Nerds in The Big Bang Theory 1 - The Potential of The Big Bang Theory to Reduce Prejudice against Nerds
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Nerds in The Big Bang Theory 1
The Potential of The Big Bang Theory to
Reduce Prejudice against NerdsNerds in The Big Bang Theory 2
Abstract
Numerous theories have been proposed to describe how media’s portrayal of social
outgroups and their stereotypes might increase or decrease ingroup members’ prejudice against
them. This paper follows a line of theories that focus on explaining the effects of intergroup
contact on prejudice and extending this explanation to parasocial relationships. Based primarily
on Pettigrew’s reformulation of Allport’s Intergroup Contact Theory, the paper outlines several
factors that should be taken into consideration when evaluating mediated portrayals of social
outgroups. Particularly emphasized is the coexistence of both personalization and categorization
factors. The paper then presents a qualitative content analysis of a popular American television
show, The Big Bang Theory, evaluated based on the previously described factors. The results of
the analysis suggest that The Big Bang Theory does indeed have the potential to reduce viewers’
prejudice against the social outgroup “nerds” through parasocial interactions with the show’s
characters.
Keywords: stereotypes, prejudice, media, television, Intergroup Contact Theory, nerds, The Big Bang TheoryNerds in The Big Bang Theory 3
The Potential of The Big Bang Theory to
Reduce Prejudice against Nerds
In 1986, Tajfel and Turner proposed Social Identity Theory to explain the process by
which affiliation with an ingroup could lead to prejudice against an outgroup (Brown & Zagefka,
2005, pp. 56-58). The theory posits that people derive their identities from the social groups they
belong to and that a positive evaluation of their ingroup is necessarily connected to high self-
esteem. Furthermore, in order to assign a relatively high social status to their ingroup, people
assign a comparatively low social status to their outgroups. It seems unsurprising, then, that
children bully and that even adults ostracize certain social groups. A common victim group of
this social ostracism is “nerds.”
Wikipedia, a collaborative, user-based Internet encyclopaedia (hence a reliable source for
understanding the common descriptions associated with a stereotype), describes nerds:
Nerd is a derogatory slang term for a person typically described as intellectual, socially-
impaired, and obsessive who spends inordinate amounts of time on unpopular or obscure
activities, pursuits, or interests, which are generally either highly technical, or relating to
topics of fiction or fantasy, to the exclusion of more mainstream activities (“Nerd,” 2012,
para. 1).
Naturally, almost by definition, members of the “nerd” outgroup are often ostracized and socially
discriminated against. Often a single indicator, such as scientific intelligence or love for
technology, becomes a cue to immediate stereotyping and categorizing, and frequently enough,
to prejudice and ostracizing.
Considering the prejudice against this outgroup, it is interesting to observe Chuck Lorre
and Bill Prady’s (2007-2012) The Big Bang Theory continue to enjoy immense popularity since
its premiere in 2007 (“The Big Bang Theory,” 2012a, “Ratings”). The show follows Sheldon
Cooper and Leonard Hofstadter, “brilliant physicists, the kind of ‘beautiful minds’ thatNerds in The Big Bang Theory 4
understand how the universe works,” but have trouble interacting with people, and their “socially
dysfunctional friends,” Howard Wolowitz and Rajesh Koothrappali (“The Big Bang Theory,”
2012b, “About”). (Five-season-) long story short, the show’s main characters are nerds. These
nerds are lovable, or interesting at the least—interesting enough to be on air for over five years.
The positive portrayal of these outgroup members could reduce prejudice against the outgroup as
a whole, and with its continuing and widespread success, the show has the potential to have
impact on a large scale. It is important, then, to analyze the show’s portrayal of its nerdy
characters and assess its potential to reduce negative prejudice against them. A qualitative
analysis of 4 hours (eight episodes) of the show reveals that The Big Bang Theory is indeed
likely to reduce prejudice against nerds as a social outgroup.
Theories
Prejudice tends to arise when people lack knowledge about or experience with the
outgroup. Based on this limited information, they prejudge as a result of their natural tendency to
categorize and generalize. Explains Allport (1954/1979): “The human mind must think with the
aid of categories…orderly living depends on it” (p. 20). He purports that people create
categories—or stereotypes—and prejudge new information, making generalizations in order to
classify it into their existing categories (pp. 17-23). Allport’s (1954/1979) Contact Theory
explains that this limitation can be somewhat overcome through positive intergroup contact,
decreasing prejudice. The theory specifies that when individuals have equal group status within
the particular situation and strive for a common goal through intergroup cooperation with
institutional or authoritative support, intergroup contact can reduce prejudice. Furthermore, there
is increasing evidence that mediated “parasocial contact” can also have parallel effects in
reducing prejudice (Schiappa, Gregg, & Hewes, 2005). An examination of current theoriesNerds in The Big Bang Theory 5
suggests that viewing televised portrayals of an outgroup, such as that of nerds in The Big Bang
Theory, can reduce prejudice.
Since its initial proposal, Allport’s (1954/1979) Intergroup Contact Theory has been
extensively tested, supported, challenged, and modified, by numerous social scientists (Pettigrew
& Tropp, 2006; Tausch & Hewstone, 2010). In particular, Pettigrew (1998) reformulates the
theory by incorporating into the model the sequential psychological mechanisms through which
intergroup contact may reduce prejudice. In this longitudinal model, Pettigrew emphasizes the
potency of long-term close relationships that allow for prolonged contact and a process of
prejudice reduction and generalization. He explains that while Allport’s four conditions of
successful intergroup contact—equal group status within the situation, common goals, intergroup
cooperation, and the support of authorities—are “essential situational factors for positive
intergroup outcomes” (p. 76), additional stages—positive initial contact, established contact, and
unified group—are critical to reducing prejudice through intergroup interaction.
Pettigrew further elaborates that for positive initial contact, decategorization, or the
personalization of the outgroup member, must happen. Brewer and Miller (1984) propose and
Ensari and Miller (2002) find evidence for this idea of personalization as a process of reducing
prejudice. The model states that intergroup interactions that encourage the sharing of intimate
information reduce biased, category-based responses and judgments. During Pettigrew’s
“established contact” stage, people generalize these newfound positive feelings to the outgroup
as a whole. According to Pettigrew, this stage is facilitated when the outgroup member’s group
affiliation is salient during the interaction. Hewstone and Brown (1986) propose and explain the
psychological process behind this categorization model. They argue that individuating the
outgroup member too much can lead to viewing him/ her as a deviation, inhibiting generalizationNerds in The Big Bang Theory 6
of the positive interaction to the outgroup. Therefore, they argue, to reduce general prejudice
against the group as a whole, the outgroup member’s group identity should be emphasized and
the member’s characteristics should be portrayed as typical and representative (pp. 548-549).
With the increasing prevalence of media and its much discussed potential to influence
people’s attitudes arises an interesting issue of whether the effects of the contact hypothesis can
be extended beyond direct face-to-face contact to indirect, mediated contact. Reeves’ and Nass’
(1996) “Media Equation” makes this potential seem likely. They argue that discerning mediated
objects from physical matter is a learned skill, and that people’s physiological and psychological
reactions to media are essentially the same as those to events and objects in real life. It is not
surprising, then, that such realistic responses to media may translate to social and interpersonal
interactions with personalities and characters portrayed in the media. Horton and Worhol (1956)
claim that “parasocial” interactions mediated by radio, television, or movies do indeed resemble
face-to-face social interaction in ordinary groups. In an extensive review, Giles (2002) supports
this claim, concluding that parasocial interaction and social interaction share many attributes, and
further, that the psychological processes involved in parasocial interaction resemble those
observed in ordinary social activity and relationship formation.
Considering people’s parasocial interaction and relationship with media figures, it is
reasonable to believe that the effects of Intergroup Contact Theory can be extended to mediated
interactions. Schiappa, Gregg, and Hewes (2005) claim that the theory is indeed applicable to
parasocial relationships, and propose the parasocial contact hypothesis. They contend that
“parasocial contact can provide the sort of experience that can reduce prejudice” (p.97) through
the same cognitive and affective mechanisms through which face-to-face contact does. In otherNerds in The Big Bang Theory 7
words, positive exposure to outgroup members portrayed in media can lead to long-term
parasocial relationships that reduce prejudice against the outgroup as a whole.
Methods
Procedure
Eight of 108 aired episodes (as of April 24, 2012) were selected and analyzed according
to particular criteria based on the contact hypothesis. The total length of video material added up
to 4 hours.
Episode Selection
The Big Bang Theory has been running for five seasons. Since Pettigrew’s (1998)
reformulated contact theory emphasizes the longevity of contact, four episodes from the first
season and four from the fifth season were selected to capture the prolonged interaction between
viewers and the characters. The first four episodes of either season were analyzed. The earliest of
the eight episodes was aired September 24, 2007, and the latest October 6, 2011.
Positive Initial Contact—Personalization
To evaluate whether the episodes provided ideal opportunities for positive initial contact,
the extent of personalization was examined. Mainly, dialogues and scenes revealing personal,
intimate information about the characters were recorded. Such information included relationship
issues, personal feelings, childhood stories, and family ties.
Established Contact—Categorization
To assess the potential generalizability of positive parasocial contact, the salience of the
characters’ nerdiness was examined.
Salience. “Salience” was identified as reminders or cues emphasizing the characters’
identities as nerds. Such cues were both explicit, pointed out in dialogue or inserted into theNerds in The Big Bang Theory 8
storyline, and implicit, unmentioned but visually present. Specifically, noted implicit cues
included costume and props.
Nerdiness. Particular features commonly associated with the nerd outgroup were
recorded. Such characteristics included extreme intelligence, physical ineptness, obsessive-
compulsiveness, and social awkwardness (“Nerd,” 2012, “Characteristics” para. 1, 6).
Furthermore, obsession with “nerdy interests” (para. 3-5) was taken note of. These included
intellectual or technical topics related to science, mathematics and technology, and film, comic
book, or video game references related to fantasy and science fiction.
Results
Results of the eight-episode analysis were promising. In all episodes, there was an
observable coexistence of personalization factors and identity salience.
Personalization
Relationships. The most commonly revealed intimate details were those pertaining to
romantic feelings or relationship issues. Much of the first season’s storyline revolves around
Leonard’s unrequited love for his new neighbour, Penny. He fantasizes about babies that will be
“smart and beautiful” and admits to having ulterior motives for going out of his way to help
Penny. In the first episode, for example, he finds himself doing Penny a favour by
(unsuccessfully) visiting her ex-boyfriend to retrieve her TV set. He later admits, “I was hoping
to establish a relationship with Penny that might have someday led to sex.” The audience is
exposed to further examples of Leonard’s quest for Penny’s love, as in the third episode, when
he has taken Penny’s mail “accidently on purpose so [he’d] have an excuse to talk to her.” More
intimate emotions, such as disappointment and rejection, are also revealed to the audience. In the
second episode, when Penny is enraged at Leonard for breaking into her house, he is moody allNerds in The Big Bang Theory 9
day because, in Sheldon’s words, “his imaginary girlfriend broke up with him.” In the third
episode, when he sees Penny kissing a “kinda dreamy” guy, Leonard goes through, as Sheldon
predicts, “weeks of moping and tedious emo songs and calling me to come down to pet stores
and look at cats.”
In addition to the early storyline of Leonard’s romantic feelings for Penny, personal
details from the past and present related to romantic relationships are dispersed throughout the
episodes. For example, in the first episode, Leonard and Sheldon converse about a past
relationship, revealing to the audience that Leonard once had a girlfriend named Joyce Kim, who
defected to North Korea. In the third episode, Leonard, in an attempt to recover from Penny’s
rejection, asks co-worker Leslie Winkle out on a date, another unsuccessful event the audience
observes.
The sharing of personal relationship issues continues in the fifth season. In the second
episode, for example, Leonard is struggling to make his long-distance relationship with his
girlfriend Priya Koothrappali work. The audience is taken into his bedroom, where he
awkwardly tries and fails to have an intimate Skype date with Priya. In the third episode,
personal details about Howard’s engagement to his girlfriend Bernadette Rostenkowski are
shared with the audience. He tries to convince Bernadette to move into his mother’s house,
where he currently lives. Their arguments and struggles to reconcile are all part of the plot and
exposed in detail to the audience. Raj’s love affairs are shared with the viewers in the fourth
episode of this season. He is introduced by Penny to a deaf girl, Emily, whom Raj falls in love
with and showers with gifts. Throughout the episode, the audience sees Raj’s personal
interactions with Emily and learns of his intimate emotions as he shares them with Penny.Nerds in The Big Bang Theory 10
Family and Childhood. Although rarely a focal part of the episodes, the characters’
families make appearances and are referenced throughout the show. For example, in the first
episode of the first season, in conversing about the last time Sheldon and Leonard “had a woman
take her clothes off in [their] apartment,” the two characters reveal that Leonard’s grandmother
has Alzheimer’s. In season 5’s first episode, Sheldon calls Leonard’s mother to help him cope
with his “emotional upheaval.” The audience learns that she is “a world-renowned expert in
parenting and child development” but also that she is a tough parent who offers no emotional
support to her distressed son. In addition to the nature of familial relationships being revealing in
themselves, familial references are often accompanied by personal accounts of the characters’
childhood. For example, when Sheldon’s mother, in episode 4 of the first season, comes to his
home convince him to apologize to his boss, she claims that Sheldon “gets his temper from his
daddy” and that “he has been difficult since he fell out of [her] in the K-Mart.”
Categorization
Implicit Identity Cues. Implicit indicators of the characters’ “nerd” classification were
present throughout all eight episodes. The most consistent appearance was that of graphic t-shirts
and room décor that kept the characters’ love for traditionally nerdy obsessions, like superheroes,
obtuse science, and fantasy/ science fiction franchises, salient. For example, Sheldon is often
seen wearing a shirt with Superman, Flash, or the Green Lantern references, and Leonard
wearing one with scientific references such as the phases of the moon, a string of DNA, a
chemical compound, a mathematical formula, or the periodic table. Sheldon and Leonard’s
apartment, in which a large amount of the show takes place, is full of references to the
characters’ nerd group identities. For example, leaning against the walls of their living room and
kitchen are several whiteboards filled with formulae and diagrams; in one corner stands a plasticNerds in The Big Bang Theory 11
model of molecules and a telescope; on the walls hang posters of movies and comic book heroes;
on their side table sits their Kleenex box, shaped like a Rubik’s Cube.
Explicit Identity Cues. Sheldon, Leonard, Raj, and Howard’s identities as nerds are often
emphasized in the storyline or explicitly pointed out in conversation. For example, the very first
scene of season 1’s first episode begins with Leonard and Sheldon visiting a “high IQ sperm
bank.” Four years later, in episode 3 of season 5, Sheldon spends the whole episode buying,
critiquing, and playing with a new toy train set. The characters often blatantly point out that they
are nerds. For example, when Penny is first invited to join Leonard and Sheldon for lunch, she
comments on their boards saying, “You’re like one of those, Beautiful Mind genius guys.” When
she first tries to talk to Raj and asks about his selective mutism towards women, Howard answers
matter-of-factly, “He’s kind of a nerd.” In the second episode, when Penny finds out Sheldon and
Leonard broke into her room to tidy it up while she slept, she yells, “Son of a bitch! You sick,
geeky bastards!” and later that episode, as Sheldon is forced to apologize to her for the incident,
he mumbles, “I have a master’s and two PhD’s. I should not have to do this.”
Even as the episodes progress, the audience is always reminded of the characters’
nerdiness. In the third episode of season 5, Amy Farrah Fowler reads from Leonard’s high school
year book: “Dear Leonard. You’re really good at science. Maybe one day you’ll come up with a
cure for being a dork.” In the fourth episode, Leonard comforts himself by justifying his long-
distance relationship, “See, this is the good thing about having a girlfriend nine thousand miles
away. I can spend my nights doing whatever I want,” to which Howard responds, “You mean
like playing nerd games with us?”Nerds in The Big Bang Theory 12
Coexistence of Personalization and Categorization.
The most promising observation was that the personalization and categorization of the
nerd characters often accompanied each other, juxtaposed to emphasize both. For example, when
Leonard shares his intimate feelings for Penny in season 1, Sheldon points out that they are “not
of the same species” or that he can “retrieve the black box from the twisted smouldering
wreckage that was once [Leonard’s] fantasy of dating her and analyze the data so that [he]
wouldn’t crash into geek mountain again.” In the second episode, when Leonard goes out of his
way to impress Penny by carrying her furniture up the stairs, Sheldon points out their lack of
upper-body strength. Leonard responds, “We don’t need strength. We’re physicists. We are the
intellectual descendants of Archimedes.”
This juxtaposition of both personalization and categorization factors continues in season
5. When Leonard shares his personal struggles in his long-distance relationship with his friends
and the audience, Howard offers a mechanical invention, “two interfaces that simulate a human
mouth,” by which Leonard could virtually kiss Priya. When Howard has relationship issues with
his fiancé Bernadette about moving into his mother’s house, the audience is presented with a
personal and intimate conversation between the two, set in Howard’s room, full of colourful
posters, figurines, toys, and other room décor, including lightsabers on his wall and model
rockets on his shelves.
Discussion
This content analysis of The Big Bang Theory illustrated that the show, according to the
parasocial contact hypothesis, has the potential to reduce negative prejudice against “nerds” as a
social outgroup. This potential has optimistic implications in that parasocial contact overcomes
key limitations of direct contact. There are limited intergroup contact opportunities in real-lifeNerds in The Big Bang Theory 13
settings (Turner, Crisp, & Lambert, 2007, p.429). For example, intergroup anxiety, “fears that
the interaction partner, or the respondents themselves, may behave in an incompetent or
offensive manner” (Turner, Crisp, & Lambert, 2007, p.428), can cause people to avoid
interactions with outgroups (Plant & Devine, 2003; Shelton & Richeson, 2005; Turner, Crisp, &
Lamber, 2007). Furthermore, such anxiety can translate into uncertainty or negativity toward
interaction during face-to-face contact, causing the interaction to be a negative experience (Plant
& Devine, 2003).
However, this analysis should not be taken as evidence that the show will definitely
decrease prejudice for all viewers. First of all, content analyses, even those based on the soundest
of theories, can only hypothesize a potential effect. A well-designed empirical observation of
audience responses and attitudes that tests this hypothesis about The Big Bang Theory would
help support this claim. In addition to the inherent limitations of a content analysis, this
particular analysis is limited in that it assumes that viewers follow the show through its
consecutive seasons, and that all episodes are essentially similar to the eight evaluated. However,
each episode analysed seemed to have an effective combination of salience and personalization,
increasing the likelihood that even light or intermittent viewers are somewhat affected.
Furthermore, all eight episodes, sampled based on criteria unrelated to content, showed
prejudice-reducing characteristics in a regular pattern. It seems reasonable to believe that the
characteristics are somewhat typical of the remaining episodes.
“Nerds” as a social group are often shunned and ostracized, based on stereotypes and
prejudice. The Big Bang Theory has the potential to benefit the society by reducing this negative
tendency. In addition to the general benefit society enjoys from decreasing negativity toward a
particular group, there are practical benefits in reducing bias against the nerd outgroup. AsNerds in The Big Bang Theory 14 society becomes more technology-centred and scientifically advanced, the expertise of nerds is becoming increasingly demanded and valued in the workforce—or, as New York Times reporter Steve Lohr (2009) writes, “the nation’s economy is going to need more cool nerds” (para. 5). Unfortunately, young people are shying away from computing and other “nerdy” careers, possibly because of the negative stereotypes associated with them (Lohr, 2009; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009). Dispelling these negative associations through a nationwide television programme like The Big Bang Theory could have immense positive implications for society.
Nerds in The Big Bang Theory 15
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