社会的態度に関する一研究 : (1)Stereotypesを通して見た文化変容

Problem Racial prejudices have been considered as a chief obstruction for our democratic education and international understanding. When racial prejudices become stereotyped, not only certain unfavorable conceptions are implanted into them, but also these exaggerated ideas foster rationalization of any action realistically or unrealistically relating to them. They, therefore, create a vicious circle between a misperception or misinterpretation of social events and a facilitation of maladjusted personality. This dynamics of stereotypes upon personality development was found to be quite similar for both majority and minority groups in its motivational causality but diversely different in its social manifestation. (Hara, 1961) Thus, two objectives were sought in this study: what kinds of terms people choose to describe racial stereotypes for Americans and Chinese in Japan, and what sort of characteristics these stereotypes manifest in their processes of acculturalization. Method This study employed three groups of subjects-82 Japanese, 25 American and 22 Chinese students in ICU. Each subject was tested, using questionnaires in which 10 personality traits out of 60 in a list were selected and ranked according to the degrees of characteristics of an assigned group. Individual subjects responded altogether three times, once for each of the three racial groups. Racial stereotypes were then comprised of the 20 highest traits judged for a certain group by either its own or another group. In addition to the above, data obtained from Americans and Niseis in the United States were also used for comparison. Conclusions 1. Modal personality for a certain racial group is recognized as those personality traits which are judged for a group by all groups including its own. (See Table 2-(a)～(i),3-(a)～(d).) 2. Remarkably great conformity among subjects within all groups indicates a high degree of reliability of the method. Distinctiveness of stereotypes, in terms of high conformity scores, also suggests a unique structure of modal personality for each racial group. 3. A number of traits common to two groups is taken as the similarity of stereotypes or psychological distance between them. (See Fig. 1.) Very often similarity is found to be greater between two other groups than between ones own group and another. This fact demonstrates that stereotypy is a product of over-generalization. 4. Similarity of stereotypes between sub-groups in one ethnic group is always greater according to the view of subjects of a minority group than it is of those of the majority. (See Fig.2.) The mechanism of identification practiced among the members of minority groups is thus witnessed. 5. Lastly, the necessity of a semantic analysis and a study of the affective aspect of stereotypes were mentioned