This week, FPA speaks with Melvin DeFleur, a professor at Boston University's College of Communications, is the co-author of The Next Generation's Image of Americans. DeFleur and his wife Margaret surveyed 1,400 teens in 12 countries around the world about their attitudes towards Americans and American culture.
As the U.S. increasingly shifts its attention to winning the hearts and minds of people around the world through the promotion of American culture and values -- an act that some refer to as the wielding of “soft power” – there a number of challenges inherent in such a bold task. In your project, The Next Generation's Image of Americans, you survey more than 1,200 teens in 12 countries around the world about their attitudes towards Americans and American culture. What kind of questions did you ask them to generate a “positive” or “negative” response?
We initiated the project last March, well after September 11, and since then we've had more data come in. We now have almost 1,400 surveys that have been returned. We also have data from Lebanon that you have yet to see. In the study, we did something different than most public opinion surveys, which usually ask questions like, “Do you like Americans,” and provide only a yes or no option for a response. We used what is called a Likert attitude scale, which is a very technical method developed a number of years ago and used widely by psychologists to assess actual attitudes. Attitudes are configurations of evaluative beliefs, and I'll give you an example.
We put in an item saying something like “Americans are generally quite violent.” Respondents then have the option of answering: I strongly agree. I agree. I am undecided. I disagree. I strongly disagree. That's the structure of the questions we used. We had 12 beliefs that we measured, and each respondent was given a score based on numerical attitude scores from that system. We also came up with an overall score for the 12 nations that we studied.
Which responses shocked you the most?
Well, let me tell you the ones we were not surprised about first. Nobody in Saudi Arabia likes us very much, as well as Baharain. Those two Arabic countries had the most teenagers with negative attitudes. These teens aged from 14 to 19-years-old. The median age was 17. Saudi Arabia and Baharain were the most negative, followed by South Korea. That surprised us, since we have such a big investment in that country, and we have protected them from invasion by the North for so long. That was followed by another surprise, with the next most negative nation being Mexico. They were fifth in line on the negative side.
According to the Arab Human Development Report released this month by the UN, 70 percent of the population in the Arab world is less than 25-years-old. New York Times columnist Tom Friedman likes to use the metaphor that these are kids who are wearing both a Yankee cap and an Osama bin Laden t-shirt, suggesting that this is the generation that we should be concerned about, because they can still be won over. What kind of results did you find in your study regarding Arab youths perceptions of Americans?
I would say about 50 percent are under 15-years-old. You do have a very large number of young people. What we found was that they hold the most negative perceptions by far. The question you raised about where they get their ideas is interesting. Some of them come from adults -- there is no question about that. Recent public opinion polls of adults show that we are not well-liked among most Arab adults. But an amazingly important second source is our pop-culture, media and entertainment products. They love our popular culture. We sent a copy of our report to the Screenwriters Guild in California, and after holding a special meeting on this, they mockingly titled the report “We Hate You, But Please Send Us Baywatch.” The other joke we hear often is “Yankee go home, but take us with you.” It is a strange thing, a kind of love and hate. They are being taught to hate by two sources. One is the adult population, but the second one is from the media products. Many Arab youths are so enchanted with our music and television programs and motion pictures, but is creates quite a contrasting image of us.
It's something that never ceases to amaze me. I recently spoke with a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco, and he told me that he had met a youth that claimed to hate all Americans, but that he liked him. When the volunteer asked him how many Americans the youth knew, he replied, “Only you.” This is something that I think is pretty common. On a personal level, people relate well to Americans, but at the same time, disagree with policies, etc. You talk about a “collective perception” in your study. Is that at work here?
Yes. It's a very common kind of thing, because what has happened is this hatred of Americans has become a part of the culture. We say that baseball is the American pastime. Everybody will say that, but do we all go to baseball games? More people go to the Museum of Fine Arts here in Boston than to the Red Sox games. It's just a part of the general beliefs that people support, and when they encounter a real object of that belief, they don't believe it at all.
The objective of the study was to see how youths view Americans “as people” separate from American foreign policy, military actions and economic polices. For many around the world, this is part of the problem – that Americans are generally unable to internalize or take responsibility for the actions of their government that often have a direct impact on the lives of people like the ones you surveyed. How did you go about getting your subjects to evaluate Americans “as people” separate from those things?
How we went about that was to make sure that the questions we asked were not related to foreign policy decisions and actions. For example, I could give the statement, “Americans have strong religious values.” They would respond in the categories we described earlier. “Americans are very concerned about their poor,” or “Many American Women are sexually immoral.” Well, these are not related to what we are doing in Israel or Palestine or wherever.
But I think many would say that if you asked someone about American religious values, they would immediately relate it towards the American stance in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or other religious and political conflicts around the world.
That seems logical enough, but the interesting thing is that most of them did say that we were religious. It's a hard thing to interpret these things. I think the fact that these young folks don't like us in a collective sense is not news. We knew that already. What I think is news is what we have managed to find out about where in the world they are getting their ideas. Included in our study is what we call a sub-scale. “Americans are generally quite violent.” Well, they see that in movies and on television. The kids who come here from other countries have told me that they were worried about walking in the streets, because they feared that gunfire from police and bad guys could erupt at any moment. Another item in that sub-scale is that “Many American women are sexually immoral.” Many of the people I interviewed here said that they wanted to date an American girl so that they could have a sexual relationship on the first date. Most of these ideas of violence and sexual immorality come from movies and other forms of popular culture that we export. It has a profound influence on how they answer questions regarding positive or negative attitudes towards Americans.
We spoke briefly yesterday about low-grade American cultural exports as a primary source in the formulation of youth's perceptions of America. Joseph Nye makes a similar observation in his book, the Paradox of American Power. What kind of data have you gathered on this, and how might American exports be improved to better represent our society?
We have very solid statistical date showing a strong relationship between this media sub-scale that we have and attitudes. That's a correlational relationship, like the one between smoking and cancer. It doesn't prove absolutely that if you smoke, you are going to get cancer, but it is a kind of overwhelming generalization that everyone accepts today. At the very least, there is a high-risk. We have that kind of correlational data showing that the kinds of things people learn about the U.S. from movies, television, music videos and popular culture in general does have an influence on their attitudes. We haven't published all of this yet, but we can show that through solid data.
But how do we go about, to answer your question, changing “hearts and minds.” That is a tough one. I don't think that the government can play much of a role. The reason is that we deeply respect the first amendment of our constitution. So we can't move in on multi-national corporations that own a bunch of studios and television productions and newspapers, and say, “You've got to stop saying bad things and portraying us in this or that way.” We can't do that. I think the answer is voluntary change on their part.
There is a pattern here. You remember the Ford Explorer, and the problem they had with it rolling over. That is one case where they were creating a product that harmed people. At first, they denied it, but then public pressure was put on them to redesign it. The same is true of the tobacco companies. Eventually, they came into compliance. That is the pattern. So how do you bring the media into compliance? People need to speak out for change. Outfits like yours, voters and concerned parties should bring light to the unfortunate consequences of what they are producing. I think that's the only way.
I was reading yesterday in The New Yorker about a positive driven Islamic rap group that is being heavily promoted by the State Department. We've got Charlette Beers running a controversial public relations campaign aimed at showing Arabs the “real” America, one of tolerance and faith. We've heard a number of ideas from other government agencies, particularly the Pentagon aim to change the way Americans are viewed through propoganda and news manipulation. Is perception something we have the ability to engineer, to create? Do such efforts come with what many see as a vital component – sincerity?
I don't think the State Department can produce rap music. That's ridiculous. The Soviet Union used to do the same kind of thing, making films about heroic tractor drivers plowing the fields for the benefit of humanity. I don't think the government has much of a role here.
They could do one thing, through organizations like the Voice of America, which has already been well-established and reaches a large audience. They could provide movie reviews, so that when people in foreign countries watch these films, they can hear a critique that points out what is realistic and what is nonsense.
I sent Charlotte Beers a copy of the report, but I don't think she is going to have any luck in her quest to change people's perceptions of America. The P.R. people do it with bumper stickers and sweatshirts. I don't have much hope for that strategy. It's got to come as a voluntary recognition of the unintended consequences of these multi-national corporations.
The problem here is what psychologists call incidental learning. That is, the kids go to a movie or video to be entertained. The people who make it do not intend to teach them these lessons any more that kids tend to come out thinking that Americans are awful people. Incidentally, while being entertained, this is what they learn. It fits in to one of the oldest theories of how we learn. It goes back to Plato. In The Republic, he explains the allegory of the cave. It's about these guys who are chained in one place in a cave, and all they see are the shadows on the wall, so they build up a conception of reality based on those shadows. You'd be amazed if you go back and read that to see the parallels with the shadows on the television or movie screen. It's called the social construction of reality.
Going back to the earlier question about American efforts to change foreign perceptions about this country, do you think that such efforts might actually make things worse? Could it backfire by alienating those who don't understand us even more if they feel manipulated?
Yes. These kids are smart. My wife and I went to a middle school to discuss our findings and I was amazed. They asked difficult questions. Kids in various countries are smart. They are going to smell a rat the moment they see it. We had that problem with our research. It was difficult to convey what we were trying to do, and had to come in under the radar screen. We contacted relatives of those people we know here who teach in various schools around the world. If we had tried to go through the proper authorities in places like Saudi Arabia, they would have thrown us out of the country.
It worked out well, because the youngsters expressed themselves very articulately and openly. We are confident that the information we gathered was not influenced by the government, and the teachers were well-trusted people. All of this is reflected in the report.
Thanks so much for sharing your findings with us Prof. DeFleur
Thank you.