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

322 Communicating Racism

flict with one's own opínions stored in previous modeis, or when they are similar to similar opinions in similar models. In this case, we say that the relevant (particular) opinion is formed or confirmed, respectively.

At another leve!, the hearer may already have a more general opinion about the unfair treatment of Dutch people in comparison to foreigners, represented, for instance, in general episodic models about situations of favorable treatment of foreigners. In that case, the story and its evaluation by the woman can simply be heard as a further "instance" of this general opinion of the hearer and, hence, as further support for this opinion. The recipient may even use the woman's story as evidence in talk with other people ("My neighbor told me ... "), as is often the case in our interviews (see below for examples). The same is true for the more abstract opinions activated from prejudice schemata. The opinion of the hearer about this specific case is a confirming instance of the prototypical opinion.

Conversely, if the hearer has a negative attitude toward ethnic minority groups, but does not yet have a general opinion about unfair favorable treatment of such groups, the opinion conveyed by the story may be (over)generalized toward a corresponding more general opinion, which would be coherent with other negative opinions in the schema about ethnic groups. This process is probably facilitated by opinions conveyed by the story that do support the hearer's prejudices. If the hearer thinks Surinamese are aggressive, drive big cars, and wear flashy clothes and jewels, then the story would confirm those opinions and, hence, become more credible and the opinions in it more acceptable. Theoretically, we may, therefore, assume that opinion formation or confirmation is seldom based on single opinions, but often takes place within organized clusters, in which already shared opinions are conveyed to form or support new ones.

Rejection

Whereas the processes described aboye account for the "standard" case of ethnic persuasion, hearers may, of course, also "disagree" with the speaker and "reject" the proposed opinion conclusions. The very story on which they are based may be found hard to believe. In our example, we find some evidence for this interaction process. The interviewer (a male researcher) throughout the interview has not, as with most other interviews, acted in a "passive" way, but has actively "argued" with the interviewees about their experiences and opinions. Although in some cases, such a reaction may lead to socially desirable statements, more often than not they stimulate the interviewee to substantiate his or her experiences or opinions further.

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specific opinions possible and not only higher-level, abstract opinions. In this case, "all people should be treated equally" may be found an "irrelevant" norm as a basis for the opinion; instead, more specific and, hence, more contextually adequate norms such as "people who need it must get extra attention and help." Note that the woman in our example implicitly knows this opinion strategy and, therefore, emphasizes the similarity of her case: She is also poor, has also moved, and also needs money to decorate her house (and not to buy a car). It follows that norm application in opinion formation depends on the "definition of the situation," that is, on the high-level structures of the model conveyed. For the woman, her situation and that of the Surinamese are similar, but her treatment by the welfare authorities is dissimilar, and, hence, the evaluation turns out negative because of the relevant norms. If, however, the similarity of a woman wanting to move and the immigration of people from a former colony is not represented as similar, the norm would not apply, and a negative opinion need not follow. We see that model structures determine opinion formation.

(c) The hearer may neither endorse nor reject general opinions based on norms of positive social action and, therefore, may have no opinion on the (assumed) financial help given to immigrating Surinamese. In that case, the higher-level opinion on equal treatment may take precedence and will facilitate opinion formation that is close to that of the woman: It is unfair that she did not get welfare money. Yet, the opinion may remain particular, and attached to this case (model) or similar cases (models) only. Such an interpretation would be facilitated if the hearer has friends who have similar experiences. According to the principies of balance theory (Granberg, 1984; Heider, 1958; Insko, 1981), negative treatment of a friend is usually evaluated negatively, whatever the higher-level norms one might endorse. The recipient may well accept, for instance, that immigrant children get differential treatment in school by getting extra lessons in both their own and in the second language. Our interviews feature many examples óf this kind of differences in opinions about positive action. The negative opinion in this case remains attached to the episodic models and need not be generalized and attached to the general ethnic group attitude. Assumed favorable treatment may be resented only for social domains in which resources are assumed to be scarce. We do not find examples in our interviews, for example, in which foreigners are said to "eat all our food," which would be a more likely prejudice in situations in which food is scarce.

Of course, several other possibilities exist. The principles of ethnic prejudice formation, confirmation, transformation, or rejection should, however, be more or less clear by now. The process is a strategic evaluation of events and opinions with respect to existing models (one's own

experiences, previous stories), the speaker model (or generalized models of similar speakers), frames, scripts, and general prejudiced attitudes. Acceptance will be the general tendency if no particular or general opinions in other models and schemata conflict with the opinion and will be facilitated if the opinion is an instance of one's own general opinions. Rejection is more likely if there is such a conflict. And no opinion formation or only particular opinions will result from limited application of general norms or previous models.

Acceptance Bias

The acceptance of prejudiced opinions is obviously the easiest strategy if recipients share the prejudiced attitude: Both the "evidence" and the opinion based on it in that case simply confirm what the recipient thought anyway. Rejection of the opinion may be easy only when no attention is paid to the "evidence," or when the speaker is simply disqualified as being prejudiced. If not, a rather complex process of analysis must take place to subsume the events under a different category, and to arrive ata more positive or neutral evaluation of the events (e. g., as illustration of affirmative action). In that case, the story as told may be accepted as true, but the opinions derived from them as unfounded by these other, more specific, norms and values. Each strategic support in the story for the negative opinion may in that case require separate "reanalysis" in terms of a different opinion. That is, counterargumentation plays a role in that case (see Petty, Ostrom & Brock, 1981, for discussion of such "cognitive responses"). However, when ethnic affairs are concerned, such countermoves may lack sufficient general knowledge, lack specific models, and the automatism of alternative rules of inference. Because many more negative stories about ethnic minority members are told, the recipient will have few instances of "positive" models that might support counteropinions. He or she will have to set up a nonprototypical argument, for which there may be little practice and few examples. In other words, reasoned rejection of fact-based prejudices is cognitively and socially rather difficult and, therefore, rather exceptional. Several people in our interviews report that they do not counterargue with prejudiced people (it is hopeless, 1 don't know what to say, I feel ashamed, and so forth). In our example, this would be easy only when the normative principies of affirmative action would be generally supported by the authorities, the media, and many citizens, which is not the case. The woman would in that case have no socially shared and legitimated "point" by comparing her case with that of immigrants. Generally, and especially in communication about ethnic minorities, there is a bias

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toward agreement, simply by the power of the consensus (Essed, 1986) and despite the official (high-level) norm of nondiscrimination. At least people seldom explicitly disagree. This means that prejudiced talk is prevailing even if most people would disagree. And it is this prevalence that provides the weight of the ethnic consensus.

Attitude (Trans)formation

Analyzing a concrete example, we have arrived at a number of hypotheses about the processes of opinion manipulation resulting from talk about ethnic groups. It was found that opinions may be limited to a specific model ("the woman was treated unfairly"), or may be generalized to similar models ("Dutch people are treated unequally by the welfare agencies"). We also assumed that general prejudices may in such cases be supported by the opinions and "evidence" supplied by the source. This process of self-confirming, or self-fulfilling, ethnic stereotypes is well-known from the literature, and we have only specified some of its further cognitive properties (Rothbart, Evans, & Fulero, 1979; Snyder, 1981a, 1981b; Snyder, Tanke, & Berscheid, 1977; Word, Zanna, & Cooper, 1974).

When persuasion is defined in tercos of more general, and more permanent, changes of attitude schemata, more processing is, of course, needed. It does happen that a single "persuasive" case may be associated with an opinion that may be generalized right away and stored in the attitude schema (Crocker, Fiske, & Taylor, 1984; Rothbart, 1981). In our example, this might be the case for the opinion "Foreigners are treated more favorably by the (welfare) authorities," if this opinion would fit finto a schema in which rights are more generally denied to foreigners. In this sense, indeed, prejudice formation is "easy," because it allows the formation of complex schemata on the basis of no or very little experience. It is also "easy" because such opinions and schemata are consensual, despite the general norm of nondiscrimination. That this norm in our interviews is still recognized may be inferred from the many examples in which people say that they are being discriminated against. So the norm still holds, but its application in the analysis of the social situation is different. If a single or a few foreigners are witnessed benefiting from social resources such as housing, work, or welfare, and when it is also assumed, more generally, that many Dutch people do not have access to these resources, the conclusion that foreigners are being favored is again "easy."

Apart from providing further support or coherence for general prejudices, such opinion conclusions are also functional: The actions based on them will protect the interests of the in-group. Because in-groups gen-

erally try to protect their interests, communication about the actions and strategies that lead to such shared goals is necessary. Consensually confirmed prejudices, thus, also provide the conceptual basis that allows such social interpretations and plans, and these also appear in persuasive talk that allows their reproduction in the in-group.

Ethnic attitude formation based on talk, thus, may in many respects be cognitively and socially easier than attitude formation about other groups or other social targets. In our analysis of the structures of ethnic prejudice, we found that probably such ethnic attitudes are generated from out-group protoschemata, which in an abstract way are already formed on the basis of information acquired during socialization. For new ethnic groups, the relevant (negative) properties only have to be filled into the schema. Each story, especially when repeated and legitimated by publication in the media then may be used as "proof ' of the general opinion it implies or expresses. Everyday talk and the media provide ample examples that may be used to form, confirm, or generalize negative ethnic opinions. Positive information, counterarguments, and basic principies of adequate interaction in multiethnic societies, are virtually absent in socialization, communication, and other instances of social information processing. This also explains why challenging ethnic prejudices is much more difficult than accepting them.

This means that if recipients are already prejudiced it will not be easy to change such prejudices. Counterexamples can simply be rejected as "exceptions," that is, as special models that have special circumstances and that, therefore, cannot be generalized (Weber & Crocker, 1983). In other words, overgeneralization of ethnic opinions does not hold when positive (or neutral) opinions are being expressed in talk. Second, even if one opinion would be changed both in particular and general models, for instance, on the basis of evidence, arguments, or general principies (norms, laws), this change need not affect the attitude structure. Overall negative prejudice schemata do admit "positive," although often marginal or less relevant, components ("Blacks are musical," "Women are sensitive"), as long as the higher-level propositions are not affected. And even such "positive" attributions may have negative implications: A good feeling for rhythm may be considered as a property that is "close to nature," as opposed to the more "civilized" sense of music of Whites (whereas sensitivity of women may be associated with weakness). To change higher-level macropropositions in ethnic prejudice would require a systematic program that would address the (negative) evaluations in many opinions, which in addition are supported by similar opinions in an overall out-group protoschema. In other words, changes of high-level opinions might require reorganization of vast amounts of social information, schemata, basic principies, and so on. Whereas neg-

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ativity spreading is a standard strategy in prejudice formation (one negative opinion is applied also to other categories of the attitude), the same is not true for positive information transfer. In other words, ethnic attitude change may require complete ideological reorientation, in which different protoschemata are designed, different norms and values being developed or put in different relevance position, or information systematically gathered to support the new opinions (Rothbart, Dawes, & Park, 1984). And most basically—the discriminatory actions based on ethnic prejudice should no longer be tolerated. Prejudiced cognitive programming in that case loses much of its relevance, and ideological reorientation then becomes possible. We discuss these social contexts of the reproduction (and opposition) of racism in the next chapter.

4.2. SOME QUANTITATIVE DATA

ON ETHNIC INFORMATION USES

A fter the theoretical and qualitative analyses of the previous section, this section gives a few descriptive quantitative data about the ways recipients process information from sources. Continuing the analysis of the data reponed in Chapter 3, we have analyzed all passages in which people refer to personal or media sources, with particular attention to their account of the facts and opinions attributed to those sources, as well as their own reactions, opinions, and agreement with the facts or opinions of these sources.

We realize that such data provide only a glimpse of what really happened, cognitively, in the recipients during the (persuasive) communications. Yet, we as sume that the "version" of the communicative event as told to the interviewer is probably an expression of what the recipient recalled and found relevant to retell, and that is precisely what we want to know. From those accounts, we can tentatively infer some properties of the structural representations of communicated facts and opinions in the recipient's memory. Also, such accounts suggest how people tell such "subjective" (but socially shared) versions to in-group members, which allows us to obtain insight into the basic processes of the reproduction of racism.

There may, of course, be differences in what is recalled and reproduced by the interviewees, for instance, according to whether the source was a personal communication or media messages, and according to gender, neighborhood, and age, which we have added as independent variables.

Which Facts?

The first relevant question is what type of facts, negative or positive (relative to ethnic groups or relations), are typically being mentioned by the interviewees, and whether or not such facts are believed or not. In Table 5.1, we first find that, in general, the vast majority of the facts reported as being borrowed from other sources is negative (103), whereas only a few facts are positive (18), the others being neutral (or no specific facts mentioned).

In absolute terms, more negative facts are attributed to personal communication than to the media (especially because personal communication is mentioned more often as a source), but in relative terms, the media are also somewhat lower as a source for negative facts. There is no difference between men and women mentioning such negative facts (although women make more references to other sources), but women mention positive facts slightly more often. People in low-contact areas mention negative facts slightly less often (when we take into account the proportion of their source references) and positive facts somewhat more often. Senior citizens proportionally mention positive facts more often than young people. With the exception of people in low-contact areas and young people, the average prejudice score for people mentioning positive facts about ethnic groups is higher than that of people mentioning negative facts. This interesting phenomenon suggests that both negative and positive facts are often mentioned critically by people, as we shall see below. The major conclusion that may be drawn from these data is that information about ethnic groups attributed to other sources is mostly negative. This may mean that most communications are indeed about negative facts, or that people recall negative facts better. Both hypotheses are probably true.

Type of Reactions

From the analysis of the facts reported it already emerges that despite the large amount of negative facts recalled and reported by the interviewees, they need not always believe or accept these facts. People show this by implicit or explicit comments. If we look at the figures of Table 5.2, we first observe the obvious prejudice pattern: People reacting to (negative or positive) facts in a way that is negative for ethnic groups are on the whole more prejudiced (4.2) than those who react positively (2.6).

There are twice as many people who give negative reactions than positive ones. A large part of these reactions are based on personal sources, whereas positive reactions are more often based on media information

Fact-Reaction Links

Of course, facts and reactions should not be considered only on their own. People may display negative reactions that parallel negative facts reported (suggesting belief, acceptance), but may also react with positive remarks about ethnic groups or group relations after such a negative fact attributed to a source, and the same holds for positive or negative reactions to positive facts. In Table 5.3, we have tabulated the scores for these four combinations.

The first striking feature of these data is that there are very few positive facts reported, and even less reacted to negatively. People focus on negative facts, whether they accept or reject them. This suggests that most people who react critically (and who are low in prejudice) do so against the negative things other Dutch people say. Generally, references to personal or media sources seem to trigger negative situation models. Indeed, positive situation models, when told, are usually based on peopies' own experiences and sometimes attributed to TV. Opposed reactions to negative facts reported by the media are mostly based on negative press portrayal of minorities (in crime news, or in reports about racist people). Negative reactions that support negative facts primarily derive their information from personal communications, especially in the highcontact areas. Positive reactions to negative facts are comparatively frequent in low-contact areas, and usually occur in passages with critical comments about what other people say (generally) about ethnic minority groups. The elderly especially tend to accept negative facts, but also more often than young people accept positive facts. A similar pattern divides men and women. If women in our examples seem to be more conforming, this leads to acceptance of the dominant negative information about ethnic groups, at least in these passages about communicative events (the average prejudice scores for men and women are the same, which suggests that more prejudiced women tend to refer to other sources more often for support of their negative attitudes). Young people tend to be more critical of negative information about minority groups.

Reported Source Opinions

Sources not only provide information about (real or fictitious) facts concerning ethnic minority groups, for instance, in stories, but also give opinions. If we inspect Table 5.4, we find similar tendencies as those reported aboye for facts, such as higher average prejudice for people mentioning positive opinions of sources.

Negative opinions are recalled or mentioned most often, again mostly