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

252 Communicating Racism

and (b) these processes of communication and interaction are structurally embedded in social micro and macro contexts. These two dimensions assign both a functional and a contextual dímension to the nature of social cognition. One of the many consequences of this orientation is, for instance, that people are processing social informatíon not as individual persons, but rather as social members of groups. This is crucial for an explicit account of ethnic prejudice as a form of social cognition. Interpersonal communication, in that perspective, is an enactment of intragroup communication and of intergroup perception and interaction.

Against this background, then, our analysis of the interpersonal communication and acquisition of ethnic prejudice requires a new conceptualization of the major components of this process along the following lines:

(a)The interactive production of prejudiced talk in general, and the persuasive structures and strategies of such conversations in particular, are a function of "underlying" cognitive structures and strategies of ethnic beliefs and attitudes. We summarily cal! this the production component.

(b)Similarly, the processes of understanding, evaluating, and representing talk about ethnic groups are a function of the ethnic representations (models and attitudes) of the recipient. This is the interpretation

component.

(c)The strategic (trans)formation of ethnic beliefs, opinions, and attitudes is a function of these interpretation and representation processes. This will be called the transformation component.

(d)These production, interpretation, and transformation processes are a function of the discursive goals and strategies of conversation in particular and of those of interaction, such as selfand other-presentation in general. This is the interaction component.

(e)Finally, the cognitive, discursive, and interactional structures and strategies are a function of the social (micro) situation and, therefore, of societal (macro) structures. We may call this the social context component.

After a brief critical discussion of the traditional and more recent approaches in the fields of interpersonal communication, attitude change, and persuasion, we focus our attention on the neglected dimensions of the process of social attitude and prejudice (re)production in conversation. The keywords for this new focus are structures and strategies, namely, those of text and (in) context, those of social cognition and (in) communication, and those of attitudinal and ideological (re)production. That is, we should show how discursive, cognitive, and social strategies of ethnic attitude (trans)formation within the dominant in-group are interrelated and enacted at the micro level of interpersonal communicative encounters. In the next stage, we then establish the link between this

communicative, interpersonal level with the higher, macro levels of the analysis of racism and its social reproduction.

Whereas this might be a nice theoretical program, we as yet hardly have an empirical leg to stand on. We merely have our interviews as the major source for data about such processes. Yet, as approximations of real talk, and as examples of persuasive communications about ethnic minority groups, they at least provide rather natural examples of how ingroup members go about expressing and conveying their ethnic attitudes in the social and communicative context. To complement these data, we draw on earlier experimental results obtained by others within different theoretical frameworks. Especially for the important interpretation and transformation components, we only have indirect evidence about how the recipiente of persuasive talk about ethnic minorities uriderstand and evaluate such talk and how its cognitive representation interacts with the (trans)formation of ethnic attitudes. In this case also, we must rely on previous experimental work, and on data derived from the ways people reproduce personal and media discourse in their own talk (see Chapter 3). Methodologically, this procedure allows less control and a lessfocused study of isolated "variables." On the other hand, it provides the most natural form of interpretation and transformation assessment, namely, through the ways speakers spontaneously display their understanding, representations, (counter)arguments, andlor (dis)agreement in further talk about such earlier communications.

1.2. TOWARD A COGNITIVE THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE PERSUASION

The interpersonal communication of prejudice is a special case of the communication of attitudes, a process usually—and sornewhat narrowly—captured under the concept of "persuasion." Before we propose a new framework of persuasion processes in general, and of those of ethnic prejudice communication in particular, we critically summarize some major tenets of classical persuasion research. We formulate these comments from our actual point of view, namely, that of social cognition, as well as against the background of our own, discourse analytical and interdisciplinary, approach to interpersonal communication and persuasion. We do not aim, however, to give a review of the literature, which has repeatedly and recently been done elsewhere (Petty & Cacioppo, 1981; Petty, Ostrom & Brock, 1981; Reardon, 1981; Roloff & Miller, 1980).

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The Behavioristic Background

Despite a long and respectable "cognitive" tradition in social psychology, many studies of interpersonal communication, persuasion, and attitude change showed methodological inspiration from behaviorism, until the 1970s (Bettinghaus, 1973; Greenwald, Brock, & Ostrom, 1968). And even until today, persuasive intentions of a "source," expressed as verbal or nonverbal behavior, are still described as "stimuli," and persuasive effects on behavior as "responses." In the more cognitivistic approaches, these reponses were taken to be caused or "mediated" by attitudes, conceptualized as the "intermediary variables" in the persuasive process (Petty, Ostrom, & Brock, 1981). The formation and change of attitudes as (or influenced by) "internal" responses to persuasive behavior, typically "messages," thus became analyzed as a form of conditional learning. Experimentally, this meant that message or "source" characteristics were treated as independent variables, and mental, verbal, or behavioral responses as dependent variables. Stimuli, as well as cognitive and behavioral responses, were "measured" and statistically "correlated," but not structurally analyzed and subjected to explicit process analysis. And also, the cognitive analysis was formulated in general notions, such as "balance" or "consistency," which were hardly made explicit in terms of precise cognitive representations or rules of inference.

Also, for the sake of experimental clarity and control, the usual setup of research was to manipulate some characteristic of the source (e.g., appearance, status, credibility, and so on), a property of the persuasive message (e.g., style or argument posítion), or the type of recipients (varying according to gender, age, education, or "persuasibility"), and to examine whether such controlled variables had an effect on the direction, size, or nature of attitude change, measured verbally (typically by scale responses) or behaviorally.

In this analysis of persuasion processes, the precise role of "verbal" reactions, such as opinion statements of various kinds (affirmations on scales, acceptance/rejections of preformulated opinions, or "free" formulations of opinions in, for instance, interviews), was not quite clear. Usually they were seen as the operationalization, or as the external expression, of attitudes. Hence, the permanent interest in the dichotomy between attitudes, defined as "verbal (expressions of) attitudes" on the one hand, and "behavior" on the other hand (Cushman & McPhee, 1980; Zanna, Higgins, & Herman, 1982).

Such an analysis ignored the obvious fact that verbal statements are also (communicative) acts, and in need of analysis like other "behavior caused by" attitudes. And only in 1970 did it become understood that

action is not "caused" by attitudes, but that more complex cognitive representations and processes, including beliefs, intentions, and goals, interact with attitudes in the planning and execution of "behavior" (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975; von Cranach & Harré, 1982). We had to wait until the 1980s, however, before such cognitive analyses of the attitude-action relationship were formulated in explicit tercos of representations and processes, and integrated into a general framework of social cognition (Higgins, Herman, & Zanna, 1981; Roloff & Berger, 1982; Wyer & Srull, 1984). Together with impression formation and other interactional strategies, persuasion could in that case be analyzed in terms of (discursive) social information processing.

Early Cognitivistic Approaches

Despite the influence of the behavioristic paradigm until the 1970s, a substantial segment of classical persuasion research had a more cognitivistic flavor. After all, the notion of "attitude" itself implies a cognitive perspective on (influencing) behavior. This approach favored more extensive attention for the nature and organization of attitudes themselves, as well as for the mental processes involved in persuasive communication. Although reference to Bartlett's work (1932) on memory and schemata was not frequent, and despite the fact that especially his analysis of the interpersonal communication of beliefs is seldom acknowledged, he should be considered as one major source of this cognitivistic development. Gordon Allport, in his work on attitudes, rumor (Allport & Postman, 1947), and ethnic prejudice (Allport, 1954), was clearly influenced by Bartlett and always paid a lot of attention to the cognitive dimension of social communication.

The major sources of the cognitivistic approach to persuasion are the various "cognitive consistency" theories of the nature of attitudes, attitude change, and persuasion, such as Heider's balance theory (1946), Festinger's cognitive dissonance theory (1957), or Osgood and Tannenbaum's (1955) congruity theory (see Abelson et al., 1968, for surveys). Common to these approaches is the interest in the organization and the dynamics of attitudes and their formation or change (Rosenberg et al., 1960). That is, sets of beliefs are cognitively in equilibrium (balanced, congruous, or not dissonant) only under specific conditions. When these conditions are not satisfied they will tend to change. People were supposed to strive toward "well-formed" cognitive structures. Elementary "logical" notions such as consistency (not both p and -p), transitivity (for instance, if X likes Y, and Y likes Z, then X likes Z), or rules of "deduction" are involved in this kind of "psycho-logic" (Abelson & Rosenberg, 1958).

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However, this form of cognitive analysis of attitudes and their change was highly abstract, despite the application to concrete examples (as in Festinger, 1957). There were hardly any attempts to specify in detail the contents and structures of the cognitive representations of such (in)consistent attitudes. The same holds for the dynamic processes of their change. Which cognitive strategies were actually applied, and how these should be explicitly formulated, was not (yet) made explicit. Of the full communication and persuasion process, only an approximate model was provided, such as by McGuire (1969, 1972). He specified the respective steps or stages of the persuasion process, such as attention, understanding, yielding, and acceptance. What each of these steps amounted to exactly, cognitively, was barely understood. As for the other "cognitive" notions of this rich tradition of attitude and persuasion research, the analysis took place at a generalized, abstract, and often intuitive leve!. As we have seen in the previous chapter for the analysis of attitude and prejudice structures, or for the heuristics of social information processing, there is a tendency to introduce and use plausible and interesting notions (attribution, availability, illusory correlation, balance, yielding, and so forth), but they often remained unanalyzed.

Thus, the use of cognitivistic terms is not yet the same as a full-fledged cognitive theory. The "cognitive analysis" of classical attitude and persuasion theories appears to be superficial at best and certainly highly fragmentary and incomplete. There was no question of systematic and explicit modeling of the cognitive representation of persuasive messages and contexts, no serious attempts at defining the precise nature of beliefs and attitudes in terms of complex structures, no systematic link between attitudes and the "behaviors" they were assumed to "cause," and no formulation of explicit rules, strategies, or other processes through which these various representations are actively linked among each other, on one hand, and with perception and action, on the other hand. If dynamic principies or even strategies were formulated, they at most had a plausible intuitive nature.

Message Analysis

Within the most influential paradigm of classical persuasion research, namely, that initiated by the Yale School (e.g., Hovland & Janis, 1959; Hovland, Janis, & Kelley, 1953; Hovland & Rosenberg, 1960), there was special interest for the "message characteristics" of persuasive communication. For instance, attention was paid to the effects of the ordering of arguments, leading to the well-known "primacy" versus "recency" dispute: Is information (or are arguments) better recalled when they come first or last in a discourse? Despite these

early attempts, we witness another major shortcoming of classical persuasion research, that is, its neglect of the systematic structures and contents of persuasive messages. After all, ordering of arguments, choice of words (style), or the strength of appeals (Janis & Feshbach, 1953) are only some (even rather marginal) aspects of persuasive discourse. Little inspiration was taken from insights in linguistics, or the beginning of discourse analysis in anthropology, semiotics, and literary scholarship, to define the precise nature of persuasive messages. From classical rhetoric, only some major notions were borrowed, for instance, repetition (Cacioppo & Petty, 1979; Sawyer, 1981) or rhetorical questions (Petty, Cacioppo, & Heesacker, 1981). However, these were seldom integrated into a more comprehensive theory of the structures and strategies of persuasive discourse. Indeed, because discourse was merely seen as a message-stimulus, produced by a source (of which the production processes were also ignored), only isolated independent variables were chosen, intuitively, as possible determinants of persuasion (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1981). The way people actually go about persuading each other in natural communicative contexts was also an approach that received little attention.

Recent Cognitive Reorientation

Looking back at this earlier work from the vantage poínt of the míd-1980s, it is, of course, easy to make critical remarks about the theoretical shallowness and incompleteness of much work on persuasion in earlier decades, especially the research that has a more behavioristic flavor. Also, it is now easier to see why so many experimental results were inconclusive, or why firm experimental findings hardly received satisfactory explanations. It was only in the late 1970s and early 1980s that the dominant views in persuasion research slowly became infected by a more explicit account of cognitive processing, as it had been developed in cognitive psychology and Al since the early 1970s (see e.g., Cappella & Folger, 1980). In Petty, Ostrom, and Brock (1981) we find growing interest for the further analysis of "cognitive responses" in persuasion processes; Reardon's (1981) introduction pays attention to the role of cognitive rules in persuasion and its effects on behavior, whereas in Roloff and Berger (1982), we find various approaches that try to integrate the analysis of communication in the framework of social cognition.

The strength of a dominant paradigm, and the traditions of a discipline, appear to be very powerful, however. Even in the recent cognitivistic approaches to persuasion and communication, the old vocabulary and its biasing associations often remain. We read about "stimuli" and

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"responses," and cognitions are still studied as "intermediary" variables, and seldom as a problem or as structures in their own right. One reason for these persistent behavioristic remnants in cognitive approaches may be the conceptual analysis of persuasion as changing sorneone's behavior (response) by a persuasive message (stimulus), through a change of attitude (mediator, intermediary, or interna! response). That persuasion primarily involves cognitive (trans)formations of intricately structured knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes, and on the basis of complex discourse structures and their cognitive representations, was not an issue that was high on the research agenda. Persuasion focused on behavior change. And for the sake of experimental (typically short-ranged) research, it was insufficiently recognized that many of the "persuasive messages" people are confronted with do not, or only very indirectly, lead to intended "behavior changes." Conversely, many other types of discourse, including those that are not consciously intended to be persuasive such as news reports in the press or TV programs, may also lead to belief and attitude change. In other words, the theory of persuasion should be embedded into a much broader approach of discursive information processing and cognitive transformation in the interactional and social context.

The Major Components of Persuasion

From this brief discussion of some major tenets in persuasion research, we have concluded that some of the essential components of persuasive communication were not systematically analyzed at all, so that their role in theoretical ideas and experimental testing was permanently neglected, undervalued, or loosely formulated in intuitive terms. Let us briefly comment on some of these components, which will be theoretically dealt with more extensively in later sections.

Message structure. Despite the neglect, briefly discussed aboye, of systematic discourse analysis, "messages" have always played an important role in persuasion research. Attitude change was seen primarily in a "rhetorical" perspective, that is, as the rather direct result of intentionally persuasive messages in personal or public communication. Less attention was paid to other, for example, nonverbal, forros of communication, or to gradual, long-terco, selfinduced, changes in attitudes as a result of complex thought and belief processing.

Messages thernselves were also conceptualized in ways that are reminiscent of classical rhetoric. Because persuasion often involves the uses of argument, it was not surprising that prevailing attention was paid to

the organization of arguments in messages and their effects. We referred earlier to the debate about whether pro or con arguments should be formulated together, or whether they should be presented first or last, respectively, leading to primacy or recency effects (Hovland, Lumsdaine, & Sheffield, 1949; Hovland et al., 1957). However, characteristic of persuasion research and of much communication research in the social sciences in general, was the neglect of the very argumentative structure of discourse. Arguments in messages were identified (or produced in experimental materials) in an intuitive way, and no systematic research was undertaken to analyze in detail the structures of conversational or more formal (written) argumentative discourse. The schematic nature of argumentative structures, their organization and ruleor strategygoverned nature, as well as their links with the semantic content or the more "surface" stylistic (lexical, syntactic) properties of messages, or with the performance of speech acts, were seldom recognized (Kahane, 1971; Toulmin, 1958; van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1983). A rich tradition of argumentation analysis in philosophy was barely known. In fact, even the content of argumentative discourse was seldom explicitly analyzed, for instance, in relation to the intended persuasive goals (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1981).

The same holds for other "message variables," such as fear appeals or lexical style. No analysis was made of the systematic linguistic correlates of emotions, nor of the essentially contextual (and mostly social) nature of lexical and syntactic variation. This means that the same fear appeals formulated in different terms may have different interpretations and cognitive effects, and that persuasive arguments in one communicative context may have a very different role than the same arguments in another context.

In general, then, messages were not analyzed at all, or characterized in intuitively plausible categories involved in the persuasion process. Persuasion was assumed to take place either by "rational" arguments, or by "irrational" emotional appeals or threats. No systematic, genreand context-dependent discourse analysis was carried out, so that no distinction was made between different levels of text or dialogue, for instance, in terms of phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, stylistics, rhetoric, narrative analysis, or other subtheories of grammar and discourse analysis, as we have proposed in Chapter 2. It is obvious that if we want to examine the systematic nature of discursive persuasion, we should formulate the precise nature and the cognitive processing consequences of each of these structural features, or their variable combinations in different personal and sociocultural contexts of communication. Although discourse analysis itself only became seriously developed in the early 1970s, there was sufficient work in linguis-

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tics and various branches of discourse analysis in the 1950s and 1960s to warrant more systematic attention to the nature of message "variables." But this would have required interdisciplinary endeavors that have been rare in persuasion research. And even in the 1980s, now that we do have sophisticated discourse theories and analytical methodologies in several disciplines, including psychology and communication research, too little attention is being paid to the organization of the "message" in persuasive communication, despite the recent attention for persuasive message strategies (Burgoon & Bettinghaus, 1980).

Comprehension. Similar remarks hold for the first cognitive "step" in persuasive communication: the understanding and representation of the relevant message and its characteristics. Again, much of our insight finto these processes has been gained only in the later 1970s, but there was earlier work on comprehension, and even the developments of the 1970s are not yet translated into persuasion research problems. It was mentioned aboye that McGuire (1972) and others did recognize that persuasion should be analyzed in terms of several steps or phases of cognitive processing, such as attention, comprehension, acceptance, yielding, or integration. Yet, each of these concepts remained unanalyzed and played only an intuitive role. Exactly how messages were comprehended, and exactly how opinions were inferred from them and accepted or integrated was not spelled out. In other words, the cognitive core of persuasion processes, namely, representations and operations, was dealt with in superficial, summarylike statements. One of the reasons for thís neglect of interpretation processing was the repeated finding that understanding, measured as "recall," had little effect on attitude change (Cacioppo & Petty, 1979; Love & Greenwald, 1978). Rather, it was found that cognitive responses, such as "thoughts" or (counter)arguments engendered during message perception, appear to influence persuasion and its persistance over time. Exactly why this is the case is usually not explained, nor do we get explicit descriptions of the representations and strategies involved in such cognitive "responses." As long as we do not specify in detall how a persuasive message is actually processed, and which other social and cognitive factors are involved, we cannot obtain full insight into the persuasive process as a whole. In the previous chapter, we have proposed such a theory of discourse comprehension, which, of course, also holds for persuasive messages.

Representation. The possible "effects" of persuasive discourse are not simply "mediated" through "cognitive responses." According to our cognitive analysis, it is the cognitive representation in episodic memory of interpreted discourse that is (one) starting point for further processing, such as attitude formation or change.

The mental representation of discourse is not a replica of "given" discursive structures. Rather, it is the result of a complex strategic interplay between structures, meanings, and functions assigned in short-term memory decoding and interpretation, on one hand, and other cognitive structures, such as knowledge, beliefs, and existing attitudes, on the other hand. This means that the representation of the persuasive message in memory may be subject to many personal, social, and cultural biases, resulting from personal experiences, social scripts, and cultural norms and values.

Compared to the original discourse itself, textual representations may be structured in a very different way. Meanings may have changed and large parts (e.g., surface structure and local meaning details) may no longer be retrievably stored. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that (detailed) arguments may later no longer be recalled. Even immediately after having read or heard a text, recipients usually cannot produce much more than 25 % to 50% of a one-page text (see van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983, for detail). After longer delays, people merely have access to fragments of the macrostructure of a text, that is, a few high-level propositions.

Primacy and recency (of arguments or other information) have very different effects on representations and processing. Initial information is used for the activation of scripts, attitudes, and models, and will lead to the important formation of tentative macrostructures and hence to better recall. Final (recent) information is better recalled especially because of special processing interactions between short-term and episodic memory and the current focus of attention. These and other properties of the cognitive representation of argumentation (or other schemata, such as narration), must be taken into account in a full-fledged theory of persuasion.

Much information stored in the representation may not have been expressed in the original discourse at all, but is inferred from other knowledge and belief sources in memory. In other words, representations of (persuasive or any other) discourse are not replicative, but (re)constructive, an insight already advocated by Bartlett (1932) half a century ago. Each theoretical notion mentioned in this paragraph is merely the tip of an underlying theoretical iceberg, which should be made explicit before adequate analysis of the persuasion process is possible.

Situation models. Discourse processing in general, and persuasion in particular, crucially depend on the previous experiences and opinions of a person relative to the persuasion "topic" (persons, groups, objects, events, actions, and so on). Therefore, we need an explicit mental representation of these "previous experiences," and especially of their opinion components, and must show how these interact with the representation of the persuasive discourse.