прагматика и медиа дискурс / Teun A van Dijk - Communicating Racism

242 Communicating Racism

"positive," actors and actions are not coherent with predominantly negative models and schemata and, therefore, need further processing by constructing negative "explanations." The same actions of in-group and out-group members are differently interpreted: People we like are "frank" or "outspoken"; people we dislike are "aggressive" (Duncan, 1976; Sagar & Schofield, 1980; Stephan, 1977) . Ethnic group members at leisure may be seen as being lazy, whereas in-group members in the same situation may be seen as having a well-deserved rest from hard work. And whereas Black people without ajob may be seen as unwilling to work, Whites may be seen as having the "bad luck" of being out of a job. That is, the very interpretation process, and the conceptualizations of persons and their actions, may be directly controlled by underlying models and attitude schemata. A different perspective may lead to different evaluative associations of the meanings of discourse we hear or read in everyday communication. "Neutral" reports in the press, thus, may be routinely associated with their negative inferences, and these will form the model that is used for further thought, communication, and action.

Discounting

Another strategy of biased information processing is discounting (Kelley, 1972): If information about (causes of actions of) ethnic group members is incoherent with prevalent models or attitudes, this information may be discounted in several ways. Discounting strategies, thus, may involve the converse of selection, namely paying less attention to such information or explaining away such information as less relevant, ad hoc, oras an exception "that confirms the rule." Unlike the interpretation of action by in-group members, the causes or reasons for actions by minority group members do not tend to be interpreted in the most plausible way (Pyszcsynski & Greenberg, 1981). A Black male seen running in the street is not just in a hurry, but maybe running away from a crime or from the police. And indeed, the police themselves often take action on precisely this kind of interpretation (as was the case with an acquaintance of ours being arrested when jogging and jaywalking in Milwaukee, Wisconsin).

Discounting might also be construed as the converse of understanding, explanation, and integration processes, that is, as "singularization" Instead of the routine categorization and generalization that characterize ethnic information processing, focus is restricted to a single (exceptional) individual or special actions. Whereas for "typical" actions, negative models and schemata are being applied and confirmed, neutral or positive actions are not generalized to positive general models or schemata.

An ad hoc, particular model is constructed for one single event or person (Gurwítz & Dodge, 1977). Instead of explaining the action by attribution to inherent personal or group characteristics, special circumstances (such as luck) are taken into account (see below for other aspects of this example of the well-known attribution error). And instead of integrating the information with similar representations, the information is dissociated from such representations, so that it can be easily forgotten by becoming irretrievable.

A special case of discounting in communication is detopicalization. This happens when in discourse an overall topic or theme, which might be neutral or positive for ethnic minority groups, is detopicalized and given lower-level status, as a detail rather than as a high-level, prominent theme. We have seen aboye that the converse may take place for negative information: a negative detail about the out-group may be topicalized, by conferring it macro-level status, whereas negative properties of the in-group—such as racism—typically are deemphasized, for instance, in news reports. An example of the "upgrading" of details that illustrate negative properties of immigrants may be found in a story by a California cabdriver about an accident he had with a Mexican. Instead of being upset about, for instance, the damage to his car, the point of his story was that the other driver didn't speak English, a point he repeated several times and highly emotionally during his story.

Attribution

Selection, negativization, and discounting may cooperate in special processing of episodes in situations or discourse. For instance, if a negative topic is being talked about, and ethnic groups are somehow "involved," the recipient may associate these two topics in such a way that the ethnic group is put in the causal, agentive role, even when they are explicitly mentioned in a victím role. A well-known example is the use and possible interpretation of news stories headlined as "TWO DIE IN GHETTO RIOTS," where the deaths may result from police action (Downing, 1980; Fowler et al., 1979). Yet, violence and riots are conceptually associated, and so are ethnic groups and ghettos, which may lead to the interpretation that the ethnic group "caused" the riots and hence the death of two people.

In general, then, the interpretation of action and action discourse about ethnic groups may involve negative attributions, by which negative characteristics of out-group members are taken as the stereotypical "causes" of negative events. In much recent research on ethnic stereotypes, we find discussion of this kindof "fundamental attribution error" (Ross, 1977): Negative acts of out-group members are attributed to their

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"inherent" (negative) attributes, whereas the same acts by in-group members tend to be attributed (and hence found less negative) to context or circumstances (Pettigrew, 1979; Stephan, 1977). And the converse holds for positive acts, which we discussed aboye in the strategy of discounting.

In our data, the strategy of negative attribution prevails especially in the interpretation and evaluation of the situation in the neighborhood or country: urban decay, unemployment, lack of housing, of which also ethnic groups are victims, are often attributed to the very presence of such minority groups. Variants of this strategy are known as scapegoating as soon as general social problems are involved, and as blaming the victim when minorities suffer from such social circumstances. We assume, however, that it is more general, and may extend to any kind of information processing about out-groups.

Attribution and attribution biases in our theoretical framework are part of a more general theory of social interpretation. The processes involved in the attribution of "causes" of action to "dispositions" of actors or to contextual factors (circumstances) (see, e. g., Jaspars, Fincham, & Hewstone, 1983, for recent reviews and developments) cannot be fully understood without a complete analysis of understanding and evaluation. Causes and reasons should be distinguished, the cognitive processes of action should be further analyzed, and we need to specify in precise cognitive detail what naive theories of action and explanation people use as part of such everyday understanding (Antaki, 1981). Simplistic distinctions between "internal" and "external" causes for action may be less relevant in such more detailed cognitive analyses of complex, situated action understanding. This also holds for the application of attribution theories in explaining strategies of ethnic information processing (e.g., Hewstone & Jaspars, 1982; Stephan, 1977).

Finally, it is also crucial in this case to examine whether attributional strategies and biases also hold for out-group members with respect to ingroup members. Much of the literature referred to in this section suggests a generality if not a universality of cognitive principies, even when only White experimenters or subjects are used, that might not hold for the ways ethnic minority groups perceive and judge the majority. In this sense, the general notions of "in-group" and "out-group" used here may sometimes be misleading.

Exaggeration and Polarization

Prejudiced recipients not only tend to select information about minorities for special treatment, but also tend to exaggerate the negative nature of the attribute or action (Sagar & Schofield, 1980). Similarly, when in-group members are involved in the same situation, their negative actions will be minimized, and their pos i-

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tion of prejudiced situation models. Even when language users try to represent what a speaker has actually said and meant—which may be relevant when we represent the communicative situation as a conflict and want to argue against the speaker—their represention of the situation the discourse is about must be in agreement with their own cognitive representations. It is what they think actually happened.

Model formation is predominantly controlled by belief and opinion schemata and by (previous) model use. Under the control of a prejudiced attitude, thus, extant (particular and general) ethnic models are searched, partially activated, applied, and updated with the new information. This means that if the ethnic attitude as well as previous models of ethnic encounters are negative, there will be a tendency to maintain this generalized negativity in the formation of new models. The result is that even models of different situations tend to be similar, if only by their overall negative evaluation propositions (which may be the only dimension of a situation later remembered; see Forgas, 1979). This experiential similarity adds to the general tendency of perceiving the out-group as being more homogeneous than the in-group: Not only do its members all look alike, they also always do the same things, namely, those things "we are not used to here" (Park & Rothbart, 1982; Rothbart, Dawes, & Park, 1984).

Negativity may characterize each node and each level of model representation: It may hold for the situation as a whole, as well as for attributes of circumstances, actors, or actions at lower levels. This means that there will be a tendency to evaluate any situation in which ethnic group members are involved as negative. The processing strategy that applies involves both top-down and bottom-up "negativity spreading." If a social situation as a whole is evaluated negatively, the lower levels of the model may also be affected, such as the participant minority actors and their actions themselves. To wit, the negative opinion about living in a decaying urban area may be selectively attributed "downwards" to the ethnic groups of such an area. And conversely, an event in which minority actors participate may be evaluated "upwards" negatively, if the "foreigners" are evaluated negatively. The processes of (self-)con- firmation, self-fulfilling prophecies (Snyder, Tanke, & Berscheid, 1977), or circularity that have been shown to characterize ethnic information processing are also reflected in the interpretive modeling of ethnic situations.

Selection and focusing in interpretation, next, will result in "highlighting" ethnic participants in situation models. Even if in reality they are numerically not very prominent, the situation models in which they are represented may well assign them higher-level, major relevance. This means that they are more likely to be actors in high-level macroproposi-

tions that dominate a model. Insignificant everyday actions of minority group members may thus be assigned topical status, as is also clear from the stories we analyzed in Chapter 2. Macro-level representation of minority group members in models is one of the theoretical reasons that recall of minority group members and their actions is relatively superior (Bodenhausen & Wyer, 1985; Howard & Rothbart, 1980; Rothbart, 1981; Taylor, 1981).

Accentuation and polarization result in a representation of participants in two highly differentiated, opposed groups, namely, "us" and "them," where "they" are associated with negative attributes, and "we" with positive attributes. Because topicalization and focusing result in the assignment of agentive roles to "them," it follows that "we" are represented in a stereotypical- "victim" role. The structure of stories about minorities precisely confirms this organization of ethnic situation models.

The biases in the new or updated model that result from the various strategies described aboye typically confirm those in previous models (Snyder & Cantor, 1979). In fact, very little updating is necessary at al!. The actual situation will be seen as very similar to the previous ones. The processing result of such comparisons is a tendency to strategic generalization. If a few instantes of an ethnic -encounter are perceived to be similar, it may be assumed that they are all the same. In Chis way, we capture one aspect of "overgeneralization," which is traditionally taken to be a core strategy of prejudiced information processing (Allport, 1954; Grant & Holmes, 1981).

Obviously, attitude schemata may play a crucial role in such generalization processes. Instead of taking each ethnic encounter as a unique event, or even as a member of a class of similar events that have been experienced before, it may simply be taken as an instantiation of a general ethnic attitude, filled in with some contextual variables. The event is then seen as (proto)typical for its kind (Cantor & Mischel, 1979). In our theoretical perspective, a prototype is, so to speak, the concretization of an attitude in a model. Models represent experiences, but also our imaginary representations of reality. Prototypes are portraits of imaginary group members, and each group member in a particular model will be compared to this generalized model as it instantiates the abstract schema. The ethnic actor, thus, is not primarily represented as an individual but as a "constructed" group member who embodies the most prominent and distinctive features of his or her group members as represented in the respective categories of the ethnic attitude (Origin: foreigner; Appearance: Black; Socioeconomic status: low job orjobless; and so on).

Generalization and prototypical instantiation are apparently the two sides of the same coin of deindividualization and dehumanization.

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Ahl the processes described contribute to further extension of negative evaluations, in the interpretation process, in model building, and in attitude (trans)formation, both for the ethnic actors, as well as for their actions and settings. The cognitive machinery appears to be perfectly attuned to the systematic derogation of ethnic out-group members.

From Model to Schema

At this point, we approach the strategic core of prejudiced information processing. If models of ethnic encounters tend to be taken as "copies" of previous models of such encounters, and if they are simply taken as instances of generalized models or of schemata, further abstraction to attitudes is also easy. One or a few models may then serve as sufficient "evidence" for generalization, decontextualization, and abstraction. In other words, in prejudiced information processing, there are few differences between general attitudes and general models. Little or no experiential evidence, thus, is necessary to develop prejudiced attitudes. Each instance, while being interpreted on the basis of the stereotypical pattern, is a confirmation of this stereotype.

Because contextual specifics do not matter very much, ethnic attitudes themselves may develop along a stereotypical pattern. Prejudiced ethnic group attitudes tend to be very similar even for different ethnic groups. It is at this point that strategic information processing has its most powerful (and, therefore, devastating) cognitive and social effects: Many different situations, actions, and people can be interpreted basically in the same way. "They" are all the same, and always do the same things. A set of interpretation, representation, storage, and retrieval strategies guarantee that such a powerful overall strategy does not run into the obvious danger of creating misunderstanding or incoherence from the point of view of the dominant in-group member. In all phases and at each level of ethnic information processing, various strategic moves guarantee permanent self-confirmation of observation and interpretation. Individual differences can be easily accounted for by strategically discrediting them, for example, by taking them as exceptions to the rule, as irrelevant, as specific subtypes, or by other moves that downgrade the relevance of social information (Crocker, Fiske, & Taylor, 1984; Lord, Ross, & Lepper, 1979). This is one of the cognitive reasons that ethnic attitudes do not change easily. In-group members have become experts in dealing with all the information that is incoherent with the socially shared attitude schemata and their individually copied prototypes.

5.3. CONCLUSION: RELEVANCE FOR THE COMMUNICATIVE REPRODUCTION OF PREJUDICE

It need hardly be spelled out how the theoretical account of attitudes and prejudices proposed in this chapter fits into our general framework of the communicative reproduction of racism. The structures and strategies of ethnic prejudice systematically appear in everyday talk, of course, under the control of interaction strategies. The categories of ethnic attitudes and their contents show in the ways people express generalizations about "foreigners," and the frequencies, order, or spontaneity reveal the relevance or the organization of such prejudiced opinions. Stories show how concrete ethnic situation modeis have been constructed and retrieved from memory. And the many strategies of talk reveal part of the underlying cognitive strategies of ethnic information processing, such as attention allocation, focusing, selection, accentuation, polarization, instantiation, (over)generalization, discounting, attributional transfer, and especially negativization. Talk shows us how in-group members have interpreted ethnic encounters, and how they have represented them in memory.

Similarly, this chapter also suggests how people interpret such talk in others. We have argued that the basic processes in the understanding and evaluation of discourse and events are similar. It follows that people may be just as "biased" in the interpretation of conversation or media messages. In this case, however, the "input" is already prestructured, and the interpretation of the ethnic actors or events told about already suggested. Whereas the events and situations themselves at least potentially allow a more or less "neutral" interpretation, much of the information that might be relevant for such an alternative interpretation may be absent for prejudiced talk. That is, in such discourse, the minority actor and action may appear even more stereotypical and even more negative. Without counterinformation, it will be difficult to construct alternative ethnic models. At this communicative, and hence social, level, the cognitive processes of interpretation appear to be even more self-confirming. This is exactly what the power of the consensus means. In the next chapter, we investigate in more detail these communicative dimensions of prejudiced cognitions and conversations.

tions, in which messages were treated as "stimuli," behaviors as their caused "responses," and attitudes as the "mediating" intermediary variables of this connection.

The previous chapters have suggested a different approach to interpersonal communication and persuasion. Attitudes in general, and ethnic prejudice in particular, require systematic and explicit cognitive analysis in their own right. The processes of their acquisition and change cannot be fully understood without a detailed account of the cognitive strategies of social information processing. Because interpersonal communication and persuasion are mainly verbal, it is also crucial to pay special attention to the structures, the strategies, and the processing of the "messages" on which they are based. Also, in the currently reformulated cognitive orientations in communication and persuasion research, this discourse dimension remains underdeveloped. And finally, everyday persuasive conversation is also a specific form of social interaction, which requires independent analysis of speech acts, acts of argumentation, and further social acts performed by speech participants in communicative contexts.

Some elements of this new approach are being provided in current research in social cognition and communication. It has become quite fashionable, for instance, to rephrase old cognitivistic notions in tercos of a schema-theoretic framework, and to account for communication in terms of the information processing paradigm. We have argued before, however, that the mere use of a notion like "schema" is far from sufficient. In the majority of the recent studies that use this notion for theoretical and experimental analysis, not a single schema is ever explicitly spelled out. Explanations of person or group perception and memory, or of other forms of social information processing, therefore, remain at a rather superficial and semi-intuitive level. The same is true for the analysis of attitudes and ethnic stereotypes and their uses in communication and interaction. This is one of the reasons we find present developments in social cognition not "cognitive" enough.

On the other hand, current research on cognition and communication is not "social" enough either. We claim that when information is processed about other persons and groups, it is not sufficient to examine in which ways these processes are similar to those of information processing (e.g., about objects) in general, as is the case, for example, in the account of ethnic stereotypes in tercos of prototypes, or the explanation of prejudiced biases in tercos of illusory correlations or availability heuristics. An account of the social dimension of social cognition must be based on the following assumptions: (a) structures and strategies of social information in memory, for instance, about groups, functionally reflect the role of this information in communication and interaction,