
прагматика и медиа дискурс / Teun A van Dijk - Communicating Racism
.pdf262 Communicating Racism
Again, neither classical nor present work in persuasion has systematically taken such "personal" representations into account by describing their contents and structures, or by specifying their detailed cognitive roles.
It was suggested earlier that such accumulated experiences and their associated opinions are to be represented as "situation models." Such models embody the coherent, hierarchical, and context-bound subjective understanding and evaluations people construct of each situation in which they are involved. Each particular situation, then, is represented as a particular (unique) model. New information about that situation will be used to update the model. This means that besides particular, ad hoc, models, we have generalized situation models. Models not only feature knowledge or beliefs about situations, but also opinions. In the previous chapter, this led us to stress the difference between opinions and attitudes.
Situation models also play a crucial role in the cognitive process of attitude formation and change. Without such models, we are unable to link general attitudes to particular messages, beliefs, or situations. In other words, what is usually called attitude change in persuasion research may either refer to transformations of situation models, involving particular opinions of the hearer (and assumptions about them by the speaker), or else to more general opinions as they organize abstract attitudes. Because in most experimental work, short-range attitude change is aimed at, we may assume that, in most cases, this process should be made explicit in terms of opinion formation in situation models. Of course, this process is in turn based on the activation of general knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and norms.
If people construct a mental model of each situation in which they are involved, they do so also for the very communicatíve situation in which they are partícípating when reading or listening to a persuasive message. That is, they build a relevant picture of the current context, that is, a context model. This model features the actual (interpreted or intended) goals of the communicative interaction, representations (and evaluations) of self as a speaker (or hearer) and as social member, and of the hearer (speaker) in similar roles, of the type of social context being enacted (e.g., public speech, informal conversation with a friend, or reading the newspaper), as well as many other relevant contextual features. Each of these may decisively influence the interpretation and evaluation of the persuasive discourse and the opinions inferred from them. The usual "source characteristics" identified as influencing "factors" in persuasion require explicit representation in such models. It is this representation and not the "real" ("objective") characteristics of sources that explain possible effects on opinion formation and change.
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Credibility of the "source" is one of the classical parameters involved here and paid attention to in much persuasion research (Hovland & Weiss, 1951). It is obvious now that such a notion should be further analyzed and integrated into a context model, namely as (only) one dimension of a rather complex "speaker model" constructed by the hearer. In this speaker (or communicator) model, other relevant dimensions may also be represented, such as attractivity (Chaiken, 1979), power (Kelman, 1958), involvement (Petty & Cacioppo, 1981), expertise (e.g., Norman, 1976), gender, age, status, ethnicity, and other personal and social characteristics (Hass, 1981). We have seen for ethnic actors and events how such representations may be biased. One can imagine how complex a theoretical and especially an experimental account may be when only the features of such a part of the context, namely, of the speaker model, are to be combined in the explanation of the effect of persuasive discourse (Cronkhite & Liska, 1980). Indeed, how persuasive is a young, attractive, Black woman of high status when acting as a doctor ...? Her attractiveness, expertise, role, and status would predict high persuasion impact, but what about the precise cognitive interaction of such factors with those of her being Black? We have seen that for White people she might primarily be categorized as Black, which may actívate shared (negative) prejudices, which again may reduce or fully discredit the role of the other factors. Hence, we need to know about the hierarchy, the power, or the relevance of source factor representations in context models. The number of possible interactions soon runs into the thousands. No wonder that heavily controlled experiments tell us so little about what goes on in "real" persuasive contexts, where all these variables are present at the same time.
Knowledge and beliefs. Due to much recent work in cognitive psychology and Al, we now know that comprehension of social events and discourse crucially depends on our knowledge and beliefs as they are represented and organized in frames, scripts, or similar cognitive constructions (see Chapter 4 for detail). We also suggested that persuasion depends on what people already knew and believed before the persuasive discourse, which means that these knowledge structures should be made explicit. Being persuaded by a professor during a class also presupposes that the student has a script about stereotypical teaching events, about normative goals of teaching interaction, and about his or her own role in such an event. The effects of expertise and in general of credibility are crucially mediated through such scriptbased expectations. And the same holds when we are being persuaded about events, for instance, when we read a newspaper editorial about Central America. Apart from personal previous experiences (models) of, say, El Salvador, the reader brings to bear knowledge and beliefs about civil war (i.e., about armies, guerrillas, fights, weapons, and so on) and
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about international politics. After the early work, of, for instance, Abelson (1973, 1976) about scripts and belief systems, little persuasion research has explicitly taken into account the specific structures of such beliefs. It was limited to whether or not communicators had or did not have "previous knowledge" about a topic, but spelled out neither this knowledge nor its cognitive organization.
Opinions and attitudes. Crucial in any
account of persuasion is the notion of "attitude." This is a classical insight, which is still valid today. However, we have seen in the previous chapter that despite the scores of books and articles devoted to this notion in social psychology, we know very little about the precise nature of attitudes. Again, despite the sophistication of the experimental or formal models, most analyses of the structures and strategies of attitude and their uses remain more or less intuitive and pretheoretical.
Thus, until today, these analyses may specify that attitudes have a "cognitive," "evaluative (or emotive)," and a "conative" dimension, assessed experimentally, not by systematic structural analysis (Breckler, 1984). Or shorter, attitudes are simply identified with any kind of evaluative proposition (or even "statement"), oras a specific (enduring) "disposition" toward specific behavior. Neither in attitude research nor in work on persuasion based on it do we find the actual representation and analysis of an interesting, socially relevant, and full-fledged attitude. When Fishbein and Ajzen (1975) in their extensive study come up with their seducingly simple definition of an attitude as an "evaluative state of mind towards some object," it should be obvious that such a definition can hardly be short for an explicit theory of attitudes. It does explain, however, how "attitude change," despite its vagueness, can easily be measured as any kind of evaluative reaction to persuasive messages.
Obviously, a theory of attitude, and, hence, of attitude change, should be more sophisticated. First steps toward such a theory have again been made by Abelson (1976) and a few others. We have suggested that the complexity of socially relevant opinions and beliefs about issues or complex social events and states of affairs seem to require a theoretical formulation that is reminiscent of frame or script theories (e. g., Carbonell, 1979). Indeed, we assumed that attitudes are categorially, linearly, and hierarchically organized structures of general, that is, context-free, beliefs and opinions represented in (semantic, or rather social) longterm memory about socially relevant clusters of events and states of affairs. Such attitudes are in turn also organized in more embracing attitude clusters and ultimately into ideologies.
Thus, we also distinguished between (component) opinions, which are general evaluative beliefs about persons, objects, or events, and the more complex attitudes of which they may be part. Similarly, it is obvi-
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ously relevant to distinguish between general opinions (which may be inserted into attitude schemata), and particular opinions, which are evaluative beliefs about particular (actual) objects, persons, or events. According to the theoretical notion of a situation model, it seems likely that particular opinions should be located in ad hoc, particular situation models, general opinions in generalized models, and in schemalike attitudes if they are combined with other general beliefs and opinions that have interactional and social relevance in other contexts.
Attitude change. Against the background of the critique and the proposals formulated aboye, it should be obvious that the current accounts of attitude change processes also need further theoretical elaboration. Because attitudes are usually rather complex cognitive structures, they simply don't change that easily, and rarely after one persuasive communication. People may change their particular opinions, though, and this change is recorded in episodic models. If a (changed) particular opinion is generalized, it may be integrated into a more general attitude. This may also require changes in other relevant opinions, for instance, if the person perceives incoherence between opinions ("inconsistency" is a logical notion that is not particularly relevant in a cognitive theory: People may well have coherent opinions that are "inconsistent" from a logical point of view). Such changes may spread through the attitude structure, and may also affect the higher levels. In that case, also overall evaluative (macro) beliefs may eventually change. A theoretically adequate account of such changes, however, should spell out in detail the structural input and output of the transformation in the attitude structure. Also, it should specify the precise conditions for such transformations.
It follows that attitude change is not a discrete, momentaneous process. People modify their cognitive structures all the time, also when no persuasive discourses are being processed, for instance, by simply "thinking" about an issue, or by anticipation (Cialdini & Petty, 1981; McGuire & Papageorgis, 1962). They may also do so long after persuasive discourses have been processed. Opinion changes in one model and context may not generalize to others. These are a few of the reasons that much of the experimental persuasion research is limited to momentaneous, particular opinions as represented in situation models derived from one or two persuasion messages. For complex, long-term processes of attitude change, difficult diachronical research would be needed, and for the study of the continuous changes of attitudes, repeated probing or think-aloud protocol analyses might be necessary.
"Behavior" and action. The final component in traditional theories of persuasion and communication is "behavior." We have stressed that persuasion is often conceptualized as
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mediating between persuasive messages on one hand and desired behavior of the persuadee, on the other hand, where attitudes are some kind of interna! "cause" of the observed behavior. Although there have been attempts, also in persuasion research, to analyze the processes of behavior in somewhat more explicit tercos, involving, for example, intentions and goals of action (see, e.g., Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975), the current discussion in persuasion research is still neglecting many fundamentals of the cognitive basis of this behavior.
A long tradition in the philosophy of action is usually ignored (see, e.g., von Cranach & Harré, 1982; von Wright, 1963; White, 1968). In the first place, the notion of behavior is misleading. Behavior also covers things people do when not intending to, when out of control, and so on. Hence, we prefer to speak about actions and interactions. These are conceptually represented units of intentional, controlled behavior. Similarly, we should specify exactly what these action "intentions" are. For instance, our intention to travel to Japan may have a quite different structure than our actual intention to eat this apple. The first intention may involve a complex (macro) plan, consisting of a hierarchical set of action propositions, strategies (e.g., to travel as cheaply as possible), and specific goals (visit a friend, attend a congress). Just as sentences can be analyzed as linguistic units consisting of an expression structure and a meaning structure, thus, actions may be analyzed as a manifest unit of behavior (a "doing"), and a cognitive unit, namely, an intention. Similarly, we may have observable goals of action, such as some change in the "world," on one hand, and a cognitive representation of such a goal, namely, a "purpose," on the other hand. Actions are weakly successful if the results of the doing correspond with the underlying intention or plan, and they are strongly successful if the goals are realized, confirming the purpose of the agent (see van Dijk, 1977, 198la, for details).
Similarly, intentions do not "come up" spontaneously, but are the cognitive end products of a complex chain of beliefs (about abilities, the action context, goals of others, and so on), preferences, wishes, wants, or other "rnotivational" structures. Each of these need to be made explicit in an account of (inter)action. Given all this information, the potential agent may forro a concrete model of a (future) situation, that is, of the kind of action to be performed in a particular context. Finally, this model may be strategically executed, depending on incoming information about the actual context. In other words, intentions, plans, and purposes are constituent elements of episodic models of future situations.
From this theoretical analysis, we may conclude that there is no direct link between attitudes and action. Attitudes, together with frames or scripts for stereotypical episodes, provide the instantiated beliefs and opinions that may form part of an action model. It is not surprising, there-
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fore, that there are few consistent findings about the famous (mostly missing) link between attitudes and behavior that has inspired so many books and articles (Cacioppo, Harkins, & Petty, 1981). Actual action, hence, may be "inconsistent" with attitudes, but the contextual information in a model may prevent the agent from interpreting this "inconsistency" as such. For the link between ethnic attitudes and ethnic interaction, this inconsistency has already been demonstrated by LaPierre (1933) 50 years ago. Similar observations have been made in our analysis of the interviews, in which people may also often say things that are superficially inconsistent with what they actually believe, because of the constraints of the communicative context.
Actions are not merely controlled by attitudes or values but (also) by general social norms, that is, information about what should or should not be done. Situational norms may be part of scripts (what should we do in the classroom or restaurant), or of attitudes (what should be done against the building of nuclear power plants), but we also have higherlevel (meta)norms for action and interaction in general, such as norms for cooperation, politeness, and so on. We assume that these general norms are part of what might be called the principies of social cognition, that is, of the ideological base that underlies more specific attitudes.
The same holds for general values, which specify items on a good/ bad dimension or its variants (pleasant/unpleasant, and so forth). Psychologically, norms must be based on values, because the obligation or permission to do A presupposes that the agent or somebody else finds A "better" than -A or B (or prefers the goals realized by A). In other words, norms involve valued action and valued results or consequences of action.
We conclude, then, that an account of (inter)action that might "result from" persuasive communications should be autonomous. There is no direct link, and certainly not a causal one (Miller & Colman, 1981). This is also the reason that simple analyses in terms of "causal" attribution are not adequate for an account of action understanding and planning. People decide to act, plan/intend actions on the basis of very complex information structures, and the execution of such actions is again embedded in very complex action context structures (opportunity, and so on) that together define an action model. This analysis is also crucial for persuasive, communicative (inter)action. Only in very simple cases does there appear to be a phenomenologically direct conditional "link" between a persuasive message and the advocated action. But even then we have to make explicit all the cognitive steps (representations and strategies) that go from message comprehension to the actual execution of an intended act before we can actually say that someone "has been persuaded to do something."
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Summary
Summarizing our critique of the prevailing tendencies in persuasion research, we may mention the following main points:
(1)Persuasive messages themselves have not been systematically analyzed for structures at various levels. Whereas nearly exclusive attention is paid to argumentative discourse, even these argumentative structures are not explicitly described. Thus, both as to "content" as well as to "form," this major component of the persuasive process remained ignored, and no useful theories were borrowed from linguistics or discourse analysis.
(2)The cognitive processes of persuasion have been dealt with in
superficial and incomplete terms. An explicit analysis is seldom made of the relevant representations of discourse, events, episodes, or evaluative beliefs. No account is given of comprehension, integration, or retrieval strategies. No distinction is made between episodic (personal, particular) and more general, semantic or social dimensions of opinions. No explicit description is given of either attitude structures or their transformations. Many features of the communicative context have been neglected, or are not explicitly inserted into a cognitive model. On the whole, the cognitive component of persuasion is still primarily taken as a set of "mediating" variables, and as "responses" to some stimulus. Autonomous analysis of cognitive processes and their relation to the communicative context remains rare or remains at a rather general level of intuitively plausible but theoretically confused terms.
(3) The "consequences" of persuasion have been primarily conceptualized in terms of "behavior," which was often assumed to be "causally" linked to attitudes, instead of as actions and interactions that are programmed, intended, and executed autonomously. The complexity of action programming has been underestimated, and it was not stressed enough that (and how) attitudes are only indirectly linked to action, such as via episodic plans of actions as represented in models.
From these major points, we conclude that despite the vast amounts of work on attitude and attitude change in communication, much of persuasion theory, in the methodologically adequate sense of a "theory," is still on the agenda. Of course, this does not make extant work in persuasion worthless. On the contrary, it has provided experimental evidence about many of the features, mostly of the communicative context, that influence specific dimensions of persuasion, such as short-term opinion changes. Only, many results need new interpretations, and many concepts need further analysis. We try todo so, along the lines of our critical remarks made aboye, by focusing on persuasion processes involved in the reproduction of ethnic prejudice in informal everyday conversations.
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2. Communicating prejudice
The persuasive communication of ethnic attitudes through everyday talk is both an interpersonal and a group-based process. Cognitive and social dimensions are equally crucial in modeling this process. Speakers who talk about ethnic minorities do so not only as individuals, but also as dominant group members. Persuasion, thus, involves the intention to share attitudes with other dominant group members, and should, therefore, be analyzed as a form of intragroup communication. Similarly, the ethnic attitudes involved are not personal, but group attitudes. So are the ideologies in which they are rooted and that define coherence relations with other group-based attitudes. This means, among other things, that the speaker already knows a lot about the norms, values, attitudes, opinions, goals, and other beliefs of the hearer in general, and those about ethnic groups in particular. In conversation, these cognitions will either be tacitly presupposed or used in persuasive strategies, such as the appeal to group norms and values.
Despite shared in-group cognitions, however, ethnic attitudes may display significant in-group variation, for instance, because of different social dimensions of subgroups within the autochthonous in-group, as well as individual variation at the level of personal models. In other words, especially with unknown in-group members, a speaker is never sure whether or not the hearer has the same attitude about foreigners. Also, persuasion in that case may not be unidirectional, but bidirectional: The other participant may be expected to engage in persuasion also as soon as such a "controversial" topic is brought up. Mutual persuasion of this kind may involve strategic attacks but also defensive moves.
From this brief introductory summary of the persuasive nature of ingroup talk about ethnic out-groups, it already becomes obvious that the processes involved are very complex. Cognitive planning, execution, and monitoring of such persuasive talk, therefore, is equally complex. Therefore, we split up the problem into the following subproblems:
(a)How is conversation about ethnic groups produced by the speaker and how is it related to ethnic prejudice structures and strategies.
(b)What are the structural, strategic, and functional consequences of this production process for the communicative and persuasive nature of talk about ethnic affairs?
(c)How is discourse about ethnic groups understood and represented cognitively by the hearer?
(d)How is represented talk about minorities linked with ethnic situation models of the hearer? How does model updating take place?
(e)What is the role of ethnic attitudes in the comprehension, representation, and retrieval of conversational information? And, conversely, how
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is this information and the ethnic models it affects related to general ethnic attitudes? Under what conditions can we say that ethnic attitude may "change" due to conversation(s)?
(f)What social information of the context of communication and interaction influences the processes mentioned aboye, and how is this information represented and used by the speech participants?
Part of these questions are dealt with in more detail in this and the next sections of this chapter. Our insights obtained in the previous chapters about the contents and structures of conversations and prejudices about ethnic groups, and about the nature of attitude, attitude change, and persuasion, can now be integrated into a more dynamic analysis of the persuasive communication of ethnic attitudes in this chapter.
2.1. PRODUCING PREJUDICED TALK
Although there is impressive research about conversation, on one hand, and about text comprehension, on the other hand, we do not know very much about the specifics of the cognitive basis of everyday talk. The reason for this lack of theoretical and empirical insight is simple: Most people working on conversation have (micro)sociological interests, rather than cognitive psychological ones (see, however, Cicourel, 1980), whereas most psychologists have preferred to work with written, textual materials, which are easier to use in experiments (but see Keenan, MacWhinney, & Mayhew, 1977). Conversations must first be carefully recorded and transcribed, and such transcriptions exhibit many detailed features of talk that do not yet enter cognitive theories of discourse comprehension and representation, for instance, pauses, repairs, hesitation phenomena, or nonverbal cues. This lack of specific knowledge about the role of cognition in conversation, however, does not prevent us from theorizing about this role, for instance, in analogy to what we know about discourse comprehension and production in general.
We start our analysis of persuasive "ethnic" talk with a reconstruction of the production processes involved, because production is the first step in the persuasive process. We do so against the background of our earlier woork on the cognitive processing of discourse (van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983) and the notions of cognitive theory summarized in the previous chapter.
Instead of describing the production processes involved in purely theoretical tercos only, we shall describe them by using a concrete example taken from one of our interviews. Our analysis, then, is what may be called an infarmal simulation of the processes the speaker must go through in order to produce the subsequent contributions to the interview.
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Our example is a story told by a 25-year-old man working in the transport section of an aircraft company, but now on sick leave and living in a poor, high-contact area of Amsterdam. The interviewer is a mate student of the same age. As may be obvious from the example, the man is highly prejudiced against Surinamese, and does not dissimulate his negative feelings as much as many others do. The passage is taken from the beginning of the interview, after the interviewer's question about experiences with foreigners. As with previous examples, the translation from Dutch colloquial speech is merely an approximation. "Ungrammatical" sentences have also been translated as more or less corresponding ungrammatical English equivalents.
(1) P-D-1
1 M: Yes, you see them once in a while, you know, and then you say 2 helio, and that's it.
3 I: And other experiences with other foreigners or so?
4 M: Well, never have trouble with Turks and Moroccans, but with 5 Surinamese are concerned, yes plenty of trouble, yes.
6 I: Could you tell something about, a story or so, about your
7experiences?
8M: Story, yes 1 once walked on Nieuwendijk [shopping street in
9central Amsterdam], with my cousin, still a free man, and well, 10 then came uhh let's see four Surinamese boys. Well, they said
11 something, funny remarks and all that. l said something back, and 12 at once we had a fight. That's why I had a knife cut across here
13 and all that. That's how. So those guys I don't like at all, of
14 course. So. Well, nothing against Surinamese, because my mother 15 is married to a Surinamese man, so, but those young ones among 16 them, that is, yes bragging and fighting and all that. So.
17 I: Anything more you can tell?
18 M: Well, as far as I am concerned they can all fuck off, in that 19 respect. Then the good ones must suffer for the bad ones, but 1 20 never have such good experiences with them.
21 I: With other, with other foreigners or so, you don't have
22 M: No, never any problems, no because (???). Those Surinamese, 23 that may fuck off. When you see what is happening. Are married, 24 they are married, they divorce, woman takes from welfare, and he 25 has no job, but is moonlighting. We have have experienced that
26 ourselves, in K* (neighborhood in Amsterdam), with my mother's 27 friend ... .
The story briefly refers to a fight the storyteller has had with young Surinamese boys, and is followed by an evaluation of young Surinamese in general, and an expression of his dislike of Surinamese in general, who he thinks cheat on welfare. Now, what are the processing steps that might lead to this particular contribution to the conversation?