The dumb jock and the science nerd.

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.

Thinking isn't always prompted by feelings of inadequacy, of course. Sometimes when we do mental simulations to see how we can get more from the world, our feelings are more adequately characterized as ambition. Someone might feel quite satisfied with the actions of the characters in the novel she was writing but still think more about them to make the novel even better. I would speculate, however, that a simulation of this sort would more likely be undertaken when one is not satisfied with the characters' behavior. Sometimes we think when we have deliberately sought a particular challenge. More often we think and scheme when we feel we lack the knowledge, authority, or sheer brawn to immediately solve the problems with which we find ourselves confronted. Consequently, I think people tend to strongly associate the activity of thinking with various types of powerlessness.

I suggest that it's this association that enables people to be comfortable using stereotypes in which thinking is associated with various sorts of weakness and strength is associated with the lack of thinking. Throughout our popular mythology, as I mentioned before, we find the hulking dumb jock and his counterpart, the bespectacled science nerd. A close relative of this contrast is the dimwitted, glad-handing, rich fraternity boy and the shy, sensitive, intellectual coed. Villains are often small, hunched, and crafty, while heroes are tall, sturdy, and pure-hearted. Women, who have traditionally been the more shut-out and disempowered gender, are often portrayed as calculating and manipulative. Men, when being discussed as a whole, are often depicted as brutes, mindlessly acting on animal impulses. Ronald Reagan, certainly no intellectual giant, was perhaps because of this usually characterized as a strong leader who could get things done. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, on the other hand, thought by most analysts as among our most thoughtful, intelligent presidents, have been continually derided as weak and indecisive.

The ultimate moral we should take from this is to be careful not to make that automatic connection between thinking and powerlessness. Indeed, many praise-worthy aspects of thinking go unnoticed when we allow the "lament over power-lessness" to seize center stage. It is very easy for us to reflect on our own experiences, rely on stereotypes, and slip into a "real men (or women) don't think" mentality. It is thus easy to write off thoughtful politicians as wishy-washy and indecisive. But knowing that it's easy for this lament to be made should make us extra vigilant against it becoming our sole focus.

Negatively stereotyping thinking and thinkers is not only shallow and incomplete but also highly dangerous. Calling contemplative behavior "weak" in a knee-jerk way cannot help but reward impulsiveness. In a complex and armament-ridden world such as ours, we cannot afford to encourage impulsiveness. We should also remember that the greatest inventiveness, creativity, and problem-solving in our history has been done when people wanted more than what they could get by just acting immediately on the world as they found it. Civilization was created by our predecessors' not only examining and experimenting with the world as they found it but contemplating visions of the world as it could be. Our everyday experience may make it very easy to slip into thinking otherwise, but we need to remember that "real men" and "real women" do think and always have.