her rapist with admiration because he was so good at having sex for a nerd.

The 1993 film The Adams Family Values shows another round of dark humor where Fester’s wife is repeatedly trying to murder him so that she can take his money. Her repeated attempts to murder him are unsuccessful, though, and the whole thing is presented as being funny. Are we being bad when we laugh at this? I doubt it because at least Fester suffers no harm, physical or psychological, and Debby ends up getting what she deserves in the end.

While the person with the dark sense of humor laughs at stories of events that often result in harm, such a person would not necessarily laugh at the harm itself. The bad person, however, may laugh at the harm itself, and may even intentionally inflict harm—often psychological—for his/her own entertainment. The person who is the target of the joke may not have to sustain serious physical harm, but he/she still would need to be in some state of distress, anger, annoyance or confusion for the bad person to receive satisfactory entertainment.

Comedies on television

As discussed in the Television blog post, television is ridden with scenes that entice viewers to laugh at things that people should not be laughing at. In many movies and sitcoms, we are enticed to laugh at people getting harmed and at people intentionally hurting each other. In a culture where laughing at such things is the norm, it can be hard to know when we are laughing at something that bad people would typically laugh at.

So if you laugh at an anvil falling on a cartoon character’s head, does that mean that you are being a bad person? Not necessarily. Cartoon characters do not get hurt the way that real people get hurt. After a boulder rock falls on their head, they often see birds or stars, then a moment later they are good as new. However, watching comedic scenes of cartoon characters falling off a cliff or having pianos falling on their heads is a stepping stone closer to watching and laughing at real people getting hurt. I can testify that television successfully taught me to laugh at people getting hurt when I was a child. At first it was cartoon characters, then I laughed at live-action characters smashing dishes onto each other’s heads, then eventually I laughed at real people getting hurt. Beware of the desensitization that television can cause.

Summary

To summarize, we can learn a lot about someone’s true nature by what he/she laughs at and the kinds of jokes that he/she makes. Does he/she laugh a someone being in a state of distress (such as anger, annoyance or confusion)? Does he/she laugh when someone is struggling to complete a task and is expressing frustration? Does he/she laugh when the other person is obviously being serious? When he/she tells a joke, is his/her goal to bring laughter and joy to other people? Or is he/she just entertaining him/herself without regard to how others present are responding to the joke? Does he/she accuse others of not being able to take a joke? Or does he/she apologize when the joke offends someone?

Imagine you are a child, 12 years old or so, with the maturity level of an adult. You are pretty good at making decisions, but your parents are not. Your parents are prone to making bad decisions that hurt the family, including you. When you try to explain to your parents that they are about to make a bad decision, they do not listen to you or believe you. To them, you are just a kid. So you watch as they make one bad decision after the other. You may be smarter than they are, but you are still under their power and authority. This situation is resemblant of many of the families we see on television.

When family movies and sitcoms first came out, back in the day, they were happy and well-functioning families. The father was the leader of the household. The mother was kind and a good provider for her children. The children benefitted from their parents’ wisdom. Some viewers even got jealous that the TV family looked so happy and perfect. Then came the dysfunctional families in the 1990s and 2000s, like Titus, Everybody Loves Raymond, Malcolm in the Middle, Married With Children, etc. These dysfunctional families were not only funny, but also did not make viewers jealous by being so happy and perfect.

In the 1980s and 1990s, there emerged movies and sitcoms where the children were smart and the adults were stupid. Who defeated the bad guys? The children did, because the adults did not know what was going on during the whole movie. Sometimes the bad guys were mythical-looking creatures that were not thought to exist, which was why only the children knew of their existence. For example, in the 1989 movie The Little Monsters, the bad guys were monsters that lived in a world that could only be accessed by crawling under someone’s bed. Adults would not believe that such creatures existed. Only children would believe that. So the children were the only ones who could defeat the bad guys because they were the only ones who were willing to believe that these creatures existed. The movie Hocus Pocus is another example. Three witches, who were executed 300 years ago, were brought back to life by the lighting of the black-flamed candle. Such an event would supposedly be hard for adults to believe actually happened, so the children had to save the day.

Sometimes, however, it was up to the children to conquer the bad guys because the adults really were just idiots, or at the very least their judgment could not be trusted. Take the Stranger Things TV series. Three boys find a girl named Eleven who escaped from a research laboratory where she was held prisoner. The boys did not tell their parents about Eleven because they figured that if they did, their parents would call the police and then the police would bring Eleven right back to the bad men that she was running from. The boys could not let that happen, so they hid Eleven in their basement. This scenario is an example of a situation where the children could not trust their parents to do the right thing. The children were convinced that only they knew what was right. If they got their parents involved, then the bad guys would get what they want.

The 2018 movie Mary Poppins Returns is another example of a movie where the children are smarter than the parent. The synopsis features some bad men at the bank pulling off a wicked scheme to deceive Mr. Banks and many other people into thinking that the payments on their houses were overdue, and that they had no choice but to turn over their houses to the bank. Who were the ones who found out what those bad men at the bank were really up to? The Banks children. Those bad men at the bank may be able to outsmart Mr. Banks, but they could not outsmart his children. Of course the children tried to explain to their easily deceived father that these men at the bank were up to no good, but he would not believe them. As in many other movies, it was up to the children to defeat the bad guys. At least this time the children had the help of Mary Poppins.

Still another example of a family with children smarter than the parents is the long-time The Simpsons TV series. Of course it is not too hard to be smarter than Homer Simpson, and let’s face it, the little girl, Lisa Simpson, is arguably genius intelligence. Not only is Lisa highly intelligent, she also is morally superior to her parents. She is the kind of girl that we would see participating in activism and always trying to make the world a better place. Though Bart Simpson is not known for being smart, he does seem to be cunning and crafty when he wants to be. While Bart and Lisa being smarter than their parents may be a part of what makes The Simpsons show so amusing, one could imagine how frustrating it would be for children to be under the authority and custody of parents who are less intelligent than you are.

Why are children so often smarter than adults on TV?

Note that the movies where children are smarter than the adults are most likely to be children’s movies where children are the main characters and where children are also the target audience. It is reasonable to figure that children can relate more to movies where children are the main characters. However, if the adults are smarter than the children like they are supposed to be in real life, then the adults would naturally play a bigger role in defeating the bad guys, in which case the children would not be the main characters anymore. Therefore, there are logistical reasons to make the adult characters into idiots. Alternatively, the bad guys could be mythical-looking creatures that only the children are willing to believe actually exist. Either way, the adults have to remain in la-la land the whole movie so that the children can be the main characters who defeat the bad guys.

While there are some explanations as to why children are smarter than adults in a number of movies and sitcoms, there can also be some bad unintended effects on viewers. Keep in mind that many of these movies are children’s movies with mainly children as the target audience, and when these children view one story after another where the children have to save the day because the adults are idiots, or at least cannot be trusted, there is a potential for our young viewers to mistakingly believe that this is representative of real life. Imagine that you are a parent and you have to keep proving to your children that they are not as mature as the TV children and you are smarter than the TV parents.

Some older people complain that children are more disrespectful today than they used to be. I wonder if one of the factors making children increasingly disrespectful is the TV family. As I discussed in the television blog post, people are greatly affected by what they see on television. In a way, people view TV characters as a model of how they should be. Children are even more impressionable, and when these movies targeted to children audiences show the child characters having to take matters into their own hands while the adults are either in la-la land or cannot be trusted, the young viewers are receiving the message that adults are incompetent and are hence not necessarily worthy of respect.

The rebellious teenager stereotype

Television promotes a lot of stereotypes, one of which is the rebellious teenager stereotype. Teenage television characters frequently have a big unfriendly KEEP OUT sign on their bedroom doors. They roll their eyes. They complain frequently. They get overly dramatic. However, when we look at how irresponsible the parents are and the bad decisions the parents make that hurt the family while the children know what is right, we see that the world of TV is a world where teenagers actually have a good reason to be rebellious.

It is one thing for parents to make bad decisions sometimes. It happens. It is another thing if the parents are prone to doing the wrong thing while the children know what the right thing to do is all along. Recall the television blog post that discusses how in a number of movies (e.g. Problem Child 2, It Takes Two), a single parent is about to marry the wrong person while the children know whom their parent should marry the entire time. Not only that, the single parent will not even believe the children when they try to explain to him that this woman he is about to marry is not a good person.

In a number of movies, the parent is too incompetent to protect the children from bad people. Not only this, but also the parent sometimes forcibly exposes the children to bad people by marrying them and making them into the children’s step parents. Though the children are smarter than the parents in these TV families, they are still under the authority of these idiots, and they suffer from it. Furthermore, the idiot adults do not take these intellectually superior and mature children seriously when these children try to explain to the adults that they are about to make the wrong decision. To the adult, the children are “just kids” and do not know any better. While it is true that children often do not know what is good for them in real life, in the land of TV that is not so. In the land of TV, it is often (though not always) the parent that does not know what is good for him/her and it is the children who know what is best.

Take the TV series Haters Back Off, featuring a teenage girl who is trying to build a famous online presence with her singing ability, which is practically non-existent. Her uncle and mother are preoccupied with trying to help her to fulfill her dreams while her younger sister, Emily, has to pay the electric bill. One day at breakfast, Emily says to the family “you notice that the lights actually turned on today? That is because I paid the electric bill”. Obviously she is the most mature and most reasonable person in the household, and she is the younger of the two children. My impression is that we viewers are supposed to laugh as this silly dysfunctional family makes the younger child have to take on some adult responsibilities because the adults are too absentminded. If you empathize with Emily, however, you may not find it to be funny.

If I were a child with the maturity level of an adult, and I had parents who were too mentally incompetent to take on adult responsibilities, and if I had to take on some of those responsibilities while an audience in the background is laughing at the whole thing, I would be angry. Yet when a teenager in the TV family gets angry, we are supposed to believe he/she is angry because he/she is a teenager and teenagers are supposed to be rebellious and “hard to deal with”. Like the female stereotypes I discussed in this blog post, the rebellious teenager stereotype also can be harmful. It produces a justification for invalidating the negative emotions of teenagers, and neglects the fact that negative emotions are often warranted and should be respected and taken seriously.

While movies and sitcoms often show children being smarter than the adults, what they do not show is the detrimental effects on the children. In real life, if a child were smarter than his/her parents, and had to watch his/her parents make one bad decision after the other, that child would have a good reason to get angry and frustrated. When bad guys come along, and the parents are too incompetent to protect the child from the bad guys, and make the child have to take matters into his/her own hands when it comes to defeating the bad guys, that child would have good reason to get angry and maybe even rebellious. When these idiot parents don’t even listen to the child when the child has something intelligent to say, and continue making bad decisions that hurt the family, including the child, then the child especially has good reason to be angry.

Summary

Television shows toxic behaviors a lot of the time without showing the harmful effects of those toxic behaviors. For example, television will frequently show characters engaging in sexual promiscuity and having sexual relations within hours of meeting each other. What television will not show are the diseases that are spread, and the emotional harm that occurs. Similarly, television will frequently show child characters being smarter, wiser and more mature than they are in real life, while the adults are not always so smart. It may seem amusing, but in real life it is a destructive family dynamic.

People generally view help as a good thing that one does for another, especially when the other person is in a state of need. When people reject an offer of help or do not show appreciation, they are sometimes judged as being ungrateful. However, help can be harmful in some contexts. Furthermore, help sometimes comes with motives that are selfish and maybe even outright evil.

Sometimes when people try to help others, their help is ineffective. In other words, their actions don’t “help” the other person. However, sometimes even when the help is effective, it does harm. Below are some examples of harm that can come upon the person being helped:

• prevents the person from developing the ability to complete a task independently
• deprives a person of a feeling of accomplishment from having done something on his/her own
• spoils the fun of figuring something out by oneself
• causes harm to come upon the person due to incompetence of the helper
• enables bad behavior, like cheating on a test

One time I was at an event that took place on a college campus, and I was looking for a building by using a map. An older guy I passed by had noticed me looking at a map and earnestly offered to show me where the building was. I rejected his offer of help because it would have spoiled the fun of looking for the building by using the map. It was like a game to me. I ended up finding the building, and it was more fun than if someone had just shown to me where the building was. This is an example of situation where help can spoil the fun.

Another time I was building a snowman. My goal was to build a snowman that was taller than me. I made two really big snowballs, but I was not strong enough to put one snowball on top of the other. So I ended up taking one chunk of one snowball at a time and putting it on top of the other snow ball. I could have asked for help, but if I got help, I would have been deprived of that feeling of accomplishment from having done something by myself. This is an example of a situation where help can deprive someone of that feeling of accomplishment from having done something by him/herself.

While people sometimes need help, other times people need to not be helped. The reason is that help can deprive a person of the ability to learn how to perform a task independently. Parents often help their children with their homework, but they usually won’t do the homework for their children. They try to teach the children enough so that they can figure out the right answers for themselves. Unless the children do some figuring out for themselves, they do not learn. When the teacher has the students take a test, there is a reason that the teacher does not help the students take the test. The test is meant to assess how well the students know the material, and the test is also meant to push the students to learn the material enough so that they can answer the test questions without being helped.

Sometimes help is morally wrong, like when a student lets another student copy his/her answers during a test. Help sometimes enables bad habits and wrongful behaviors. Helping someone cheat on a test may seem convenient to the person in the short term, but in the long term diminishes the person’s motivation to learn the material. The person being helped may get a good grade, but will be deprived of the fruits of knowledge and understanding that come with knowing the material.

Sometimes the helper is not qualified to give certain kinds of help. For example, let us say that you are cooking a meal and someone insists on helping you, but does not know much about food preparation. The person may put together ingredients that do not taste good together, or the person may burn something. In the end, the meal could be lower quality than if you had not received any help.

Unwanted help

Unwanted help can qualify as a form of harassment. Harassment is defined as any unwanted behavior, physical or verbal (or even suggested), that makes a reasonable person feel uncomfortable, humiliated, or mentally distressed. Many people would agree that when a person makes it clear that a form of treatment is unwelcome, that continuing to treat the person that way is harassment. Correspondingly, when we continue to give someone help after he/she has made it clear that the help is unwanted, the unwanted help becomes harassment.

In my opinion, unwanted help is only warranted when there is reason to believe that if the person does not receive help, death or serious injury will result, and even then there are some exceptions. A person has a right to refuse to undergo a medical procedure even when there is reason to believe that without the medical procedure, death is likely. People have certain rights, and one of those rights is the right to refuse help.

As described above, help can do harm, even when the help is effective. In some contexts, the more effective the help is, the more harm it does. By giving someone unwanted help, we are assuming the right to decide what is best for him/her. Unless you are officially a caretaker of the other person, you have no right to decide what is in the better interests of the other person. You need to respect the other person’s space and autonomy.

A part of being a good helper is not just being ready to help, but also backing off when it is made clear that the help is not wanted.

The helper can have evil motives

When help does harm to another person, we may like to think that at least the intentions are good, but this is not always the case. Motives to help someone can be not only selfish, but also outright evil. Below are examples of the motivations to help others that are actually evil:

• power and control
• humiliation
• self-exaltation
• manipulation

Evildoers have many tactics that they utilize to make themselves look like good people that they are not. One such tactic is helping someone in plain sight of others. By helping others, evildoers can even fool themselves into thinking that they are good people. In my opinion, there are ways one can tell whether help is fueled by a genuine concern for the better interests of the other person. For example, is this help actually in the better interests of the other person? Also, what is the reaction when the other person rejects the help? Does the person respect boundaries and back off, saying “I’m there if you need me” or does the person accuse the other person of being ungrateful or too proud?

Imagine a culture where girls and women in engineering is almost unheard of. Now imagine a high school girl is the only girl in an electronics laboratory class. The students partner up to do a laboratory exercise where the goal is to build a circuit and test it. The girl decides to not have a partner because she is pretty smart and believes she can do the laboratory exercise by herself. She also knows that the boys in the class have no faith in her ability to do anything, and would probably take over all of the laboratory tasks if she had one of them as a partner.

When the laboratory session starts, and the girl is about to gather the supplies to make her circuit, a couple of boys come over to her lab station and start to build her circuit for her because they refuse to believe that she can do it herself. She tells them to go away, and that she does not want any help, but they could not care less. They proceed to build the entire circuit for her. So she decides to go over to another lab station that is unoccupied and start over. As she again tries to gather the supplies, the two boys come over to that lab station and continue to build the circuit for her again. She obviously does not like this, and when she tries to tell them to go away, they just accuse her of being too proud to accept their help.

I can imagine outside observers of this incident thinking “Oh that poor girl in a predominantly male setting. She is just not tough enough to survive in this environment, and those boys are trying to help her…” Such members of the audience do not understand the reality of the situation. The boys’ motives to help the girl are not good but evil. Their forcing their help upon her against her will is evidence that they are not helping her because of any genuine concern for her well-being but rather for the purpose of establishing power, control and superiority over her. They are sexist and they do not believe that she belongs there. They are sending her the message that she cannot build a circuit on her own without their help.

By forcibly building the circuit for her, they are preventing her from developing the ability to build a circuit on her own. Note that the purpose of the laboratory exercise is not to build a circuit, but rather to learn how to build a circuit and test it. The girl will not learn how to build a circuit if someone else builds it for her. By “helping her” to build the circuit, the boys are defeating the purpose of her being there. Even worse, when she attempts to reject their help, they say she is too proud. When she tells them that they are jerks, they figure she is being ungrateful and they keep saying “We’re just trying to help…We’re just trying to help…”

Evil people often like to have power and control over others. Some men use rape to establish power and control over a women. According to this academic article, there are four major motivations to rape: assert power over the victim; suppress their own feelings of inadequacy; vent their anger; and sadism. According to this article, Sherry Hamby, a research professor of psychology at the University of the South in the US state of Tennessee, says “sexual assault is not about sexual gratification or sexual interest, but more about dominating people.”

The first motivation to rape—asserting power over the victim—is the same as the motivation behind the actions of these boys who were forcing their help on this girl. Their forced help says something about their character, which is that they are evil and like to control others, particularly females. They may also be angry that she is there because of their firm belief that she does not belong there. Just as rapists sometimes say to themselves “she wanted it”, these boys may be saying to themselves “she knows she wanted our help deep down. She can’t build a circuit”.

Evildoers will find various ways to establish power and control over others. Men who want to establish power, control and superiority over women will not always choose to rape because rape is technically against the law, and a man who commits rape could face prosecution. He may be labeled as a sex offender, which comes with damage to his reputation, and possibly some time in jail. Therefore, men have incentive to choose other methods to establish power, control and superiority over women, one of which is unsolicited help.

Let us say that someone is insistent on helping another person manage his/her finances. The real motivation may be, once again, power and control. The “helper” just wants control over another person’s money. If someone shows signs of vulnerability, the “helper” may try to take advantage of him/her by helping him/her with his/her finances, and then eventually taking over his/her finances altogether.

Another example: someone is writing a book about a topic that is politics-related, and another person persistently offers to help write the book. When the writer finally lets him/her help out, he/she eventually starts dictating what is to be written and what is not to be written. The helper’s intentions here are not good, but rather are about power and control over what goes into the book. The helper only wants his/her political opinions to be endorsed in the book rather than that of the writer.

Help can also be a form of manipulation. The evildoer may be giving the other person help in order to make the other person feel indebted to him/her. By placing the other person into this state of indebtedness, the evildoer can feel entitled to special favors from the other person in the future.

Help can sometimes be humiliating to the one receiving help. For example, when someone receives unwanted help for a very simple task that he/she could have done him/herself, he/she may look stupid and feel humiliated in front of the other people who are present. In such a situation, the evildoer is deliberately humiliating the other person, while putting on the façade of being a nice person who is just trying to help. Naïve bystanders will not notice the helper’s evil intentions, and may instead feel pity for the person receiving the help for such a simple task.

Summary

To summarize, help is not always a good deed. Not only can help be harmful, but it can also come with evil intentions. Unwanted help is one of many tactics that evildoers can utilize to harm their victims without looking like a bad person to casual bystanders. In the end, we need to respect people’s rights to reject help, and not judge them as being ungrateful or too proud.

Women have been a marginalized group throughout history. Though in historical society women were subservient to men, women are much more equal to men in today’s Western society. Nonetheless, there is still some degree of sex discrimination that comes with certain destructive female stereotypes. Below I will discuss some of the more common female stereotypes

1. The woman thinks that she is always right

This stereotype is promoted throughout television and popular culture. Often this stereotype is presented in a humorous light. Some scenes on television show a married couple agreeing to a certain rule, which is that the wife is always right, and the husband is walking into the snake pit if he even tries to disagree. Though these scenes entice the audience to laugh, the implications of this stereotype are serious and very derogatory.

When the husband and wife live by the rule that the wife is always right, note that the husband does not really think that the wife is always right. He is only pretending that she is always right to her face, and still probably believes that she is wrong and misguided. Also note that the wife is being placed into a light that paints her as a second rate human being who is so horrible and foolish that she cannot even respect the opinions of others, and turns into the angry hulk if anybody even tries to disagree with her. Making such harsh assumptions about someone’s character on the basis of a stereotype is outright mean. To conclude, when the husband and wife live by the rule that the wife is always right, the last thing that the wife gets is actual respect.

Sometimes people have a good reason to present their side of the argument with conviction. They have taken the time to confirm the facts and have thought through everything carefully. The person on the opposing side, however, may not have checked the facts, and may only be going by what he/she heard somewhere without considering the source. In such a case, the one who checked the facts and thought through everything carefully is more likely to be right; but what if the one who checked the facts is a woman, and the one who is just going by what he heard happens to be a man? If the woman asserts her argument with conviction, does she deserve to be judged as “just another woman who thinks she is always right”? Or maybe she does have a good reason to believe that she is right and the other person is wrong.

The stereotype, which says that the woman thinks she is always right, places the woman into a position where her opinion can never be taken seriously no matter how much she has carefully checked the facts, and no matter how logically sound her argument is. The audience will question the validity of her conviction in what she is saying in ways that they would not do for a man. No matter how logically sound and factually correct of an argument the woman presents, the audience will continue to believe that the woman only has conviction because she is a woman and women think that they are always right.

So is this stereotype aligned with reality? In other words, are women really more likely to believe that they are always right than are men? The scientific literature indicates that, if anything, the opposite is true. (Lenney, 1977) did a review of the science literature and found that women show lower confidence in their abilities in achievement settings while men tend to show inflated confidence, though these results can vary based on ability area. (Roberts, 1991) found that when it comes to self-assessments, men tend to have a more competitive mindset and are more likely to rate themselves highly while women are more likely to rate themselves based on how others have rated their performance.

Other evidence against this stereotype is that men are more likely to have narcissistic personality disorder, which is defined as a mental condition in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for excessive attention and admiration, troubled relationships, and a lack of empathy for others. (Grijalva et al., 2015) reviewed the science literature on gender differences in narcissism and found that narcissists generally think that they are always right and that they do not make mistakes. The first study they discuss confirms that narcissists are more commonly men. Though there is another kind of narcissism equally prevalent in both men and women, called vulnerable narcissism, this kind of narcissism is marked by low self-esteem, neuroticism and introversion.

Many more recent articles are now saying that the confidence gap between men and women in the workplace is a myth. (Lenney, 1977) and (Roberts, 1991) both conducted their meta-analysis in the 20th century. Times are changing, but even though this gap in confidence between men and women has narrowed, women are still no more confident in themselves than men are, and when they do express self-confidence, they more easily become less likeable. With women, there are more strict behavioral standards to be nice. Women come across as too harsh when they express a certain level of assertiveness unless they also embellish their assertiveness with niceness and empathy.

2. Women fight with each other more than men do

For awhile I was sharing an apartment with three other women. One of my flatmates was talking with this guy. She told him that four of us women were living together, to which he replied that we must fight a lot. I found this remark to be offensive.

In this video from That 70s Show, Erik Forman and Steven Hyde are play-fighting while Jackie and Donna are making fun of them. Erik and Steven make the claim that girls can’t play-fight because when they do, it turns into a real fight. So Jackie and Donna decide to show them that they, too, can play-fight without their play-fight turning into a real fight. They start playfully hitting each other on the shoulder when suddenly Donna complains that Jackie scratched her, and then the two of them get into a real fight after all.

This scene from That 70s Show is made out to be funny, of course, but the scene is still promoting a derogatory female stereotype, which states that somehow women have a diminished ability to get along with each other compared to men. The thing is that when people fight, it is generally because somebody did something wrong or there was a misunderstanding or someone does not feel that he/she is being treated well. Therefore, by saying that females are more prone to fighting with each other, we are implying that females have a diminished ability to know how to treat each other and/or behave like decent human beings towards each other. We also are implying that they have a diminished ability to be forgiving of each other’s mistakes. Essentially the stereotype implies that women, compared to men, are second-rate human beings, or what Steven Hyde calls “bitches”.

One time I decided to let a woman live with me who had no place to live of her own. While she was living with me, she took advantage of me. She took some food out of the food pantry without asking me, wore some of my clothes without asking me, used up some of my bathroom products and was emotionally abusive towards me whenever I didn’t do what she wanted. We had a fight where I ended up eventually kicking her out of the apartment. The thing is that I remembered the stereotype that females fight with each other more. I imagined some guy believing that the two of us were fighting simply because we are both women, and women just happen to fight more. It was obvious to me that we were fighting, not because we were both women, but because she was a horrible and exploitative person. In fact, she lived with a number of men before she lived with me, and the men fought with her too. So if someone were to assume that this other women and I were fighting just because we are both women, you can see how ignorant and offensive that judgmental assumption would be.

According to this stereotype, women are the more aggressive sex (keeping in mind that aggression can be verbal and not just physical). Of course in the field of psychology, there are often no gender differences in aggression. When there are gender differences found, males tend to be the more aggressive sex. A review by (Hyde, 1984) looked at 143 studies on gender differences in aggression, and found that gender differences were modest, only accounting for about 5% of aggression. Gender differences in aggression were highest in the 6 and younger age group (with males being more aggressive than females) and they decreased with older age. A more recent literature review by (Clauss et al., 2017) found that men are more likely to be physically aggressive while women are more likely to exhibit relational aggression characterized by isolation and ostracism through gossip rumors and lies. No evidence of gender differences in anger were found. Still another literature review by (Bjorkqvist, 2018) found that boys and girls had equal tendencies to be verbally abusive.

3. With women and girls there is more drama

I once overheard a man saying that he is glad he has sons instead of daughters because he would not have liked all the drama that comes with having daughters. Mothers sometimes comment that while boys are more likely to participate in risky activities that can cause physical injury, girls are more likely to cause drama. Indeed, we have all heard the phrase “drama queen”.

When people refer to drama, they tend to mean made-up conflict where the person invents something to fight about and fights for the sake of fighting. Sometimes drama refers to a behavior where one or both people in a relationship create an uncomfortable feeling through manipulation and/or control. It is hard to find anything in the science literature on this topic, but based on my personal experience, males and females are equally prone to creating drama.

One group that I believe is more prone to creating drama is small children. We have all seen small children throw a fuss, like it is the end of the world, over something that an adult would not think twice about. We have seen small children fight over things where mature adults would have been able to reach a compromise.

What is particularly destructive about this female stereotype is that when a woman does get upset over something, the others present may just assume she is upset because she is a woman and women are more prone to drama. They will not consider that maybe she has a legitimate reason to be upset. In other words, stereotypes such as this cause a woman’s negative emotions to not be taken as seriously. Whenever she expresses a negative emotion, even if it is justified, she is always at risk of being called a “drama queen”.

4. Women are more emotional than men

In culture, women can appear to be more emotional. They express their emotions more, they talk about their emotions with each other more, they take more of an interest in emotion and they may also have higher emotional intelligence. Men, on the contrary, are taught when they are boys that emotion is a weakness and they are discouraged from showing emotion. Therefore, it is not surprising that women appear to be the more emotional sex.

So are women more emotional than men are? According to the science literature, the “emotional” label placed on women is only a cultural stereotype, and is not rooted in reality. According to this study, women do not experience any more emotional fluctuations than men do…not even the women that menstruate. Though women were found in another study to experience more negative emotions than men, some studies show that if anything, men are more emotional than women. There is even an article entitled “Why Are Men More Emotional Than Women?“

In one study, men showed more of a physiological emotional response to emotion-provoking stimuli. The content of the videos was categorized into four areas: blissful, exciting, heartwarming and funny. The article explains: the results showed that men had stronger emotional reactions to each of these areas. When it came to the heartwarming content, men responded twice as much as did women. When asked to rate their emotional response to the content, women stated that they were much more emotional than the test results showed, while men said they were much less emotional than they actually were. In a separate survey conducted by the same company, 67 percent of these men later went on to admit they actually felt more emotional than they let on.

Men are taught when they are young boys that emotion is a weakness, and so they are told to hide their emotions. However, as it explained in this article, hiding and/or suppressing one’s emotions only causes the emotions to go unresolved. When emotions remain unresolved, they dominate us more, causing us to lash out in certain contexts without knowing why. When men do show emotion, it is often viewed as “passion”. When men get so emotional that they throw things in a fit of rage, they are viewed as “having a bad day” or “having a temper”, anything but emotional. This label seems to be reserved for women. In other words, people in culture overlook evidence that contradicts their beliefs about gender differences.

While women are not any more emotional than men are, men are not any more logical than women are. Brain studies such as this one generally show that men have better motor skills and spatial thinking skills while women have better analytical skills and think more intuitively. This study assessed men’s and women’s logical thinking skills via written exams. The results showed that women scored at least as high as men did, and sometimes higher.

When women are falsely labeled as being more emotional and less logical, disrespectful behaviors towards women sometimes come about. One behavior that I find to be particularly destructive is accusing a woman of getting angry because she is on her menstrual period. In this video from The Big Bang Theory TV series, Sheldon Cooper did just that with the human resources lady. In the video, we see that the human resources lady has reason to believe that Sheldon and his friends are behaving in a manner that is disparaging towards women. Rather than seeing her exasperation as being justified, Sheldon assumes she must be on her menstrual period.

The question is: how can the human resources lady prove to Sheldon that her agitation is not because of her menstrual period? Should she furnish proof that she is not menstruating at the time? Should they all wait a week and see if her reaction to their terrible behavior changes? Will everyone have to wait a week every time she becomes outraged by something just to make sure she is not just grumpy because she is on her period? Then what if she reaches menopause? Do we just brush off her anger as hormonally driven until she is finished with menopause?

I had read about a real-life incident where a man saw that a woman was angry with him and said “well, someone is on her period…” The woman replied “If I were on my period every time I got angry with you, I would be anemic!” Now, in my opinion, telling a witty joke in response to a disparaging comment may make the situation worse. A witty joke may only give the perpetrator free comedy entertainment and lighten the mood. This remark is to be dealt with seriously. It is a form of sexual harassment.

When people get angry, they deserve respect and they deserve to be listened to. Their complaints should be taken into consideration. Their anger should not be invalidated based on some assumption that their hormones are driving their negative emotions rather than stimuli that warrant those negative emotions.

5. Gossip is a woman thing

The science literature shows mixed results regarding whether women gossip more than men do. Nonetheless, men do gossip. One place of gossip is the mens locker room as discussed in this article. Sometimes men talk trash about other men in the locker room at sports team practices. This trash talk does meet the definition of gossip.

Prejudice against one’s own group

Sometimes the people who are the most prejudiced against a group are people who are members of the group. For example, the people who complain the most about women being too much drama are often women. When women stereotype their own group, they often think of themselves as the exception. In The Crown TV series, when Margaret Thatcher became the first female Prime Minister of Britain, she said in one episode that women are too emotional to take on government offices. She made this statement while she, a woman, was assuming the most prominent public office in Britain. She obviously thought that she was an exception to this “rule”.

When women complain about other women starting too much drama, they often give themselves a pat on the back for not being that way. They think they are better than the other women. They really have just fallen into what is called internalized misogyny.

Confirmation bias in prejudice

Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values. When it comes to prejudice against a group of people, confirmation bias will cause one’s observations of the group to be biased in favor of negative attributes and against positive attributes.

When a member of a group exhibits an unfavorable behavior, to the prejudiced person, that member of the group is representative of the entire group. For example, say a woman is making a scene at a restaurant because she is not happy with the service she is getting. The prejudiced person will say to him/herself “see, just what I thought, women are just too much drama!” Meanwhile, when a man yells out loud at the airport terminal because he is not getting his way, the same prejudiced person will just think “well, I hope he manages to calm down and that his problem gets fixed.”

Now when a member of the group exhibits a favorable attribute, the prejudiced person will think that this individual is an exception, expecially when the behavior is one that goes against the group stereotype. For example, let us say that a woman has a calm, rational and humble demeanor that goes against some of the negative female stereotypes. The prejudiced person will still think that the negative female stereotypes are aligned with reality, but that this one woman happens to be an exception. He may even say to the woman “you are not like other girls”. In this particular context, the statement “you are not like other girls” is an insult to the female sex. By telling a young woman that she is not like other girls, and framing it as a compliment, one is implying that it is better to not be like other members of the female sex, as if something is wrong with being feminine. Granted the expression “you are not like other girls” does not always have sexist underpinnings. In other contexts, it may just mean that the woman has a unique personality and that few other people are like her.

Summary

When we put all of these female stereotypes together, we can see that they place women into a bad position. Whenever a woman expresses her opinion about something with conviction, nobody will care because she is just another woman who thinks that she is always right. Whenever the woman gets upset about something, others will just think she is another woman full of drama, and will not consider that maybe her getting upset is warranted. If she gets into a dispute with another woman, others may think that the dispute is only happening because they are women, and not for some other reason.

Such bad treatment stemming from these stereotypes can lead to more negative emotions, which can then lead to more judgment and bad treatment. It is time we stop thinking based on stereotypes and see people as individuals.

References

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