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Article No. 11
Is There Still an Evil Empire? The Role of the
Mass Media in Depicting Stereotypes of Russians and Eastern
Europeans
Elza Ibroscheva
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale
elza@siu.edu
Introduction
Enemy images have always been considered
instrumental tools in the conduct of political propaganda and
psychological warfare. Ordinarily, when two nations are at war, each
considers the other its enemy. And traditionally, the wartime
propaganda of each nation attempts to inculcate in its people and
military personnel a similar image of the enemy as inherently
hostile, filled with hatred and a rage to conquer and dominate
others, treacherous, cruel, and—in a word—evil (White, 1949).
During the Cold War, the American people were
told in many ways and by many spokespersons that they were engaged
in a vital struggle with a wily and implacable enemy who was bent on
conquering the world and whose basic values are the antithesis of
everything that democratic countries believe (Holt & Silverstein,
1989). Moreover, numerous studies in the field of foreign policy had
examined the role of enemy images and ideology to conclude that they
played a significant role during the period of Cold War
confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union
(Hurwitz & Peffley, 1987, 1990; Hurwitz, Peffley, & Seligson, 1993).
Overall, these historical circumstances were responsible for the
unusual situation in which the United States and the Soviet Union
found themselves—nominally at peace with what has become the only
other superpower which nonetheless has been treated by the official
administration as a potential enemy and widely stereotyped as the
evil opponent.
Today, politically the Cold War is over and the
terms "communist bloc" and "Soviets propaganda" remain in the
history books. However, the same cannot be said with certainty about
what the impact of the Cold War on the perceptions and attitudes
towards people from the Soviet Bloc. In addition, it is important to
note that although the world is undergoing tremendous changes in
terms of the geopolitical configuration of global dominance today,
images of allies and foes continue to affect contemporary political
conflicts. Therefore, the examination of the stereotypes of Russians
and Eastern Europeans which are held by the American public in the
present atmosphere of global cooperation and post-Cold War cultural
exchange becomes of extreme scholarly importance.
For many scholars, the mass media are seen as
playing a vital role in shaping the audience’s perceptions of social
reality. They argue that we depend on the mass media as secondhand
sources to provide us with information about the remote and abstract
zones of the world that in most cases, are beyond our perceptual
grasp. This observation is very important in the case of creating
and transmitting stereotypical perceptions of foreign nationalities,
particularly when the mass media are the primary source of
information about remote cultures with opposing ideologies and
social beliefs. Therefore, the concept of mediated reality and the
role of the mass media as complementing the definition of reality,
which individual members of the social environment have already
built through observation and interaction, become instrumental in
explaining the relationship between stereotypes and the mass media.
In addition, because the moving vessels of global cooperation and
awareness today are all means of mass communication, it becomes
important to study the role of the mass media in creating and
perpetuating stereotypes of foreign nationals. This paper examines
the current stereotypes of Russians and Eastern Europeans held by
American public represented by college students to establish whether
there is a significant departure in the way in which American
students today tend to interpret images and characteristic traits of
people from Eastern Europe. Moreover, this study explores the origin
and the properties of these stereotypes to examine whether the roots
of stereotypical descriptions could be linked to ethnocentrism,
attitudes towards Russians and Eastern Europeans and most
importantly, the mass media.
Literature Review
There is a large literature on national images
and stereotypes though still relatively little methodological or
terminological clarity with respect to these phenomena. Overall,
national images and stereotypes are generalizations, broad
conclusions on the features of both one’s "own" group and that of
the "other." They might sometimes be merely a projection of the
characteristics of a prominent individual or the ruling elite of the
"other" group as a whole, or the generalization on a national scale
of private beliefs about this "other" group by opinion makers within
one’s "own" group (Gerrits & Adler, et. al, 1995).
The abundant literature in the psychology of the
enemy images projected on the Soviet Union is indeed impressive and
mostly influenced by the literature on prejudice, too vast to cite
here, and the literature (mostly in political science) on the roles
of cognition and misperception in international politics (e.g.
Farrell & Smith, 1967; Jervis, 1976; Jonsson, 1982; Levy, 1983;
Stein, 1988, White, 1970; Murray & Cowden, 1999). In a study of
enemy images among American college students, Holt (1989) recorded
that over 80 percent of the respondents thought the Soviet Union
could harm Americans, but only 16 percent of the respondents
believed that the Soviet Union had an actual intention to harm.
Moreover, Holt discovered, the most frequent descriptors for the
Russian people were, in order, hardworking, patriotic, decent,
suspicious and aggressive. By using two lists of adjectives, one
that described a public enemy and one that described a private
enemy, Holt concluded that the very large majorities of subjects in
the study correctly realized that the United States and the Soviet
Union have the capacity to destroy one another completely and yet,
the general belief seemed that a nation like the USSR "can be our
enemy without having the intent to do us harm" (p. 48).
Stephan, Stephan, Stefanenko, Ageyev, Abalakina
and Shrider (1993) tested three measurement techniques—checklist,
percentage and diagnostic ratio—to find out whether these methods
would yield consistent results in measuring stereotypes over an
American and a Russian sample. The study revealed that Russians were
perceived by the American sample to be more disciplined,
conservative, oppressed, hardworking, restrained, obedient,
secretive, serious, orderly, rigid, and cold. Moreover, Stephan,
Ageyev, Shrider, Stephan and Abalakina (1994) examined the emotional
reaction of American and Russian subjects to Americans, Russians and
Iraqis to discover that while stereotypes and the emotional
responses that they produce were indeed related to prejudice as
earlier psychological studies have demonstrated, they are also
closely related to self-esteem, ethnocentrism and authoritarianism.
Also, Yatani and Bramel (1989) reviewed studies of U.S. public
opinion regarding the Soviet Union over the past four decades to
conclude that attitudes towards Russians among Americans were
primarily ideological reflecting hostility towards socialism and
communism as a social system and that the source of the
predominantly disapproving attitudes was "nationalism"—seeing the
Soviets as "national rivals in competition for world dominance" (p.
15).
The influence of mass media content and its
relationship to forming public opinion is a large area of inquiry,
which has been among the top interests of media scholars in the past
few decades and still requires more sophisticated and detailed
examination. In studying stereotypes in the mass media, however,
many media scholars have tended to operate with a classic view of
stereotypes as rigid, simplistic, overgeneralized and erroneous.
"Stereotypes have been viewed as necessarily deficient; they distort
the ways in which social groups are characterized, and obscure
actual group particularities and subjectivities" (Pickering, 1995.
p. 692). Politically, they stand in the way of more tolerant,
even-handed and differentiated responses to people who belong to
social and ethnic categories beyond which are structurally dominant
(Zawadsky, 1942).
The concept, which has indeed dominated media
research of representation, is Walter Lippmann’s definition of the
term "stereotype" in Public Opinion (1922). In fact, this text is
generally credited with the introduction of the term stereotype in
the terminology of the social sciences. Lippmann defined stereotypes
as an inadequate and biased obstacle to rational assessment and as
resistant to social change. On the other hand, he also regarded
stereotyping as a necessary mode of processing information,
especially in highly differentiated societies, an inescapable way of
creating order. Moreover, Lippmann contended that if media
representations were based on scientific truth, they would inform
public opinion correctly. In this sense, it is important to note
that Lippmann recognized the ideological importance of stereotypes
and social propaganda in democratic as well as other political
systems. In his definition, stereotypes are ‘the projection upon the
world of our own sense of our own value, our own position and our
own right (Lippmann, 1922, p. 64), and as such, they consensually
support "particular definitions of reality . . . which in turn
relate to the disposition of power within society" (Dyer, 1979, p.
17). Thus, we can conclude stereotypes are a part of the apparatus
of social control and the mass media, as a reflective mirror of the
social structure, are directly involved in the creation,
perpetuation and crystallization of these stereotypical images and
depiction.
Similarly, in a collection of essays, Lester (et.
al, 1996) explores the verbal and pictorial stereotypes employed in
the media representations of ethnic and cultural minorities as well
as different marginal groups. The author assigns many of the
existing stereotypes to problems inherent to the journalistic
profession—in their strife to represent reality as close as
possible, journalists are often forced into typifying facts, and
illustrate only the major findings of their reports. Lester called
this phenomena "selective perception," a mediated process through
which we allow new information into our perceptions, but more
frequently, accept, reject, or reshape the new information into such
a way as to preserve existing perceptions, "perceptions, that could
be called world views or stereotypes" (p. 17).
In a similar line of thought, Ottosen (1995)
examined the news coverage of four international conflicts in
Norwegian media to establish whether enemy images and stereotypical
descriptions are an intrinsic part of the journalistic process. In
content analyzing the news coverage of the Iraqi invasion of Iran in
1980, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the marital law in
Romania in 1980 and the martial law in Poland in 1981 in the major
Norwegian newspapers, Ottosen discovered that the enemy image of the
Soviet Union and that of Islam were the rhetorical tool used by the
news media, consciously or unconsciously, to get a given ideological
message across to the receiving audience.
The bulk of the writing on the societal images to
which adults are exposed has been done by journalists and experts in
media and communications and has been anecdotal and impressionistic
(Silvestein, 1989). In fact, most studies of media images that use a
more rigorous methodology rely on quantitative content analyses and
often use control groups (Kriesberg, 1946; Herman, 1982). Others,
such as Silverstein (1989) and Silverstein and Flamenbaum (1989)
used a combination of qualitative and quantitative content analyses
of the print news to demonstrate parallels between the cognitive
biases exhibited by individual Americans towards Russians and
Eastern Europeans and the biases exhibited by the news media. As
Silverstein and Flamenbaum demonstrated, the public received
information about a nation’s actions primarily from reports in the
mass media, which themselves are probably often affected by enemy
images. It is also possible that reporters and editors assume the
public to hold and to expect confirmation of more extreme and
demonic enemy images of other nations that in fact it does hold. The
images and assumptions of media workers may derive from those held
by elites, which, in turn, exhibit their own biases (Chomsky, 1985;
Wolfe, 1983). Therefore, the authors argued, there exists a
relationship between the individual cognitive process and what might
be conceived of as a societal or group cognitive process that lead
to an item’s appearing in the news.
However complex the mediated nature of
perceptions of other nations may be, the importance of the mass
media as purveyors of these perceptions is recognized in academic
research though at a significantly smaller scale. White (1984)
contended that during the long period of the Cold War, our images of
one another were shaped extensively (and negatively) by the mass
media rather than by personal experience. Moreover, as Silverstein
(1989) argued the media were prime suppliers of the pervasive images
"that depict the Soviet as inhumane, vicious torturers who enjoy
inflicting pain and murder children" (p. 904). His survey indicated
that American children’s information about the Soviets came mostly
from the media, with parents and school trailing far behind as
information sources. Similarly, in an examination of American
network television, Gerbner (1993) discovered that the "wholesaler"
of enemy image, as of all images, was television. "Prime time
dramatic entertainment provides by far the most pervasive, frequent,
and vivid images of all foreign nationalities" (p. 32). As the
author pointed out, most Americans have never met a Soviet citizen,
but they have encountered a Russian (always called a Russian, not a
Soviet), in often intimate detail an average of at least once in
every three weeks of prime time network dramatic television.
Finally, Kleinnijenhuis (1987) attempted to
demonstrate a link between media portrayals and individual attitudes
towards the Soviet Union. Using path analysis, Kleinnijenhuis
related the newspapers read by people in the Netherlands, the images
of the Eastern bloc portrayed in these newspapers and the attitudes
towards the Eastern bloc held by the readers. The author concluded
that the images portrayed in the newspapers had a significant effect
on the attitudes of the people who read those newspapers.
Based on the foregoing discussion, it is the
contention of this paper that despite the improving post-Cold war
relationships between the ex-Soviet bloc and the United States,
considering individual perceptions of other nations as well as those
created and supported by the mass media, stereotypes are most
probably still going to be prevalent among Americans’ perception of
Russians and Eastern Europeans. This paper compares the intensity of
the pre-Cold War and post-Cold War images of Russians and Eastern
Europeans to examine whether positive and negative stereotypes of
the ex-Soviet bloc have changed since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Moreover, this paper expects that ethnocentrism, attitudes towards
Russians and Eastern Europeans and mass media use as source of
information will be significant predictors of perceived positive and
negative stereotypes of the countries and the people of the Eastern
bloc.
Method
This study conducted a crossectional
non-experimental survey. The subjects consisted of convenience
samples of 102 students from undergraduate journalism classes at
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. All students
participated voluntarily in the study. The instrument of the study
was a self-administered questionnaire in four parts.
In order to examine the research questions and
hypotheses posited earlier, this study identified one dependent and
several independent variables. The dependent variable under
observation was the stereotypes of Russians and Eastern Europeans.
Both positive and negative stereotypes were used. The independent
variables included ethnocentrism, attitudes towards Russians and
Eastern Europeans, and mass media as source of these stereotypical
descriptions. The dependent variable as well as each independent
variable was measured in a separate section of the questionnaire.
Stereotypes. First, to assess stereotypes,
subjects were asked to indicate whether they believe certain
adjectives are representative of Russians and Eastern Europeans
once, before the end of the Cold War, and a second time, after the
end of the Cold War. All subjects were instructed in details about
the character of the Cold War confrontation as well as about the
historical span of the Cold War and the post-Cold War periods. The
adjectives were selected based on previously conducted studies of
stereotypes of Russians (Stephan, et. al, 1993; Stephan, et. al,
1994) and also through a pretest. For the pretest, a separate sample
of 38 subjects was asked to select from a list of 33 adjectives—16
positive and 17 negative—previously tested for association with
Americans’ stereotypes of Russians. Subjects were asked to rate the
accuracy of each adjective on a scale from 1 to 5. The 16 top
adjectives selected by the respondents were selected for use in the
final study. The final list of adjectives included disciplined,
efficient, tough, hard working, secretive, obedient, criminal, hard
drinking, cunning, machinelike, insecure, vicious, aggressive,
cold-blooded, belligerent, and hostile.
In the final version of the questionnaire, of the
total number of 16 adjectives, 4 were positive in connotation and 8
were negative. In the first section of the questionnaire, subjects
were asked to rate the accuracy of each representation on a 5-point
scale running from very accurate to very inaccurate, once for the
pre-Cold War period and a second time, for the post-Cold War period.
Ethnocentrism. In the second section of the
questionnaire, the subjects’ ethnocentrism was measured with an
abridged version of an ethnocentrism scale developed by Hood (1998).
The scale consists of 10 statements (e.g. "If everyone did things
the American way, the world would be better off", "Most people in
the world really wish they could become American citizens"). The
response format was a 5-point Likert-scale running from strongly
disagree to strongly agree. A lower score on the ethnocentrism scale
indicate a lower degree of ethnocentrism. The original scale
recorded Cronbach’s alpha at .82. In this study, Cronbach’s alpha
was also .82.
Attitude. In the third section of the
questionnaire, respondents’ attitude towards Russians and Eastern
Europeans was measured through a specially developed scale, which
was designed to examine and record the respondents’ attitude towards
the people of the ex-Soviet bloc. The scale consisted of 10 Likert-type scale statements designed to capture whether the
subjects express favorable or unfavorable attitude towards the
countries and the people of Russia and Eastern Europe (e.g. "These
countries are free of corruption", "The people of Russia and Eastern
Europe are tolerant"). Attitude was measured on a 5-point scale
where a lower number indicated a more unfavorable attitude while a
higher number indicated a more favorable attitude. The Cronbach’s
alpha of the attitude scale was .75.
Mass media. Finally, to measure whether mass
media serve as primary suppliers of stereotypes of Russians and
Eastern Europeans, the subjects were asked to indicate the sources
that influenced their opinion of the people from the ex-Soviet bloc.
On a 5-point scale running from very big influence to very little
influence, respondents rated mass media, interpersonal sources,
college and high school classes, visit and travel and other
additionally specified sources to denote the origins of their
personal information about these nationalities. For the purposes of
this study and because of the psychical limitation of time and space
in the construction of the questionnaire, the term mass media was
meant to include a broad definition of media sources, including, but
not limited to magazines, newspapers entertainment, books, movies,
video games, the Internet, etc.
In the final section of the questionnaire,
subjects were also asked to indicate their age, gender and
nationality as a measure of the sample’s demographic
characteristics.
Findings
The sample used in this study had a mean age of
21.86, ranging from 20 to 32. Forty nine of the respondents were
females and 51 were males.
In order to illustrate the respondents’ overall
ethnocentrism, attitude towards Russians and Eastern Europeans,
media use and perceived stereotypes of Russians and Eastern
Europeans, the mean of each of these variables was computed. Table 1
presents the mean of the dependent the independent variables.
Table 1. Mean Ethnocentrism, Attitude, Media
Use and Positive and Negative Stereotypes
for the Cold War and Post Cold War Periods.
|
Variable |
Mean Value |
|
Cold War positive stereotypes |
2.18 |
|
Cold War negative stereotypes |
2.38 |
|
Post-Cold War positive stereotypes |
2.46 |
|
Post-Cold War negative stereotypes |
2.70 |
|
Ethnocentrism |
2.65 |
|
Attitude |
2.48 |
|
Media Use |
2.14 |
Lower number indicates on a scale from 1 to 5 a
higher accuracy of stereotype, lower ethnocentrism, higher media use
and more unfavorable attitude towards Russians and Eastern
Europeans.
As Table 1indicates, the average attitude of the
respondents toward Russians and Eastern Europeans was somewhat
unfavorable, while the average respondent recorded a high measure of
ethnocentrism. Moreover, as the table demonstrates, the average
respondent used the mass media as the primary source of information
about these nationalities.
In order to examine further the change of
stereotypes after the end of the Cold War, the mean of each
adjective believed to describe Russians and Eastern Europeans before
and after the fall of the Berlin Wall was recorded. Table 2 presents
in a ranking order, beginning with the most accurate and ending with
the least accurate one, the mean of each adjective as reported by
the respondents for the two periods.
Table 2. Mean Accuracy of Stereotypes before
and After the End of the Cold War
|
Stereotype |
Mean Accuracy in Cold War Period |
Stereotype |
Mean Accuracy in Post-Cold War Period |
|
Secretive |
1.87 |
Hard working |
2.37 |
|
Tough |
1.97 |
Tough |
2.46 |
|
Hard working |
2.06 |
Disciplined |
2.47 |
|
Aggressive |
2.09 |
Efficient |
2.53 |
|
Hostile |
2.12 |
Insecure |
2.54 |
|
Disciplined |
2.20 |
Aggressive |
2.59 |
|
Machinelike |
2.33 |
Hard drinking |
2.62 |
|
Vicious |
2.35 |
Obedient |
2.64 |
|
Obedient |
2.36 |
Machinelike |
2.66 |
|
Cold-blooded |
2.41 |
Criminal |
2.67 |
|
Insecure |
2.48 |
Secretive |
2.70 |
|
Efficient |
2.50 |
Hostile |
2.76 |
|
Belligerent |
2.52 |
Cold-blooded |
2.77 |
|
Criminal |
2.57 |
Cunning |
2.82 |
|
Hard drinking |
2.72 |
Belligerent |
2.82 |
|
Cunning |
2.76 |
Vicious |
2.83 |
Lower number indicates a higher accuracy of
stereotype on a scale from 1 to 5.
Table 2 indicates respondents overall believed
that the most accurate adjectives in describing Russians and Eastern
Europeans during the Cold War were, in ranking order, secretive,
tough, hard working and aggressive. In the post-Cold War period,
however, the most accurate adjectives in describing Russians and
Eastern Europeans were hard working, tough, disciplined and
efficient which also constitute the positive stereotypes variable.
Overall, the adjectives describing Russians and Eastern Europeans
were rated by the respondents mostly as very accurate and accurate,
rather than inaccurate or very inaccurate.
To answer the research question this paper
posited and establish whether there has been a statistically
significant change in the stereotypes of Russians and Eastern
Europeans before and after the end of the Cold War, a t-test was
conducted for positive and negative stereotypes the results of which
are presented in Table 3.
Table 3. Mean Scores* of Positive and
Negative Stereotypes by Period
|
Stereotypes |
Cold War Period |
Post-Cold War Period |
T-value |
Sig. |
|
Positive |
2.18 |
2.45 |
-4.30 |
.000 |
|
Negative |
2.38 |
2.70 |
-5.85 |
.000 |
|
*A lower score indicates higher accuracy
of the stereotype |
The results in Table 3 clearly indicate that
there is a significant difference (p < . 05) between Cold War and
post-Cold War positive and negative stereotypes. Overall, both
negative and positive stereotypes are perceived to be less accurate
in the post-Cold war period than in the Cold War period.
To further decipher the changes in stereotypes of
Russians and Eastern Europeans, a t-test was conducted individually
for each adjective believed to represent images of Russians and
Eastern Europeans. The results of the t-test are presented in Table
4.
Table 4. Mean Scores for Stereotypical
Adjectives by Period
|
Stereotype* |
Cold War Period |
Post-Cold War Period |
T-value |
Sig. |
|
Disciplined |
2.19 |
2.47 |
-2.52 |
.013* |
|
Efficient |
2.50 |
2.52 |
-.29 |
.769 |
|
Tough |
1.97 |
2.47 |
-4.34 |
.000* |
|
Hard working |
2.05 |
2.37 |
-3.29 |
.001* |
|
Secretive |
1.87 |
2.70 |
-6.36 |
.000* |
|
Obedient |
2.36 |
2.64 |
-2.32 |
.022* |
|
Criminal |
2.57 |
2.67 |
-.85 |
.397 |
|
Hard drinking |
2.72 |
2.62 |
1.13 |
.260 |
|
Cunning |
2.76 |
2.82 |
-.47 |
.638 |
|
Machinelike |
2.33 |
2.66 |
-2.59 |
.011* |
|
Insecure |
2.48 |
2.54 |
-.50 |
.617 |
|
Vicious |
2.35 |
2.83 |
-4.19 |
.000* |
|
Aggressive |
2.09 |
2.59 |
-4.24 |
.000* |
|
Cold-blooded |
2.41 |
2.77 |
-2.86 |
.005* |
|
Belligerent |
2.52 |
2.82 |
-3.03 |
.003* |
|
Hostile |
2.12 |
2.77 |
-5.44 |
.000* |
* Significant difference at p < .05.
Table 4 clearly demonstrates that of all 16
adjectives, believed to represent Russians and Eastern Europeans, 11
showed significant difference in accuracy when compared before and
after the end of the Cold War. Among the positive stereotypes, three
out of four recorded significant differences and among the negative
stereotypes, eight out of 12 established significant difference when
compared for the two time periods. Overall there was significant
support to conclude that stereotypes of Russians and Eastern
Europeans have changed after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Hypothesis one posited that ethnocentrism,
attitude towards Russians and Eastern Europeans and mass media use
will be significant predictors of positive and negative stereotypes
of Russians and Eastern Europeans. To test this hypothesis, multiple
regression analysis was conducted for both the positive and negative
stereotypes. The results of the multiple regression are presented in
Table 5.
Table 5. Multiple Regression of Stereotypes
by Ethnocentrism, Attitude and Media Use*
|
Stereotypes |
Cold War Period |
R2 |
Unique |
Shared |
F/T |
p |
|
Positive |
n.s. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Negative |
sig., |
.17 |
.11
Attitude
(p=.000)
(sr2=.11) |
.06 |
6.69256
3.548 |
.000 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Stereotypes |
Post Cold War Period |
R2 |
Unique |
Shared |
F/T |
p |
|
Positive |
n.s. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Negative |
Sig., |
.10 |
.01
Media Use
(p=.02)
(sr2=.01) |
.09 |
3.5538
2.3558 |
.017 |
*Only independent variables, which made
significant contribution to explaining the dependent variable, are
listed in the table.
As Table 5 demonstrates, hypothesis one was
rejected. Only the independent variables attitude and media use
contributed significantly to explaining the negative stereotypes
variable. Ethnocentrism on the other hand, did not contribute
significantly to explaining the dependent variables either before or
after the end of the Cold War.
Discussion
Using t-test, this study found that stereotypes
of Russians and Eastern Europeans have changed over the years after
the fall of the Berlin Wall, and using multiple regression, the
study discovered that attitude towards the people of the ex-Soviet
bloc and media as source of information about these countries were
significant predictors of the negative stereotypes before and after
end of the Cold War.
Interestingly, the pilot study conducted at the
onset of this examination to select adjectives to describe
stereotypes of Russians and Eastern Europeans yielded only four
positive adjectives to represent images of Eastern bloc people. The
remaining twelve stereotypes, which were included in the final
version of the questionnaire, were predominantly negative in
connotation. Moreover, as the comparison of means between the
positive and the negative stereotypes demonstrated, during the Cold
War both the positive and the negative stereotypes were rated as
somewhat accurate to neutral (2 < mean accuracy < 3) but rarely as
somewhat inaccurate or very inaccurate (4 < mean accuracy < 5).
Similarly, in the post-Cold War period, both the negative and the
positive stereotypes registered significant departure from their
initial value during the Cold War period. Specifically, stereotypes
with the highest accuracy in the current period coincide completely
with the positive stereotypes selected to represent images of
Russians and Eastern Europeans. However, even though overall
stereotypes currently indicate a more positive image of Russians and
Eastern Europeans compared to the Cold War period, negative
stereotypes of people from the ex-Soviet bloc still prevail among
young Americans.
The results were illuminating for yet another
reason. While both positive and negative stereotypes have diminished
in intensity, attitude towards Russians and Eastern Europeans was
generally rather unfavorable. On the other hand, respondents
recorded a low degree of ethnocentrism, which suggests a more
positive outlook to foreigners, and outside groups in general. To
further explain this seeming contradiction, this study examined the
relationship between ethnocentrism and attitude towards Russians and
Eastern Europeans. The regression results demonstrated a significant
negative correlation between the two (r = -. 368, p =. 000). The
correlation coefficient indicates that an increase in ethnocentrism
is linked to a decrease in favorable attitude towards people from
the ex-Soviet bloc and vise versa. Moreover, the questionnaire,
through which this study measured ethnocentrism and attitude towards
Russians and Eastern Europeans, was designed to measure
ethnocentrism and attitude regardless of the time frame. In fact,
all three of the independent variables that were tested for
significant contribution to explaining the variance in the
stereotypes were measured without discrimination between the Cold
War and the post-Cold War period which might partially account for
the difference between the regression results in the two time
periods.
The study also established that ethnocentrism,
attitude towards Russians and Eastern Europeans and media use
overall did not contribute significantly to explaining the
stereotypes which Americans hold of people from Russia and Eastern
Europe before and after the end of the Cold War. However, attitude
towards Russians and Eastern Europeans was a significant predictor
of the variance in the negative stereotypes before the end of the
Cold War. Moreover, for the post-Soviet period, media use
contributed significantly to explaining the variance in the negative
stereotypes variable. Media use reported a significant contribution
to explaining the variance in the negative stereotypes from the fall
of the Berlin Wall to present times. These findings bear an even
more engaging relation to the changes in the negative stereotypes
which the t-tests manifested. Negative stereotypes, as the t-test
indicated, have diminished in intensity and shifted from accurate
and somewhat accurate to being somewhat accurate and mostly neutral.
The findings of the multiple regression allow us to stipulate that
the mass media as the major source of information about the people
of Russia and Eastern Europe among the respondents (mean media use
was 2.14 on a 1 to 5 scale) have contributed to perhaps providing
more detailed and less biased information about the countries of the
ex-Soviet bloc in the post-Cold War era. While to some extent this
stipulation runs contrary to the initial assumption of this paper,
it provides a plausible explanation to the changes in the mostly
negative stereotypes after the end of the Cold War confrontation
between the Soviet bloc and the United States.
Conclusions
This study examined stereotypes of Russians and
Eastern Europeans as well as the role of the mass media,
ethnocentrism and attitude towards people form the ex-Soviet bloc in
creating and maintaining these stereotypes. Even though the results
of this study allow us to make certain assumptions about the role of
the mass media as one of the primary supplier of images and
stereotypes depicting Russians and Eastern Europeans, they do not
offer a consistent explanation of the peculiar relationship between
attitudes towards Russians and Eastern Europeans and ethnocentrism.
The results of the multiple regression analysis suggest that only
attitude contributes significantly to explaining changes in the
negative stereotypes of people from the ex-Soviet bloc. Therefore,
future studies of stereotypes can examine the relationship among
personality traits, interpersonal sources and attitudes towards
Russians and Eastern Europeans. Since ethnocentrism failed to
explain changes in stereotypes before and after the end of the Cold
War and yet attitude towards Russian and Eastern Europeans predicted
negative stereotypes before the end of the Cold War, perhaps other
personality measures will better explain the relation between
stereotypes and other factors which impact the formation of these
stereotypes.
Moreover, while this study demonstrated the
important role of the mass media in creating and changing
stereotypes, future studies can elaborate the design of the mass
media use variable to examine in greater details the exact mechanism
in which mass media use construct or deconstruct stereotypes of
foreign nationalities, and Russians and Eastern Europeans in
particular. One of the limitations of this study was the rather
abstract definition, which was applied to the variable mass media.
Future studies can examine the role of specific types of media, such
as film, news media, entertainment television.
In the present study several important
implications are evident. First, there seems be an important link
between negative stereotypes, attitudes and media use which requires
further inquiry. Moreover, this study can serve as a starting point
for a future evaluation of international, cross-cultural stereotypes
in an American sample and a Russian sample. Additionally, negative
and positive stereotypes can be examined by gender and compared to
establish difference in perception held by female Americans and male
Americans. Finally, a study of the stereotypes of Russians and
Eastern Europeans held by Americans can be combined with a
quantitative and qualitative examination of these stereotypes in the
mass media to refine and further illuminate the modifying
relationship between public and individual perceptions of foreigners
and the images used to depict them in the mass media.
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About the Author
Elza Ibroscheva
is a doctoral candidate working on her dissertation at the College
of Mass Communication and Media Arts, Southern Illinois University
Carbondale. Her research interests include international
communication, cultural studies, and globalization. Ibroscheva is
from Bulgaria, where she received her bachelor's degree from the
American University in Bulgaria before she came to the United States
to pursue a graduate degree. She can be contacted at College of Mass
Communication and Media Arts, Mail code 6606, Carbondale, IL
62901-6606, E-mail: elza@siu.edu
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