Determinants of Stereotypy in Three Cultures

Abstract

Data collected from India, Argentina and the U.S. served to arbitrate between competing predictions concerning the amount of agreement between nationals in depicting other nations. Amount of agreement was hypothesized to vary with friendliness, familiarity and type of adjective used to depict the “target” nation. Several findings were obtained in each of the three cultures, including: (a) a higher level of agreement for friendly (or familiar) than for unfriendly (unfamiliar) nations on evaluative traits; (b) considerably more agreement for friendly (or familiar) nations on evaluative than on descriptive traits, and (c) somewhat more agreement for unfriendly (or unfamiliar) than for friendly (familiar) nations on descriptive traits. These results reaffirm and extend previous findings. Other findings were culture-specific, including: (a) the relative salience of familiarity (more important in Argentina and the U.S.) and friendliness (more important in India) and (b) the higher level of agreement for unfriendly than for friendly nations in Argentina. The first result clarifies interpretations of findings obtained in previous studies where these dimensions were confounded while the second suggests that the ethnocentrism theory prediction for friendliness may be culture-specific.