Remember the Titans is a true story that is envisaged in a movie, where the main character is played by award winning actor, Denzel Washington. The movie is about a college football team that comprises of both black and white student players. Denzel comes as the new coach of the team that is filled by suspicion, hate, prejudice and low self esteem.
The team faces a lot of challenges from a society that is racially discriminatory and a society that does not believe in working together and appreciating each of their differences in terms of culture. To beat this notion Denzel takes a different approach of uniting both black and white students to work as a team and respect each other for who they are, and although the strategy faces a lot of challenges from both the divide, eventually it yields fruits when the team play as a unit and wins most of its matches to make history
The movie gives a lot of insight into social psychology, the player’s attitude, feelings, behaviour, and thoughts are as result of imagined, implied or actual presence of other people around them.
Citing the first instance that coach broom (Denzel) comes to the college, some member of the school board are dismayed by the fact that he is black, the society being dominated by the white, some of those members of the board do not see how a black coach can succeed where a white one had failed, this episode depicts a people who are racist in nature and who do not believe that competence, skills and knowledge are based on merit rather than color.
Ironically this aspect of racial prejudice falls on both the divide where even the black students prejudice against the white students based on social inequalities at the time, black student view their counter parts as being soft, unaware of the social inequality and having the age all assumption that white are rich and have it easy, on the other hand the white students view their counterparts as being inferior, violent, and uncivilized.
But do the said factors contribute towards racial prejudice and the fact is that they are only used as scape goats for the propagation of racial prejudice
Basing from another scene of the movie, coach Broom takes the entire team including the assistant coach, to a war memorial site where people are buried, he tries to show them that if they do not work as a team then they (team) will face the same demise as those veterans buried there, this brings our focus to personal perception and group behaviour, in personal perception the underlying factor is what is referred to as the self –concept, it deals with the sum total of believes that ones hold about himself , this beliefs are what guides self reliance information process (Hazel, Kassin & Fein, 2010).
Personal perception is brought vividly in terms of both negative and positive attributes by various characters coach Broom is depicted having a positive perception of him self and the team he believes in himself and tries to inculcate the same spirit to his team.
The self-confidence exhibited by the couch makes him to match on, despite the various challenges. The team on the other hand has a deficit or a shortcoming in terms of personal perception and also their team, they do not believe in themselves and other, they do not see their team qualifying yet they constitute the team.
This also depicts them as having a low self-esteem. According to (Stambor, 2006) people with low self esteem cause distortions of their partner’s perception, in a nut shell they demoralize their partners high spirit, in the movie this is demonstrated by a player who quits because he can not see how the team can win and also the perception of the team being integrated as one with both white and black students, this demonstrates luck of self esteem.
In a research that was conducted, it revealed that those people with a low self esteem usually placed both negative and positive judgments in a separate area of their memory unlike their counterpart who have a high self esteem who place their judgment in one are of their memory (Stambor, 2006).
Lastly looking at the movie critically coach Broom takes a different approach from just hard training and implementing new tactics to actually talking and trying to understand the players, encouraging is termed as being an important facet of psychology and also sociology, in psychology it takes a different connotation like reinforcement , coach Bloom reinforces his players hard work through encouraging them through words which acts as a positive reinforcement for them and also the society around.
In sociology, encouragement takes different perspectives that include appreciating other people’s ability and also their culture (Nevid, 2008). This is demonstrated by the coach when he notices and appreciate the students talent in the game and also academics, in a scene he asks each player to say something about his room mate, this demonstrate his willingness for the players to get to know each other and their diverse cultures.
References
Hazel R, M. Kassin S, Fein, S. (2010). Social Psychology: Upper Saddle River: Cengage Learning.
Nevid, J, S. (2008). Psychology: Concepts and Applications. Upper Saddle River: Cengage Learning.
Stambor, Z. (2006). Stressed out Nation. Monitor on Psychology. 37(1). Pp 28-29.