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Research on Enemy Images: Present Status and Future Prospects
Author(s) -
Silverstein Brett,
Holt Robert R.
Publication year - 1989
Publication title -
journal of social issues
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.618
H-Index - 122
eISSN - 1540-4560
pISSN - 0022-4537
DOI - 10.1111/j.1540-4560.1989.tb01547.x
Subject(s) - adversary , attribution , soviet union , psychology , cognition , identity (music) , social psychology , id, ego and super ego , empirical research , social cognition , political science , positive economics , epistemology , law , economics , computer science , computer security , philosophy , physics , neuroscience , politics , acoustics
This paper comments on the approach and findings of the preceding papers on the psychology of enemy images, and presents numerous suggestions about needed and feasible research. The research cited mostly used the approaches of attitude measurement and of social‐cognitive theories, including attribution and social identity theories, and it employed various research methods, including survey, quasiexperimental, and experimental methods. The main empirical focus of these studies was recent U.S. attitudes toward the USSR, which were found to bias the attitude holders' information processing, mostly in predicted ways. Nevertheless, available evidence suggests that most of the American public do not have extremely stereotyped, diabolical enemy images of the Soviet Union, its people, or its leaders, and furthermore, that U.S. attitudes toward the USSR are softening rapidly under the impact of events of the last few years. Determinants of anti‐Soviet attitudes are discussed, and hypotheses and speculations are presented about the motivations and sources of enemy images generally, how they may be changed, and their larger implications from the standpoint of cognitive and ego‐developmental theory.