Nobel prize winner Jacques Monod was fascinated by the impact of ideas on the fate of human groups. He believed that the power of an idea was independent of its truth. "The performance value of an idea," he said, "depends upon the change it brings to the behavior of the person or the group that adopts it." (1972, p. 166). Ideas, whether they be true or false, are agents and products of the evolutionary struggle for survival. "The human group upon which a given idea confers greater cohesiveness, greater ambition, and greater self-confidence thereby receives from it an added power to expand which will insure the promotion of the idea itself." If Monod is right, the study of ideas is indispensable for the adequate analysis of topics in community psychology. The way people think about a social problem may encourage them to confront it, and will affect the form and outcome of that confrontation.
Since the term "cognitive community psychology" was coined (O'Neill, 1981) the use of cognitive variables in community psychology research has been on the rise (a brief sampling:
Chavis & Wandersman, 1990; Constantino & Nelson, 1995; Florin & Wandersman, 1984;
Lavoie, Jacob, Hardy, & Martin, 1989; Lavoie, vezina, Piche, & Boivin, 1995; Mitchell, Davidson, Chodakowski, & McVeigh, 1985; O'Neill, 1989; O'Neill & Hem, 1991; Pancer &
Cameron, 1994; Rich, Edelstein, Hallman, & Wandersman, 1995; St. Lawrence, Eldridge, Reitman, Little, Shelby, & Brasfield, 1998; Van Uchelen, Davidson, Quressette, Brasfield, &
Demerais, 1997; Vinokur & Caplan, 1986).
This chapter will review prototypical research that takes a cognitive approach to social and community psychology. I will begin by introducing three levels of analysis that will be used throughout the chapter. I will then review recent studies of stereotyping that may advance our understanding of intergroup conflict. Turning from stereotyping to social action, I will present three current lines of research, each of which reflects a different level of analysis. The chapter will conclude with some reflections on the problems and prospects involved in combining several levels of analysis to look at issues in our field.
A central theme of this book is that phenomena can be analyzed on different levels, and
PATRICK O'NEILL • Department of Psychology, Acadia University, Wolfville, Nova Scotia BOP lXO, Canada.
Handbook of Community Psychology, edited by Julian Rappaport and Edward Seidman. Kluwer Academic f Plenum Publishers, New York, 2000.
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that we must be clear in community psychology about the level on which we are working at any given moment. In this chapter I will refer to three levels of analysis: the individual, the interpersonal, and the community. At the individual level, phenomena are explained by a person's beliefs, motives, or feelings, without reference to interpersonal transactions or social context. At the interpersonal level, the focus is on the transaction between two or more people.
At the community level, reference is made to group identification to explain social events.
A problem may take different shapes when approaches on different levels of analysis;
consider, for example, child abuse. At the individual level, a researcher might focus on characteristics of parents who abuse their children (e.g., Rickel, 1989) or of children who are abused (victims often blame themselves; see O'Neill, 1998). At the interpersonal level one might target the family, looking at the dynamics of parent-child interactions or intrafamily transmission of abuse over generations (e.g., Braun, 1993). On the community level, Gar- barino has studied a variety of important factors in the incidence of abuse, including lack of community identity and cohesion (Garbarino & Kostelny, 1992). One might also, at this level of analysis, look at the way abuse is defined among community groups (e.g., Campbell, 1999) or construed in historical context (e.g., Hacking, 1991, 1995), or one might use a gender-power analysis to explain the underlying motivation for abuse and its tolerance (e.g., Brickman, 1992). One may also employ systems theory to understand a community's response to cases of abuse (e.g., O'Neill & Hem, 1991).
None of these levels of analysis gives a picture of reality that is true while the other levels' versions are false. As Prilleltensky & Nelson (1997) point out, when one way of looking at a problem is in the foreground, the other ways tend to fade into the background.
They argue, and few community psychologists would disagree, that mainstream psychology overemphasizes the individual level of analysis while neglecting community, social, and cultural explanations. They also note that community psychology has been more receptive than mainstream psychology to broader analyses. It may even be that the balance has been tipped, and community psychology has not incorporated all that it might from such areas as cognitive social psychology (O'Neill, 1981; O'Neill & Trickett, 1982).
Social cognition, loosely defined as the study of knowledge structures, decision-making, and information processing, might seem to represent an obvious individual-level approach to research. But, in fact, it cuts across all three levels. Consider the following explanations for social action: Activists tend to be those who believe in their power to affect change and that social conditions are often unjust (individual level); people escalate their demands when a person in authority makes small, grudging concessions (interpersonal level); collective action occurs when people identify with a group that they perceive as being unfairly treated (commu- nity level). Notice that social cognition plays a role in each of these propositions. At the individual level, beliefs are involved; at the interpersonal level, information is transmitted; at the community level, identification processes are invoked.
STEREOTYPING AND INTERGROUP RELATIONS
An ideal of community psychology is the promotion of tolerance. The community should value diversity of lifestyle, cultural and religious practices, sexual orientations, and other aspects of human variation. The model community would not, in Rappaport's (1977) words, rank order people on a single criterion; it would, instead, maximize the ability of all to live according to a standard of life selected by the persons themselves. A goal of many community
interventions is to promote tolerance for diversity and an appreciation of the various adapta- tions people make to their environments (O'Neill & Trickett, 1982). The reduction of prejudice is a valid objective of community psychology.
The formation of negative stereotypes of other groups is associated with prejudice and discrimination (Oakes, Haslam, & Turner, 1994; O'Neill, 1981). This section will review current work on stereotyping, and will consider its implications for community psychology.
The essence of the problem of negative ethnic stereotypes can be captured in the following brief example. A tourist from the United States drives through Quebec on vacation. The tourist is treated rudely by a French-speaking waitress. On the basis of this single encounter, the tourist decides that the French in Quebec are rude and dislike U.S. tourists. Later the tourist meets Quebeckers who do not fit the stereotype, but they are discounted as exceptions to the rule.
As illogical as this scenario seems, there is considerable research evidence to support it.
People often generalize from extremely small samples (Tversky and Kahneman, 1971), and may even generalize on the basis of single cases (Hamil, Wilson, & Nisbett, 1980; Nisbett &
Borgida, 1975; Zuckerman, Mann, & Bernieri, 1982). Once a belief is in place, though, it is hard to shake, even when the person is presented with counter-examples (Wilder, 1984), or is told that the information on which the belief was based was false (Anderson, Lepper, & Ross, 1980; Anderson, 1983).
What are the conditions that lead people to create stereotypes on the basis of small sam- ples, then to cling to these stereotypes, even when they are discredited? In terms of formation, there is some evidence that people generalize without considering whether a sample case was randomly drawn from a larger group (Nisbett and Borgida, 1975). They may even generalize in the face of information that the sample case is atypical (Hamil, Wilson, & Nisbett, 1980), although there is contradictory evidence on this point (Zuckerman et aI., 1982). They tend to generalize more when they view the target group as homogeneous. The perceived homoge- neity of out-groups, compared to their own group, leads people to make more extreme judgments-good or bad-about out-group members than about members or their own group (Linville & Jones, 1980).
Turning to the perseverance of stereotypes, we find that a belief is more resistant to discomfirming evidence when the person has worked out a scenario that makes the belief seem plausible (Anderson et aI., 1980). A tourist with a causal scenario about why the French in Quebec might have reason to be rude to English speakers will be more likely to cling to the belief that they are rude, even when faced with strong evidence to the contrary.
Weber and Crocker (1983) propose three competing models of what may happen when a person who believes a stereotype is confronted with disconfirming evidence. In the bookkeep- ing model, the stereotype is modified gradually, one example at a time. In the conversion model, the stereotype changes radically in response to sudden or salient instances. In the subtyping model, new stereotypic structures are developed to accommodate instances not easily assimilated by existing stereotypes. If the subtyping model is correct, for example, a tourist who expects rudeness from Quebeckers may, when confronted with a friendly mer- chant, develop a SUbtype: Merchants are friendly to get business. The initial stereotype stays in place, but becomes more complex.
In experiments to test these models, Weber and Crocker (1983) found that when discon- firming evidence is dispersed across many members of a group, the stereotype tends to change slowly, as a function of the number of disconfirming examples. When the disconfirrning evidence is concentrated in a few members, however, subtypes are developed. Dramatically inconsistent individuals (such as the friendly merchant) are seen as unrepresentative of the
group as a whole. The conversion model is probably most relevant to the development of a stereotype in the first place. We know that, as the conversion model predicts, people often generalize on the basis of a single vivid case. The bookkeeping and subtyping models are relevant to changing entrenched stereotypes. The three models, and the conditions under which they operate, offer one solution to the paradox that we stereotype quickly on the basis of inadequate evidence, then we cling to the belief, even when confronted with good evidence that it is false.
Other promising lines of research into stereotyping focus on salience and vividness.
Salience is a function of differential attention. Novel stimuli are salient. The tourist who is snubbed by a Quebec waitress generalizes to Quebeckers rather than to waitresses. Why?
Because the tourist has been served by many waitresses, but has never before encountered a French-speaking waitress in Quebec. Salience has been shown to playa role in formation of stereotypes (Forgas, 1983).
The vividness of information also seems to contribute to stereotyping. Vivid information is emotionally interesting, concrete, imagery-provoking, and proximate in a sensory, tempo- ral, or spatial way (Nisbett & Ross, 1980). An interaction with a rude waitress is more emo- tional than an interaction with a friendly waitress; it has more impact when it happens to you, personally, than when you hear about it from someone else. Vividness, salience, and other cognitive variables influence what we remember. Moods also affect memory (Alvaro, McFar- land, & Beuhler, 1998; McFarland & Beuhler, 1997).
The role of vividness and salience in belief formation, and the role of causal explanations in belief maintenance, have other applications relevant to community psychology. For exam- ple, they are implicated in the perceived correlation between social class and criminal behavior. Tittle (1982) examined various theories of crime that assume a correlation between social class and criminal behavior. He suggested that there is a lack of evidence for the criminality of the lower class, yet the belief remains strong despite its fragile empirical basis.
Social scientists, for instance, devote a good deal of mental energy to devising theories to account for a correlation that may not exist. Tittle offered several explanations for the strength of this belief, including one based on a cognitive view of stereotyping. He noted that "there is a robust tendency for humans, even those with trained scientific minds, to form their judgments about phenomena on the basis of the most recent, the most dramatic, or the most personally relevant piece of information" (p. 354). Once a person decides that a relationship exists- between social class and criminal behavior, in this case-that belief is hard to shake, espe- cially when the person has thought of a causal theory to explain the relationship. Thus, in Tittle's view, once we have thought of reasons why the lower class should be drawn to criminal behavior, our stereotype tends to withstand evidence that there is little or no relationship between class and crime.
In another community-based application of social cognition, Yates and Aronson (1983) used findings concerning the impact of vivid information to recommend ways in which the general public could be persuaded to conserve energy in residential buildings. The National Energy Conservation Act of 1978 led to a program in which major gas and electric utility companies in the United States offered customers a variety of conservation services. The companies were required to provide useful, reliable, and accurate information to customers in all socioeconomic subgroups. The information was to be provided by auditors trained to act as effective communicators. Yates and Aronson made a number of specific suggestions about how these communicators might convey information in ways that would be vivid and person- ally relevant.
Although there are many potentially interesting applications of research on belief forma-
tion and maintenance, stereotyping on the basis of group membership has still drawn the most attention from investigators.
Beyond the Individual Level of Analysis
Much of the research on stereotyping has an individual focus, but we ought not slight the importance of interpersonal and community levels of analysis when we consider prejudice and discrimination. Forgas (1983) warns against relying on individual cognition to understand stereotyping. People learn about one another through interaction, and our interactions are shaped by group identification.
The importance of considering various levels of analysis is demonstrated by the problem of so-called realistic group conflict. Sherif (1956) created artificial groups, pitted them against one another, and then looked for ways to resolve the resulting conflict. His work has been taken as a demonstration that actual competition underlies prejudice. But the community level of analysis, where group loyalties are real, not artificial, gives a somewhat different interpreta- tion. Kinder and Sears (1981) studied voting behavior in two Los Angeles mayoral elections, each involving one white and one black candidate. Realistic group conflict, based on direct threats to whites' neighborhoods, jobs, children's schooling, or families' safety, had almost no effect on voting. Instead, voting by whites was influenced by what Kinder and Sears call
"symbolic racism" -sociocultural prejudice related to long-standing group identification.
Some research programs include design features that highlight more than one level of analysis. For instance, DuM combines the interpersonal and community levels. She looks at interactions between people with strong group identifications, such as the French and English in Quebec. She asks: Under what conditions can members of different groups become friends?; are these conditions different than those required for friendship between members of the same group? (Simard, 1981). By using real interactions, she has discovered aspects of intergroup relations that are hard to pinpoint in the laboratory. For instance, similarity was extremely important in cross-cultural friendships; friendship required that persons from two different groups be more similar to one another than would be necessary within a group.
Language is an obvious barrier when two people are not fluent in each other's language, but DuM's research showed that the barrier is still up even when the two potential friends are bilingual; participants thought it was extremely important that their mother tongue be used in conversation with the other person.
Up to this point, I have followed the usual social psychological approach of assuming that stereotypes are necessarily false, since they are simplifications, and that they are generally bad, since they are implicated in prejudice and discrimination. I want to move away from these conventions, because matters are not as simple as they seem.
First, are stereotypes necessarily false? Campbell's work on the basis of stereotypes (e.g., Campbell, 1967; LeVine & Campbell, 1972) was, for a time, a rare exception to the consensus that they are indeed false. Referring to cross-cultural studies, Campbell pointed out that the main components in negative stereotypes believed by one group about another were usually ways in which the groups really did differ. For example, a group that avoided alcohol was most likely to emphasize the drunkenness of one that did not. Campbell was concerned about the creation of cultural identities and the way stereotypes fed into those identities.
It has taken mainstream psychology some decades to follow Campbell's lead. The new tum is marked by a book of research published by the American Psychological Association, Stereotype accuracy: Toward appreciating group differences. The book opens with a frank
discussion of the political difficulties in studying this topic: "The idea that stereotypes may have some degree of accuracy is apparently anathema to many social scientists and laypeople.
Those who document accuracy run the risk of being seen as racists, sexists, or worse" (Lee, Jussim, & McCauley, 1995, p. xiii).
There is, in fact, a considerable body of evidence that stereotypes of one group by another do have a grain of truth. McCauley (1994) reported accurate judgment of real group differ- ences in studies involving race, gender, and college major.
Are stereotypes always a bad thing? To be sure, they are, by definition, a simplification of complex material. Such simplification is not a good thing when judging a job candidate. But the same may not hold true at the community level, when the unit of analysis is the group rather than the individual member.
Stereotypes reflect ethnic and national traditions, not just ethnocentric prejudice. Groups are often proud of their ability to "laugh at themselves," especially when their own cherished traditions incorporate some aspect of the stereotype. Consider the following joke, which former French President Giscard d'Estaing used to tell when speaking at official functions in European capitals. In heaven, he said, the chefs are French, the police are English, the engineers are German, the administrators are Swiss, and the lovers are Italian. In hell, he con- tinued, the chefs are English, the police are German, the engineers are Italian, the administra- tors are French, and the lovers are Swiss. His joke plays on both positive and negative aspects of traditional stereotypes drawn from ideas about national virtues and vices-ideas that must be generally accepted for the joke to work. As a personal aside, I tried this story out while enrolled in a language course in Tours, France, before a group of fellow students that included representatives of all the groups mentioned in the joke. Only one of the two Swiss claimed not to understand what was so amusing.
When we employ different levels of analysis in our work, we bring some of our under- lying assumptions into question. In a sense, the mainstream attack on cultural stereotypes reflects the melting-pot view of the ideal society. Stereotypes contradict the polite fiction that people are really all the same. The main alternative to the melting pot is the ideal of society as a mosaic, made up of different ethnic groups who treasure their traditions, even while they cooperate with one another in democratic institutions.
There is ongoing debate about how far one can or should go in respecting group traditions in a liberal democracy; see, for instance, Geertz (1986) on diversity, Rorty (1991) on ethno- centrism, Taylor (1995) on the politics of recognition, and Fish (1997) on "boutique multi- culturalism. "
However this debate plays out, there is no doubt that our notions about the ideal society have shifted from the melting pot to some form of the mosaic. With that shift, we need to reexamine the mainstream view in psychology that stereotypes are necessarily pernicious.
Taylor has explored this question in research in Canada, where the mosaic ideal has been in place longer than it has in the United States. He points out that in a multicultural society, members of ethnic groups are encouraged to retain their cultural diversity and preserve their heritage. Ethnic categories are positively valued. As Taylor (1981) says, in that context:
"Stereotypes can be an important mechanism for recognizing, and expressing, ethnicity"
(p. 163).
In considering the implications of the cognitive bases of stereotyping for intergroup relations, our target should not be the stereotyping process itself, which will almost certainly prove to be well-defended against our assaults. Instead, we should worry about the application of stereotypes to individuals in situations that matter to them as individuals. We should be concerned when stereotypes are used to promote one culture-bound perspective as being universally appropriate (LeVine & Campbell, 1972).