- Remember the Titans Essay PDF

Preview

Summary

Unit 1 Psychology
...

Description

Remember the Titans Titans:: Media Analysis The film, “Remember the Titans” made in 2000, set in 1971 in the state of Alexandria, Virginia, US centres around T.C. Williams High School’s football team and explores the dynamics between the black and white community. It was an all white school until 1971, the government forced integration of the black and white schools creating racial tension that divided the communities. The interactions that occurs between each character portrays the heavily deep-rooted prejudice that existed within society at the time. The film is a dominant model of the way that social cognition is complex. Social cognition is not only important but also used in psychology to describe how we interpret, analyse, remember and use information to make judgements about others in different social situations. Whereas, attribution is the process by which people explain the causes of their own and other people’s behaviour which can be grouped into two categories - personal and situational attribution. The aspects of social cognition include how people form impressions of other people and how they explain behaviour of others, as well as the way they form attitudes towards people. Throughout “Remember the Titans”, distinct examples of attitudes were displayed by several characters that were either positive, negative or neutral attitudes revolving around some aspect of their lives and the world that they live in. An attitude is defined as an evaluation that one makes regarding an object, person, group, event or issue. One attitude that is evident in the film is Gerry observing his mother’s negative attitude towards African Americans. When Gerry says he is “going to play basketball with Julius”, his mother replies with “I don’t want to get to know him (Julius)”. This attitude was formed through the social learning theory as the white Americans developed their prejudiced views of African Americans by observing the behaviour of others. Gerry’s mother imposed this attitude on him. Another attitude demonstrated was that Sheryl loves football as a sport more than “some pretty dolls” or any other “little girl” activities. This was a positive attitude that was acquired through social learning from her father, a highly successful coach in their town. Since she observed the behaviour of her father, who is a role model to her with his triumphant coaching skills, Sheryl models coach Yoast’s major interest in sports. A third attitude depicted in the film was Coach Boone’s attitude towards coaching the football team since he is authoritative with his actions, asking that the players “spend time every day with a teammate of a different race” to “learn about him and his family…” Consequently, he also demanded full effort from all of his team players. Operant conditioning is when someone repeats behaviours that are encouraged and does not repeat behaviours which are punished. Coach Boone’s attitude was through operant conditioning when staying with this coaching style, as he repeatedly reminded them of their efforts, which encourages the team. His attitude is evident when he says “until that time, we go to 3-a-day practices” and even “4-a-day practices” if the team continued to ignore one another.

Furthermore, prejudice was formed in the film due to classical conditioning. Classical conditioning occurs through repeated association of two different stimuli or ‘events’ for example at the beginning of the film when the white Americans only saw the African Americans when they were protesting or on the news committing crimes, such as stealing. This lead to the repeated association of African Americans because the white Americans saw the aggressive behaviour that African Americans had and therefore, they portrayed a negative attitude towards them. The tri-component model, also known as the ‘ABCs of attitudes’ describes how a certain attitude has three related components which includes affective, behavioural and cognitive. Any attitude depicted in the film involves these three related components. The affective component are emotional reactions or feelings an individual has towards an object, event, issue, person, group which can be positive (liking or favouring), negative (disliking or hating), or neutral (having a lack of interest). The behavioural component refers to how a specific attitude towards something is expressed through an individual’s actions. The last component - the cognitive component are the beliefs an individual has regarding an object, group, event, person or an issue. The beliefs are linked to what we know about the world and it also develops as a result of our experience throughout the course of our lives. The tri-component model can be applied to how Sheryl’s attitude towards football was established during the scene when she was at Coach Boone’s house with his daughter Nicky. When she was told to stop talking about football by Boone and to instead, socialise with Nicky, the affective component is the annoyed tone when she hates “playing with dolls” (negative), the behavioural component is evident by her rolling her eyes and glaring at the dolls and the cognitive component is that she believes football is much more interesting than playing with dolls. Stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination are all heavily expressed in the film. A stereotype is defined as a collection of beliefs we have about people who belong to a certain group, despite individual differences among members of that group. People use stereotypes to assist them in knowing how they should react to new people that they meet since it is not possible for everyone to intimately know people that they meet the first time. Stereotypes are often based on incorrect or inadequate information. There are many stereotypes displayed and explored throughout the film. A clear stereotype that was expressed in the film is the idea that white Americans are expected to attain tertiary education qualifications or else they are labelled as “white trash”. This is seen in the case of Louie Lastik, one of the white football players on the team since his family had “never went to college” before, which makes him a “down-home, no good, never goin’-to-no-college white trash, man”. Another stereotype is that all girls like dolls because of the expectation of society. Coach Boone tells Yoast to get Sherly some “pretty dolls” as he assumes she is a young girl and must like to play with dolls. These stereotypes leads to prejudice in “Remember the Titans” between the different races and even with gender. Prejudice is holding a negative attitude

towards members of a group, based solely on their membership in that group. An example of prejudice expressed in the film is Sheryl’s attitude towards Coach Boone when she says to him that he took “[her] daddy’s job away” and there is “certainly no time for you [Coach Boone]”. This occurs at the beginning of the film and when Coach Boone comes over asking politely requesting to see her father. This is prejudice since Sheryl dislikes Boone based on her stereotypic view of white Americans over African Americans. Sheryl is prejudiced against African Americans which is why she evaluated its members, in this case Coach Boone negatively. Discrimination is positive or negative behaviour that is directly towards a social group and its members. It takes many forms which may involve behaviour such as ignoring people, excluding people from places or positions, bullying, putting people down or in its extreme form such as physical violence. Negative discrimination is depicted when Sunshine invites Petey to a bar as the owner mistreats them with “the right to refuse service to anybody”. He simply discriminates against Blue and Petey just because of the colour of their skin and their ethnicity. Another explicit example of discrimination is Gerry’s girlfriend, Emma, who did not initially shake Julius’ hand. Emma, being a white American didn’t want to associate with Julius because he was an African American, which displays an obvious sign of discrimination since one race shows hatred towards another person. The division of African Americans and white Americans played a major role in forming the ingroups and the out-groups in the film. The in-group is a group that the individual is able to identify with and is accepted by whereas, an out-group is a group that the individual does not identify with that they feel superior to. In relation to the film, the white Americans of Virginia were the in-group since they had the power over the African Americans in Virginia, which makes them the outgroup. The African Americans were viewed negatively as “black animals” and the white Americans used their privileges in order to make them feel inferior. This can be distinctly displayed in the restaurant/bar scene when Ronnie (Sunshine) invites Blue and Petey to come. The white Americans (ingroup) viewed their peers in their group as more positively and were more loyal to them whilst they had a negative perspective towards African Americans (those in the outgroup). Black people were viewed as less like the white people. There are many types of attribution from the film to explain the specific behaviours of characters. The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to overestimate the influence of personal factors and underestimate the impact of situational factors on other people’s behaviour. When an individual does this, they attribute a person’s behaviour to internal rather than external factors. It is evident in the film in the case of Coach Boone’s strategies as a coach. Coach Yoast attributes Coach Boone’s coaching strategies and his personal characteristics of arrogance pride whilst underestimating the racial tension and discrimination that Boone is having to deal with that creates obstacles impacting his coaching decisions in life. Self-serving bias is when someone judges themselves and tend to take the credit for their successes whilst attributing their failures to situational factors.

Whenever the team wins, Coach Boone takes the credit of being successful due to his coaching tactics, however he blames other coaches and teams whenever the team is lagging scores behind. The Halo effect is a cognitive bias in which the impression someone forms about one quality of a person not only influences their beliefs but also expectations about the person in other qualities. People who are physically attractive benefit from the halo effect. This effect can also be seen as ‘first impression’, where physical appearance is an important characteristic of first impressions. The Halo effect could be applied to Ronnie’s (Sunshine) character due to the appearance of his long hair being labelled as ‘feminine’ or ‘homosexual’. This influenced the belief and expectations about his other qualities such as his ability to play football or his sexual orientation. The players assumed he was a weaker football player or was homosexual as they applied one quality of him without having any more information about his other traits. It is portrayed when Gerry underestimated Sunshine’s football skills when first meeting him and not knowing much about him, which were in fact and in reality very skilled. The film, “Remember the Titans”, effectively applies the elements of social cognition through the lives and experiences of various characters, especially the ways that the characters presented themselves to others in different social situations. The place and the time of the film further adds a particular value to the significance of the struggles, which showed the harsh extent of racial tensions between the communities in that era of 1971. As the film followed the coaches and the players journey including the transition of an all white school and football team to a mixed interracial black-white team, the film highlighted the changes in the many attitudes displayed through characters. Ultimately, it lead to changes in the community’s - between the white Americans and African Americans perspective and even coaches Bill Yoast and Herman Boone overcame their differences, when they turnt a group of hostile men into young champions....