do you think chua's essay perpetuates a cultural stereotype

An Examination of Chinese vs. Western Parenting Through Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

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"I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years. . . . I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent, and pathetic,” writes Amy Chua, a Yale Law School professor, describing the tactics she used to force her daughter Lulu to play “The Little White Donkey” on the piano (61). This is one example Chua chronicles of parenting her two daughters, Sophia and Lulu, in Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother . In her book, Chua uses the term “tiger mother” to describe a style of parenting most commonly exercised by Chinese parents (4). Chua addresses the differences between Chinese and Western parenting in the introduction, writing, “Despite our squeamishness about cultural stereotypes, there are tons of studies out there showing marked and quantifiable differences between Chinese and Westerners when it comes to parenting” (5). From this statement, Chua goes on to briefly illuminate these differences, such as Chinese parents spending “approximately ten times as long every day drilling academic activities with their children” in comparison to Western parents (5).

The book unleashed a heated response, with some readers even sending death threats against Chua (Dolak). Why did Chua’s book elicit such backlash? On the one hand, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother’s reliance on Chinese and Western stereotypes and Chua’s writing style may well invite controversy of this magnitude, but so do the responses of her critics. Through an examination of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and the discourse that the book spurred, we can see how representations of both Chinese and Western mothers have been distorted and, in turn, how these misrepresentations sidetracked what could have been an important discussion about Chinese versus Western parenting.

The controversy first erupted in January 2011 when the Wall Street Journal published an excerpt of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother , titled “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior.” Chua, who has stated numerous times that her book is not a parenting manual, claimed that “the Wall Street Journal’s article strung together the most controversial sections of her book and failed to highlight that the book is a memoir about a personal journey of motherhood” (Dolak). Ironically, Chua’s criticism of the Wall Street Journal excerpt can be applied to her own book. Just as the Wall Street Journal article “strung together the most controversial sections of her book,” Chua has strung together her most controversial parenting anecdotes in Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother .

We can better understand this parallel between the excerpt and the book by inspecting the letter in response that Chua’s daughter Sophia wrote, which reads in part, “No outsider can know what our family is really like. . . . They don’t see us eating our hamburgers with fried rice. They don’t know how much fun we have when the six of us—dogs included—squeeze into one bed and argue about what movies to download from Netflix” (Chua-Rubenfeld). Perhaps the reason why no outsider can get a glimpse into this charming vision of Chua’s family is because Chua decides not to portray this vision in the book, even though one would expect moments of familial intimacy to be included in a “memoir about a personal journey of motherhood” (Dolak). To a certain extent, Chua’s decision to include anecdotes like “The Birthday Card” (in which Chua rejects the birthday cards Sophia and Lulu made for her because they were made carelessly and tells her daughters “I deserve better than this. So I reject this.”) over stories about family bonding almost makes sense (Chua 103). After all, Chua seems eager to point out how strict and demanding she is compared to her Western counterparts and these anecdotes arguably do the job. With her one-dimensional portrayal of Chinese parenting, Chua perpetuates “the media stereotypes of Asian-Americans that are already so prevalent in our society—quiet, obedient, good-at-math nerds that through their rigid discipline end up having deficient social skills” (Chi).

Not only does Chua describe her daughters and herself as walking Chinese stereotypes, she typecasts the Western mothers she discusses in her book. The author suggests that Chinese parents raise more successful kids because of their Chinese heritage while Western parents raise less successful kids because of their Western heritage. This idea is primarily illustrated through comparisons she draws between her family and their Western counterparts throughout the book, such as the juxtaposition of Sophia and her Western peers at the Neighborhood Music School. While Chua enforced a rigorous practice schedule of ninety minutes a day, seven days a week for Sophia, “Most of the other students at the school had liberal Western parents, who were weak-willed and indulgent when it came to practicing” and mentions a student named Aubrey, “who was required to practice one minute per day for every year of her age” (Chua 27–28). Eventually, and of course partly because of this intense practice schedule, Sophia ended up playing at Carnegie Hall as an eighth-grade student (140). Chua explicitly calls herself (and her ability to execute such a rigid practice schedule for her daughter) a “big cultural advantage” for Sophia (27). This quotation is crucial to our understanding of Chua’s use of stereotypes, demonstrating that she is able to drive her daughters to success because she is Chinese and that following these “Chinese values” is more favorable to raising successful kids than being a Western mother following “Western values.”

 What is the difference between a “Chinese mother” and a “Western mother”? Chua addresses this question in an interview with Time magazine, saying,

I think the biggest difference is that I’ve noticed Western parents seem much more concerned about their children’s psyches, their self-esteem, whereas tough immigrant parents assume strength rather than fragility in their children and therefore behave completely differently. (Luscombe)

To further examine the ethnic distinctions that Chua makes, we must also consider her disclaimer regarding her usage of the terms “Chinese mother” versus “Western parents” in her book. Chua writes, “When I use the term ‘Western parents,’ of course I’m not referring to all Western parents—just as ‘Chinese mother’ doesn’t refer to all Chinese mothers,” adding that some Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Irish, and Ghanaian parents qualify as “Chinese mothers,” as well (Chua 4). However, Chua’s disclaimer is ineffective, because she does not readdress this clarification in the rest of her book, and instead, perpetuates stereotyped images of Chinese mothers and children versus Western parents and children. The effect of Chua’s book is an oversimplification of “Chinese students” and “American students” (not to mention, of course, that students can be both): the former is obedient and good at rote tasks while the latter is lazy and undisciplined.

Unfortunately, the critics responding to Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother rely on the same stereotypes that Chua employs. We see this quite visibly in writer Ayelet Waldman’s response to Chua’s book in the Wall Street Journal , “In Defense of the Guilty, Ambivalent, Preoccupied Western Mom.” In her article, Waldman employs the very stereotypes Chua uses in Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother , beginning with a list, as Chua does, that detail the activities Waldman’s children are allowed to do: quit studying the piano and the violin, sleep over at their friends’ house, surf the Internet, etc. ( Wall Street Journal ). Waldman makes it quite obvious that she has taken Chua’s list of forbidden activities for her children and has reversed it to make it a list of permitted activities. That is, Waldman seems to exaggerate the lax attitudes of certain Western parents just as Chua played up the harsh practices of the Chinese tiger mother. For instance, she writes that she always permits her children to “sleep over at their friends’ houses, especially on New Year’s Eve or our anniversary, thus saving us the cost of a babysitter” and to “participate in any extracurricular activity they wanted, so long as I was never required to drive farther than 10 minutes to get them there, or to sit on a field in a folding chair in anything but the balmiest weather for any longer than 60 minutes” ( Wall Street Journal ). It is clear from her essay that Waldman is a devoted and attentive parent, but she still resorts to such statements that reaffirms the idea of a lenient Western mother. Both Waldman and Chua perpetuate Chinese and Western stereotypes with a complacence that is hard to understand at times. Why are these mothers so willing to caricature their culture and parenting?

Waldman’s essay demonstrates the divisive effect of both Chua’s use of stereotypes and Chua’s simplification of Chinese and Western parenting. For instance, Waldman recounts how her daughter Rosie overcame mild dyslexia “not because we forced her to drill and practice and repeat, not because we dragged her kicking and screaming, or denied her food, or kept her from the using the bathroom, but because she forced herself.” She is pointedly contrasting her daughter to Chua’s daughters, who were forced to “drill and practice and repeat” and more specifically, Lulu, who was not allowed to use the bathroom until she mastered a piano piece (Waldman). “[Rosie] climbed the mountain alone, motivated not by fear or shame of dishonoring her parents but by her passionate desire to read,” states Waldman. It seems that according to Waldman, to be self-motivated and to be motivated by fear or shame of disappointing one’s parents are mutually exclusive and that the former is more respectable than the latter. However, such a categorization seems unfair to the children who are pushed by their parents, such as Chua’s daughter Sophia.

Sophia disproves Waldman’s argument through an essay that she wrote for school prior to Chua penning her book. In this essay, Sophia writes that just before her performance at Carnegie Hall, “I realized how much I loved this music” (Chua 140). That is, while Sophia may have followed her mother’s rigidly enforced ninety minutes a day, seven days a week practice schedule because she was motivated by “fear or shame of dishonoring her parents,” as Waldman would say, Sophia evidently grew a passion and a love for the piano that no one, not even Chua, could command her to develop. “Oftentimes training children fairly early to work very hard and be disciplined would be one way to foster their self-motivation,” writes Professor Ruth K. Chao in her study “Beyond Parental Control and Authoritarian Parenting Style: Understanding Chinese Parenting Through the Cultural Notion of Training” (1117). That is, working hard from a young age may allow a child to see the benefits of doing so and thus, he may be inclined to set his own goals.

In contrast to Chua’s simplified and stereotyped work, Chao delves into the cultural factors that have led these two cultures to develop distinct parenting styles. In her study, fifty immigrant Chinese mothers and fifty European-American mothers answered scales, or questionnaires, derived from “Block’s 1981 Child Rearing Practices Report” (Chao 1114). After conducting the research, Chao concludes “that the concepts often used to describe Chinese parenting (i.e., ‘authoritarian,’ ‘controlling,’ or ‘restrictive’) have been rather ethnocentric and misleading” (1111). Chao dismantles these concepts by examining two Chinese terms: chiao shun , which “contains the idea of training (i.e., teaching or educating) children in the appropriate or expected behaviors” and guan , which Tobin et al. explain “literally means ‘to govern’” but also can mean “‘to care for’ or even ‘to love’” (qtd. in Chao 1112). She states that “the sociocultural traditions and values that have shaped [these] child-rearing concepts” do not exist in the West (1117). Furthermore, Chao found that even the word “training” itself triggered “very positive” associations for the Chinese mothers participating in her study, while the European American mothers associated “training” with words like “militaristic” or “regimented” (1117). These findings suggest the difficulties in classifying Chinese parenting in strictly American terms. Even the very same word, “training,” evokes two very different responses in Chinese culture versus European-American culture. As Chao states, “These highly charged negative ‘derivations’ of authoritarian [ sic ] have been applied to describe the parenting styles of individuals who in no way share this same historical and sociocultural context” (1117). Thus, Chao’s analysis calls into question the disapproval expressed by critics of Chua who may not understand the cultural context of Chinese parenting. Chua’s decision not to examine the cultural context in Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother , but merely present its striking features, is what lends the book to such controversy. Had Chua given her largely American readership a better idea of the cultural concepts that fashioned Chinese parenting, Chua and her critics would have been able to engage in a more informed discussion of the merits and drawbacks of Chinese and Western parenting.

Discussions of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother will have implications that far exceed the scope of the book. The book comes at a time of heightened American anxiety about China becoming a formidable economic challenger to the United States. More significantly, Chua’s book comes at a time when students from Shanghai came in first in every subject tested by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) while children from the United States placed 17 th in reading, 23 rd in science and 31 st in math ( The Telegraph ). U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s statement in response to the PISA test results almost seems to be taken directly off a page of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother . He says that U.S. students “express more self-confidence in their academic skills” than students in any other nation that participated in the PISA and that “this stunning finding may be explained because students here are being commended for work that would not be acceptable in high-performing education systems” (Ed.gov). While Secretary Duncan’s comments deal with the 2009 test results, his speech is still relevant today because American students maintained this high self-regard in the most recent 2011 test results ( The Telegraph ). How we interpret these results is crucial: we cannot take a Chua-Waldman reading of these scores by assuming that all American students are thus lazier but have a higher sense of self-esteem than all Chinese students. Rather, by keeping Chao’s study in mind, we can recognize the impact of culture on the parenting and education of both China and the United States.

No one culture holds the secret to successful parenting and even Chua herself recognizes this by the end of her book. After recounting an incident of dramatic rebellion from her daughter (involving chopping off her hair to just below her ear and smashing a glass in a restaurant), the author considers the possibility that there are merits in both Chinese parenting and Western parenting (Chua 174, 205–206). Indeed, Chua now allows Lulu to participate in improv, a very “American” pursuit, admitting, “I’m still in the fight, albeit with some significant modifications to my strategy” (221).

In his essay, “The Case for Contamination,” Kwame Anthony Appiah, a professor at Princeton University, discusses how society accepts contentious concepts, such as women entering “learned professions” like law or medicine and poses the question, “Isn’t a significant part of it just the consequence of our getting used to new ways of doing things?” (52). Indeed, society began to accept the idea of women entering learned professions mostly because more and more women entered learned professions. Yet if we are to get used to “new ways of doing things,” such as adopting Chinese parenting concepts, we must remove the stigma, get past the stereotypes, and promote a freer exchange of ideas through “conversations that occur across cultural boundaries” (Appiah 23). Chua and her book spurred “conversations,” but not the kind that brings about change. Rather, these conversations reinforced the boundaries between Chinese and Western cultures. Perhaps, if we can get past the hyperbole and Chua’s dramatics in Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother , we will discover ideas that transcend the boundaries of culture: hard work and parents wanting the best for their children. What we must do, then, is to move away from a discourse of stereotypes and generalizations and toward an informed conversation that recognizes the specific cultural traditions and values that have shaped the parenting style of each culture. Through such a conversation, we will be able to better recognize the merits of both parenting styles.

WORKS CITED

Appiah, Kwame A. “The Case For Contamination.” New York Times Magazine 1 Jan. 2006: 30–52. ProQuest National Newspapers Premier. Web.

Chao, Ruth K. “Beyond Parental Control and Authoritarian Parenting Style: Understanding Chinese Parenting Through the Cultural Notion of Training.” Child Development 65.4 (1994): 1111–1119. Print.

Chi, Frank. “Amy Chua: Manipulating Childhood Trauma and Asian-American Stereotypes to Sell a Book.” Boston.com . The New York Times Company, 16 Jan. 2011. Web. 16 Apr. 2012.

Chua, Amy. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother . New York: Penguin, 2011. Print.

Chua-Rubenfeld, Sophia. “Why I Love My Strict Chinese Mom.” New York Post . News Corp, 17 Jan. 2011. Web. 14 Apr. 2012.

Dolak, Kevin. “Strict, Controversial Parenting Style Leads to Death Threats for ‘Tiger Mother’ Amy Chua.” ABC News . ABC News Network, 17 Jan. 2011. Web. 14 Apr. 2012.

Duncan, Arne. “Remarks at OECD’s Release of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2009 Results.” ED.gov . U.S. Department of Education, 7 Dec. 2010. Web. 21 Apr. 2012.

Luscombe, Belinda. “Chinese vs Western Mothers: Q&A with Amy Chua” Time . Time, 11 Jan. 2011. Web. 09 Apr. 2012.

Pearson, Allison. “The Discipline of a Chinese Mother.” Telegraph.co.uk . Telegraph Media Group, 27 Jan. 2012. Web. 14 Apr. 2012.

Waldman, Ayelet. “In Defense of the Guilty, Ambivalent, Preoccupied Western Mom.” Wall Street Journal . News Corp, 16 Jan. 2011. Web. 14 Apr. 2012.

YERIN PAK '16CC is a sophomore History major at Columbia College and is originally from Seoul, Korea. In her free time, Yerin enjoys writing, reading and traveling.

Article Details

In defense of my strict Chinese mother

Following the uproar over Amy Chua's "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior" essay, Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld defends her tiger mom's methods in the New York Post

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Amy Chua sparked rancorous debate with her Wall Street Journal essay , "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior," an excerpt from her controversial new book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother . In the essay, Chua detailed how she achieved superior parenting results by requiring her daughters to earn all As and shun sleepovers — at one point, all but shackling one daughter to the piano bench until she mastered a particularly tricky piece. Critics took issue with Chua's boasts, arguing that such a parenting approach ultimately yields resentful, unhappy, and even suicidal offspring. Now, 18-year-old Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld has come to her mom's defense in an open letter in the New York Post . While having a mother like Amy was "no tea party," Chua-Rubenfeld says she appreciates that her mom always pushed her to reach her full potential. "I'm glad you and Daddy raised me the way you did," she says. Here, an excerpt:

I think the desire to live a meaningful life is universal. To some people, it's working toward a goal. To others, it's enjoying every minute of every day. So what does it really mean to live life to the fullest? Maybe striving to win a Nobel Prize and going skydiving are just two sides of the same coin. To me, it's not about achievement or self-gratification. It's about knowing that you've pushed yourself, body and mind, to the limits of your own potential. You feel it when you're sprinting, and when the piano piece you've practiced for hours finally comes to life beneath your fingertips. You feel it when you encounter a life-changing idea, and when you do something on your own that you never thought you could. If I died tomorrow, I would die feeling I've lived my whole life at 110 percent.

And for that, Tiger Mom, thank you.

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Parenting Styles — Amy Chua’s Critique on the Parenting Styles of Westerners Compared to Chinese Parents

Amy Chua's Critique on The Parenting Styles of Westerners Compared to Chinese Parents

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Published: Oct 16, 2018

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Critiques from Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

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Motherlode | on chinese mothers and american kids, on chinese mothers and american kids.

Perhaps the most talked-about story in parenting circles this week is Amy Chua’s essay in The Wall Street Journal titled “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.”

Chua is a professor at Yale Law School and the author of the new book (released today) “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” which, like her essay, is a how-to guide for Western parents who want to learn the methods Chinese parents use to raise, as Chua puts it, “so many math whizzes and music prodigies.”

To hear Chua tell it, the secret lies in being downright mean. Her daughters, Lulu and Sophia, she writes, have never been allowed to “attend a sleepover, have a play date, be in a school play, complain about not being in a school play, watch TV or play computer games, choose their own extracurricular activities, get any grade less than an A, not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama, play any instrument other than the piano or violin, not play the piano or violin.”

In one memorable example of how this works (or doesn’t depending on your point of view), Chua describes a tussle with her younger daughter, Lulu, who was seven years old and practicing a difficult piano piece. Chua worked “nonstop” with Lulu “drilling each of her hands separately,” then trying to put the two parts of the piece together. After a week of this, Lulu had had enough. The little girl “announced in exasperation that she was giving up and stomped off.”

What would you have done?

Here is what Chua did:

“Get back to the piano now,” I ordered. “You can’t make me.” “Oh yes, I can.” Back at the piano, Lulu made me pay. She punched, thrashed and kicked. She grabbed the music score and tore it to shreds. I taped the score back together and encased it in a plastic shield so that it could never be destroyed again. Then I hauled Lulu’s dollhouse to the car and told her I’d donate it to the Salvation Army piece by piece if she didn’t have “The Little White Donkey” perfect by the next day. When Lulu said, “I thought you were going to the Salvation Army, why are you still here?” I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years. When she still kept playing it wrong, I told her she was purposely working herself into a frenzy because she was secretly afraid she couldn’t do it. I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic.

At this point Chua’s (Western) husband stepped in.

He told me to stop insulting Lulu — which I wasn’t even doing, I was just motivating her — and that he didn’t think threatening Lulu was helpful. Also, he said, maybe Lulu really just couldn’t do the technique — perhaps she didn’t have the coordination yet — had I considered that possibility? “You just don’t believe in her,” I accused. “That’s ridiculous,” Jed said scornfully. “Of course I do.” “Sophia could play the piece when she was this age.” “But Lulu and Sophia are different people,” Jed pointed out. “Oh no, not this,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Everyone is special in their special own way,” I mimicked sarcastically. “Even losers are special in their own special way.”

Eventually — after so much yelling that Chua lost her voice — Lulu learned the piece, and even felt triumphant about it, her mother writes.  “Western parents worry a lot about their children’s self-esteem,” she concludes. “But as a parent, one of the worst things you can do for your child’s self-esteem is to let them give up. On the flip side, there’s nothing better for building confidence than learning you can do something you thought you couldn’t.”

And that is Chua’s basic philosophy, the thing that separates Chinese mothers from weak-willed, indulgent Westerners. “What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you’re good at it,” she writes. “To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences.”

In an essay in The New York Times Magazine this coming weekend, Judith Warner places Chua’s preachings into a larger context — just another in the decades-long parade of ways that parents have tried to do their job “right.”

Looked at through that lens, Warner argues, Chua’s model is being marketed as a timely antidote to “the whole mishmash of modern, attuned, connected, concerned, self-esteem-building parenting,” which, in turn, was a response to the laissez faire, be-your-child’s-friend, kind of parenting that came before that.

“Despite the obvious limits of Chua’s appeal,” Warner writes, “her publisher is clearly banking on her message finding wide resonance among American moms worn out from trying to do everything right for  kids who mimic Disney Channel-style disrespect for parents, spend hours a day on Facebook, pick at their lovingly prepared food and generally won’t get with the program.”

In other words, we parents are always looking for a new way because the (most recent) “old way” didn’t work. And we originally fixated on that “old way” because the way before wasn’t perfect either. And perfect, after all, is the goal — the one thing that all these recalibrations of parenting wisdom have in common.

As Warner writes:

Through all the iterations of Mommy madness, ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad,’’ this article of faith always remains intact: that parents can have control. Developmental neuroscientists may talk of genes and as-yet-undiscovered-and-hence-uncontrollable environmental factors that affect the developing fetus, social scientists may talk of socioeconomic background and the predictive power of parents’ level of education — the rest of us keep hope alive that parental actions, each and every moment of each and every better-lived day, have the ultimate ability to shape a child’s life outcome. The notion that parental choices — for early-onset Suzuki or otherwise — have this uniquely determinative effect is, in light of current research, almost adorably quaint, akin to beliefs that cats must be kept out of a baby’s bedroom at night lest they climb into the crib and suck away the child’s breath. But it remains part and parcel of modern mother love.

Powerful evidence that what Chua advocates is not ancient universal truth, but rather just the latest trend, can be found one click away from her essay in the Journal — in an article by the reporter Victoria Ruan. Titled “In China, Not All Practice Tough Love,” it describes how mothers there are turning from parenting that stresses “discipline and authority” and making best sellers of books like “A Good Mom Is Better Than a Good Teacher” and “Catching Children’s Sensitive Periods” and “My Kid Is a Medium-Ranking Student.” They are also importing titles from the West, including John Gray’s “Children Are From Heaven: Positive Parenting Skills for Raising Cooperative, Confident and Compassionate Children,” (yes, the same John Gray who wrote the “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus” books) and “How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk,” by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish.

All of which leaves us with the following conclusions:

1. The latest parenting trend in the United States is potentially Chinese in origin while the latest parenting trend in China is potentially Western.

2. The reason parents on both sides of the globe are searching for new ways is because there really is no one ideal way.

3. If neither path is foolproof, then we should feel free to choose what feels best for us, rather than what is “best.”

Given such a choice, I choose to be the parent who does not lose her voice screaming over a piano exercise (even if it means the child drops piano lessons) and who does allow her child to go on sleepovers and perform in the school play (even if it means a little less time drilling math equations).

How about you?

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Chinese Daughters and Amy Chua

By Evan Osnos

Until this week, Amy Chua was best known as a Yale law professor, but now she stands, with arms crossed confidently, at the center of a raging online battle between detractors and defenders of the parenting approach she proclaims in her essay, “ Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior .” It is a manifesto that, as my colleague Blake Eskin puts it , “makes a case for parenting with the kind of overwhelming force Colin Powell deployed against Saddam Hussein.”

While the comments on her piece continue to mount—“refreshingly honest” versus “wrong and disturbing”—I sought out some of the voices that are drowned out: those of Chinese and Chinese-American offspring.

Three expert witnesses, each with a different combination of Chinese and American experience: Tze-cheng Chun, a second-generation Chinese-American, is artistic director of the Tze Chun Dance Company in New York. Lu Han was born in Beijing, received a master’s from New York University, and is a now a writer, researcher, and translator in China. Qi Zhai, who was born in the Chinese city of Harbin and educated at Stanford, is a writer and editor in Beijing. Listen to them, not me, but for those without time to read to the end, the takeaway is this: Amy Chua may be playing up the drama, but the outlines are unmistakably familiar. The results? Well, that’s more complicated.

Tze-cheng Chun tells me,

Yes—Chinese mothers are superior in that they equip their children with the skills needed to succeed in their careers and as members of society. However, a different, and more difficult, task for a Chinese mother is to convey their best intentions and love while doing so…. Chinese parents usually succeed in producing hard-working academically strong children; however, the second level of success—being able to create a loving and communicative family dynamic—is not always attained…. Some Chinese children feel as many Western parents feel, that the Chinese parenting method is harsh and lacks compassion. Many just quietly obey their parents because they dread the wrath they’d incur otherwise. They simply do as they are told. Or, they rebel. Growing up outside of Boston, I knew many Chinese-American children who were hard-working students, and some who were the total opposite: unmotivated and defiant kids who stayed out late and got into trouble. Chinese people are traditionally not very open about their feelings, and many children I grew up with took their parent’s inability to communicate as a sign that they did not, in fact, know what was best…. My mother was by no means a “typical” Chinese parent. She rarely scolded us and let me give up piano at age seven. She encouraged my brother and I to pursue all our interests (including a school play or two) and supported us to the best of her ability while never pressuring us. She made it clear that no matter how much she wanted us to succeed, it did not matter unless we wanted to succeed ourselves. Giving us this responsibility for our own lives drove us to work harder. She taught us that our futures were ours to make, not hers, but whatever we chose to pursue she would be there to support us. My mother patiently explained everything to my brother and me, from how the world works to why we should work hard. She never asked us to just follow orders. She never dictated a chore or demanded more from us than what we could give. She always looked for creative solutions and pushed us to ask our own questions. My brother is now a filmmaker and I am a choreographer, two professions that are, as my grandmother constantly reminds us, a Chinese parent’s worst nightmare.

In Beijing, Lu Han writes,

Thinking that you have the world in your control, and telling your kids that, can be a very dangerous thing to do because there are all these things in life that will be out of your reach. Having said that, I do have to agree with what Amy said, “Chinese parents assume strength, not fragility,” and it is generally a good practice. I think that assuming the best of your kids essentially makes them confident, because, no matter how strict your parents are toward you, deep down you know that it’s because they think you are psychologically strong enough to handle it, and excellent enough to accomplish whatever the task is. This faith stays with you no matter how little praise you get from your parents, or how harshly they yell at you. However, there are definitely tragic examples, too, in which kids grow up receiving this kind of education and still turn out to be “losers” or “parent haters.” There is an online chat group on Douban called “Fumu Jie Huohai” [“The Scourge of Studious Parents”], in which group members, mostly those born in the eighties, blame their parents for their own unhappiness or emotional trauma…. This issue has become extremely prominent as most urban families have been able to have only one child for the past twenty or thirty years, so the parents have such high hopes for them that it creates an intense pressure. It’s not only about being strict and spending more time on academic studies. What Amy, and millions of other Chinese parents are doing, is to make daily and even major life decisions for their children…. I think this is an even bigger problem with Chinese education—when you take away the ability to choose, you are basically taking away the ability to be responsible for your own choice and action.

Last, but certainly not least, Qi Zhai writes:

I was not allowed to get anything but an A. I remember so vividly a big fight with my father one year … I had come home with a B+ on my report card (for math) and my father demanded an explanation…. I said, “Dad, American parents would be so happy about a B+, or even a C, on a report card!” To this kind of complaint, my parents’ usual reply was “Then go find yourself some American parents.” Another common type of parental retort is, “American parents also let their daughters get pregnant in high school and watch their sons join rock bands…. I did extracurricular activities that my parents didn’t choose. I was in high school plays, I ran track and field, I did debate, I played volleyball. These were mixed experiences. For activities that my parents deemed respectable and worthwhile, like debate, they proudly showed up at events and told all their friends about my accomplishments. For sports and drama, they picked me up and dropped me off at all the practice times, but never bothered to attend games or performances. After sweaty practice sessions, at dinner time, my mother would always say, “Why are you wasting your time on this? You’re so tired, you shouldn’t work so hard for them.” It hurt me that she didn’t support my hard work and it was a conflicting message from what my coach was screaming on the field everyday, “I want you to run so hard that you vomit.” I had sleepovers and was allowed to go out, but very selectively, with kids my parents knew whose parents they were comfortable with. Generally, with Chinese and Korean families, my parents didn’t worry so much. But I can’t recall ever spending the night at a Caucasian student’s house, except for a volleyball-team sleepover. I never quite attended a real party until graduation night, when I wandered around aimlessly watching the cool kids get drunk and high. I don’t feel I missed out on the teen-age pregnancies (common at my private high school in the Philippines) and drunken accidents (an American diplomat’s son died, among several other incidents), but I do feel that I needed more time to adjust socially once I was in America. To fit into American society, dinner parties, cocktails and other alcohol-infused events are a necessity. It took me longer to learn the basics of what you’re supposed to do, which arguably has an impact on how well you can network for a job, etc., in Western society…. Despite above objections to Amy Chua’s parenting style, I generally agree with her conclusions. American parents do “coddle” their children a bit too much. But there’s no other way. American adults are coddled, too—therapists, feelings, all that stuff—so to not coddle your children would be socially unacceptable. And Chinese parents do feel inextricably tied to their children for life, demanding everything of them but also giving everything to them. Like Amy’s story about staying up the night, the biggest gift my parents gave me is learning the value of education. I could feel it in everything they did, that education was the most important thing for the three of us. I had a science project in middle school that I couldn’t finish on time (because it was about nutrition and calories—not the kind of thing Chinese kids know a lot about and my parents were no help). My mother stayed up the whole night, cutting me apple slices and bringing other snacks, just watching me do the work so I wouldn’t feel alone…. When I have my own children, I will mimic my parents’ devotion to education. But what I will do differently is allow more room for creativity. Pragmatism and fear were the driving forces for my parents’ choices with me—fear of unemployment, war, disaster. I hope the luxury of choice will be the driving force when I become a parent. Nothing would make me happier than if my children could say, “Mom, I want to be an artist” without fearing for their income or success. I want to give my children what I’m still working on building for myself as an adult—confidence in knowing that no matter what choices you make, as long as you’re passionate about it, you will be successful.

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Do you think chua’s essay perpetuates a cultural stereotype? why or why not?

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In her essay, "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior," Amy Chua presents a parenting style that she claims is common in Chinese culture. She argues that this parenting style, which emphasizes strict discipline and a focus on academic achievement, produces more successful children than the more permissive Western parenting style. On one hand, it could be argued that Chua's essay does perpetuate a stereotype of Chinese culture . By presenting this strict parenting style as "Chinese," she implies that all Chinese parents behave this way, which is not necessarily true. Additionally, by portraying this parenting style as superior to the Western parenting style, she suggests that Chinese culture is inherently better than Western culture. On the other hand, it could also be argued that Chua's essay does not perpetuate a stereotype. She is simply describing her own experiences as a Chinese-American mother and the parenting style that she has chosen to adopt. Furthermore, she acknowledges that her parenting style is not necessarily the only way to raise successful children. Overall, whether or not Chua's essay perpetuates a cultural stereotype is a matter of interpretation. While she does present a specific parenting style as being "Chinese," it is ultimately up to the reader to decide whether or not this portrayal is accurate and fair.

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Article contents

Media constructions of culture, race, and ethnicity.

• Travis L. Dixon , Travis L. Dixon Department of Communication, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Kristopher R. Weeks Kristopher R. Weeks Department of Communication, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
•  and  Marisa A. Smith Marisa A. Smith Department of Communication, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.502
• Published online: 23 May 2019

Racial stereotypes flood today’s mass media. Researchers investigate these stereotypes’ prevalence, from news to entertainment. Black and Latino stereotypes draw particular concern, especially because they misrepresent these racial groups. From both psychological and sociological perspectives, these misrepresentations can influence how people view their racial group as well as other groups. Furthermore, a racial group’s lack of representation can also reduce the group’s visibility to the general public. Such is the case for Native Americans and Asian Americans.

Given mass media’s widespread distribution of black and Latino stereotypes, most research on mediated racial portrayals focuses on these two groups. For instance, while black actors and actresses appear often in prime-time televisions shows, black women appear more often in situational comedies than any other genre. Also, when compared to white actors and actresses, television casts blacks in villainous or despicable roles at a higher rate. In advertising, black women often display Eurocentric features, like straight hair. On the other hand, black men are cast as unemployed, athletic, or entertainers. In sports entertainment, journalists emphasize white athletes’ intelligence and black athletes’ athleticism. In music videos, black men appear threatening and sport dark skin tones. These music videos also sexualize black women and tend to emphasize those with light skin tones. News media overrepresent black criminality and exaggerate the notion that blacks belong to the undeserving poor class. Video games tend to portray black characters as either violent outlaws or athletic.

While mass media misrepresent the black population, it tends to both misrepresent and underrepresent the Latino population. When represented in entertainment media, Latinos assume hypersexualized roles and low-occupation jobs. Both news and entertainment media overrepresent Latino criminality. News outlets also overly associate Latino immigration with crime and relate Latino immigration to economic threat. Video games rarely portray Latino characters.

Creators may create stereotypic content or fail to fairly represent racial and ethnic groups for a few reasons. First, the ethnic blame discourse in the United States may influence creators’ conscious and unconscious decision-making processes. This discourse contends that the ethnic and racial minorities are responsible for their own problems. Second, since stereotypes appeal to and are easily processed by large general audiences, the misrepresentation of racial and ethnic groups facilitates revenue generation. This article largely discusses media representations of blacks and Latinos and explains the implications of such portrayals.

• content analysis
• African American portrayals
• Latino portrayals
• ethnic blame discourse
• structural limitations and economic interests
• social identity theory
• Clark’s Stage Model of Representations

Theoretical Importance of Media Stereotypes

Media constructions of culture, race, and ethnicity remain important to study because of their potential impact on both sociological and psychological phenomena. Specifically, researchers have utilized two major theoretical constructs to understand the potential impact of stereotyping: (a) priming and cognitive accessibility (Dixon, 2006 ; Scheufele & Tewksbury, 2007 ; Shrum, 2009 ), and (b) social identity and social categorization theory (Mastro, 2004 ; Mastro, Behm-Morawitz, & Kopacz, 2008 ; Tajfel & Turner, 2004 ).

Priming and Cognitive Accessibility

Priming and cognitive accessibility suggests that media consumption encourages the creation of mental shortcuts used to make relevant judgments about various social issues. For example, if a news viewer encounters someone cognitively related to a given stereotype, he or she might make a judgment about that person based on repeated exposure to the mediated stereotype. As an illustration, repeated exposure to the Muslim terrorist stereotype may lead news viewers to conclude that all Muslims are terrorists. This individual may also support punitive policies related to this stereotype, such as a Muslim ban on entry to the United States. Therefore, this cognitive linkage influences race and crime judgments (e.g., increased support for criminalizing Muslims and deporting them).

Social Identity Theory and Media Judgments

Other scholars have noted that our own identities are often tied to how people perceive their groups’ relationships to other groups. Social categorization theory argues that the higher the salience of the category to the individual, the greater the in-group favoritism one will demonstrate. Media scholars demonstrated that exposure to a mediated out-group member can increase in-group favoritism (Mastro, 2004 ). For example, researchers found that negative stories about Latino immigrants can contribute to negative out-group emotions that lead to support for harsher immigration laws (Atwell Seate & Mastro, 2016 , 2017 ).

Both the priming/cognitive accessibility approach and the social identity approach demonstrate that cultural stereotypes have significant implications for our psychology, social interactions, and policymaking. It remains extremely important for us to understand the nature and frequency of mediated racial and ethnic stereotypes to further our understanding of how these stereotypes impact viewers. This article seeks to facilitate our understanding.

Stage Model of Representation

In order to provide the reader with an introduction to this topic, this article relies on the published content-analytic literature regarding race and media. Clark’s Stage Model of Representation articulates a key organizing principle for understanding how media may construct various depictions of social groups (Clark, 1973 ; Harris, 2013 ). This model purports that race/ethnic groups move through four stages of representation in the media. In the first stage, invisibility or non-recognition , a particular race or ethnic group rarely appears on the screen at all. In the second stage, ridicule , a racial group will appear more frequently, yet will be depicted in consistently stereotypical ways. In the third stage, regulation , an ethnic group might find themselves depicted primarily in roles upholding the social order, such as judges or police officers. Finally, a particular social group reaches the respect stage in which members of the group occupy diverse and nuanced roles. Given Clark’s model, this article contends that Native Americans and Asian Americans tend to fall into the non-recognition stage (Harris, 2013 ). It follows that few empirical studies have investigated these groups because empirical content analyses have difficulty scientifically assessing phenomena that lack presence (Krippendorff, 2004 ).

Bearing in mind Clark’s stages, Latinos appear to vacillate between non-recognition and ridicule. Meanwhile, blacks move between the ridicule and regulation stages, while whites remain permanently fixed in the respect stage. In other words, in this article, our lack of deep consideration of Native Americans and Asian Americans is rooted in a lack of representation which generates few empirical studies and thus leaves us little to review. The article offers a quick overview of their portrayal and then moves on to describe the social groups that receive more media and empirical attention.

Native American and Asian American Depictions

Although severely underrepresented, there are a few consistent stereotypical portrayals that regularly emerge for these groups. In some ways, both Native American and Asian Americans are often relegated to “historical” and/or fetishized portrayals (Lipsitz, 1998 ). Native American “savage” imagery was commonly depicted in Westerns and has been updated with images of alcoholism, along with depictions of shady Native American casino owners (Strong, 2004 ). Many news images of Native Americans tend to focus on Native festivals, relegating this group to a presentation as “mysterious” spiritual people (Heider, 2000 ). Meanwhile, various school and professional team mascots embody the savage Native American Warrior trope (Strong, 2004 ).

Asian Americans overall have often been associated with being the model minority (Harris, 2009 ; Josey, Hurley, Hefner, & Dixon, 2009 ). They typically represent “successful” non-whites. Specifically, media depictions associate Asian American men with technology and Asian American women with sexual submissiveness (Harris & Barlett, 2009 ; Schug, Alt, Lu, Gosin, & Fay, 2017 ).

Overall, scholars know very little about how either of these groups are regularly portrayed based on empirical research, although novelists and critical scholars have offered useful critiques (Wilson, Gutiérrez, & Chao, 2003 ). Hopefully, future quantitative content analyses will further delineate the nature of Native American and Asian American portrayals. Consider the discussion about entertainment, news, and digital imagery of blacks, Latinos, and whites presented in the next section.

Entertainment Constructions of Race, Culture, and Ethnicity

Entertainment media receives a great deal of consideration, given that Americans spend much of their time using media for entertainment purposes (Harris, 2013 ; Sparks, 2016 ). This section begins with an analysis of black portrayals, then moves on to Latino portrayals to understand the prevalence of stereotyping . When appropriate, black and Latino representations are compared to white ones. Two measures describe a group’s representation: (a) the numerical presence of a particular racial/ethnic group, and (b) the distribution of roles or stereotypes regarding each group. When researchers have often engaged in examinations of race they typically begin by comparing African American portrayals to white portrayals (Entman & Rojecki, 2000 ). As a result, there is a substantial amount of research on black portrayals.

Black Entertainment Television Imagery

Overall, a number of studies have found that blacks receive representation in prime-time television at parity to their actual proportion in the US population with their proportion ranging from 10% to 17% of prime-time characters (Mastro & Greenberg, 2000 ; Signorielli, 2009 ; Tukachinsky, Mastro, & Yarchi, 2015 ). African Americans currently compose approximately 13% of the US population (US Census Bureau, 2018 ). When considering the type of characters (e.g., major or minor) portrayed by this group, the majority of black (61%) cast members land roles as major characters (Monk-Turner, Heiserman, Johnson, Cotton, & Jackson, 2010 ). Black women also fare well in these representations, accounting for 73% of black appearances on prime-time television (Monk-Turner et al., 2010 ).

However, recent content analyses reveal an instability in black prime-time television representation over the last few decades. Tukachinsky et al. ( 2015 ) found that the prevalence of black characters dropped in 1993 and remain diminished compared to previous decades. Similarly, Signorielli ( 2009 ) found a significant linear decrease in the proportion of black representation from 2001 (17%) to 2008 (12%). Signorielli ( 2009 ) attributes this decrease in black representation to the decrease in situation comedy programming. Indeed, African Americans appear most frequently in situation comedies. Sixty percent of black women featured in prime-time television are cast in situation comedies, and 25% of black male prime-time portrayals occur in situation comedies (Signorielli, 2009 ). However, between 2001 and 2008 , situational comedies decreased, while action and crime programs increased.

The previously discussed analyses describe the frequency of black representation. However, frequent depictions do not equate to favorable representation. Considering role quality (i.e., respectability) and references made to stereotypes, entertainment media offers a mixed bag. On the one hand, some recent analyses found that the majority of blacks are depicted as likable, and as “good characters,” as opposed to “bad character”-like villains (Tukachinsky, Mastro, & Yarchi, 2015 ). In addition, the majority of black characters are depicted as intelligent (Tukachinsky et al., 2015 ). On the other hand, the rate of blacks shown as immoral and despicable (9%) is higher than that of whites (2% and 3%, respectively) (Monk-Turner et al., 2010 ). In addition, black depictions exhibiting high social status and professionalism trended downward. Between 2003 and 2005 , higher status depictions reached their peak at 74.3% but sharply fell in subsequent years to 31.5%, with black women faring worse than black men (Tukachinsky et al., 2015 ). Classic studies of entertainment representations found that blacks tend to be the most negatively represented of any race or ethnic group, often being depicted as lazy and disheveled (Mastro & Greenberg, 2000 ). Overall, black characters tend to be portrayed in less respectful ways compared to whites in content intended for general audiences, although they sometime fare better when the targeted audience is African American (Messineo, 2008 ). For example, crime drama television frequently depicts white women as at risk for murder, but FBI statistics demonstrate that murder victims are more often likely to be black males (Parrott & Parrott, 2015 ).

Black Representations in Magazines and Advertising

African Americans remain well represented in magazines, though they are not as prominent in this medium as in television (Schug et al., 2017 ). Moreover, the trend in the representation of African Americans, particularly women, appears to be improving (Covert & Dixon, 2008 ). Images of black women represent 6% of advertisements in women’s magazines and 4% of advertisements in men’s magazines (Baker, 2005 ). However, both black-oriented and white-oriented magazines appear to advance portrayals of black women with Eurocentric rather than Afrocentric features, referencing whiteness as a beauty standard. Overall, compared to black-oriented magazines, white-oriented magazines feature more black women with fair skin and thin figures. Black-oriented magazines feature more black women with straight hair. Moreover, straight hair textures outnumber other natural styles (i.e., wavy, curly, or braided) in both white- and black-oriented magazines.

Conversely, black men typically assume unemployed, athletic, or entertainment roles in these ads (Bailey, 2006 ). Moreover, mainstream magazines are most likely to depict black men as unemployed. Meanwhile, black-oriented magazines tend to portray African Americans in more managerial roles.

Black Representations in Sports Entertainment

Besides prime-time television, black stereotypes in sports coverage and music receive substantial attention in the literature. The unintelligent or “dumb” yet naturally talented black athlete remains a programming staple (Angelini, Billings, MacArthur, Bissell, & Smith, 2014 ; Rada & Wulfemeyer, 2005 ). For example, Angelini et al. ( 2014 ) found that black athletes receive less success-based comments related to intelligence than white athletes (Angelini et al., 2014 ). The findings echo previous research arguing that black athletes receive fewer positive comments regarding their intelligence than do white athletes (Rada & Wulfemeyer, 2005 ). Fairly similar depictions exist in broadcast commentary (Primm, DuBois, & Regoli, 2007 ). For example, Mercurio and Filak ( 2010 ) content-analyzed descriptions of NFL quarterback prospects featured on the Sports Illustrated website from 1998 to 2007 . The descriptions portray black athletes as possessing physical abilities while lacking intelligence . Conversely, Sports Illustrated described white prospects as intelligent but lacking in athleticism.

Black Representations in Music Videos

Music videos tend to sexualize black women, reinforcing the black jezebe l stereotype (i.e., a sassy African American woman who is sexually promiscuous) (Givens & Monahan, 2005 ). Also, black men appear aggressive and violent in music videos (e.g., like a criminal, thug, or brute ) (Ford, 1997 ). According to rap research, blacks appear in provocative clothes at a higher rate than whites, and black women are the most provocatively dressed in music videos (Turner, 2011 ). Even black female artists are twice as likely to wear provocative clothing than are white female artists (Frisby & Aubrey, 2012 ). Furthermore, Zhang, Dixon, and Conrad ( 2010 ) and Conrad, Zhang, and Dixon ( 2009 ) found that black women appeared in rap videos as sexualized, thin, and light-skinned while black men appeared dark-skinned and threatening .

Latino Entertainment Television Representation

Unlike African Americans, Latinos remain significantly underrepresented in English-language television outlets. For instance, Tukachinsky et al. ( 2015 ) found that of all characters, the number of Latino characters was less than 1% in the 1980s and increased to over 3% in the 2000s. However, these numbers fall significantly below the proportion of people who are Latino within the United States (about 18%) (U.S. Census Bureau, 2018 ). Similarly, Signorelli ( 2009 ) also found that the percentage of Latinos in the United States Latino population and the percentage of Latino characters in prime-time programming differed by approximately 10%.

Latinos continue to be underrepresented in a variety of genres and outlets. For instance, Latinos remain consistently underrepresented in gay male blogs. For example, Grimm and Schwarz ( 2017 ) found that white gay models (80.2%) were most prevalent, followed by black gay models (4.5%). However, Latino models were the least prevalent (1.5%). In addition, Hetsroni ( 2009 ) found that the Latino population makes up 14% of patients in real hospitals, yet they only comprise 4% of the patients in hospital dramas. Conversely, whites make up 72% of real patients but comprise 80% of hospital drama patients.

Latino Underrepresentation in Advertising

Latino underrepresentation extends to the advertising realm. For example, Seelig ( 2007 ) determined that there was a significant difference between the Latino proportion of the US population and the Latino proportion of models found in mainstream magazines (1%). Another study that investigated Superbowl commercials conducted by Brooks, Bichard, and Craig ( 2016 ) found that only 1.22% of the characters were Latino.

Prominent Stereotypes of Latinos in Entertainment Media

Although underrepresented, Latinos are also stereotypically represented in entertainment media. For example, Tukachinsky et al. ( 2015 ) discovered that over 24% of Latino characters were hypersexualized in prime-time television. Furthermore, Latinos tended to occupy low-professional-status roles. This trend also occurred more often with Latina females than Latino males.

Spanish-language television also reinforced stereotypes. For instance, Mastro and Ortiz ( 2008 ) studied the portrayals of characters in prime-time Spanish-language television broadcasts by Azteca America, Telefutura, Telemundo, and Univision. They found rich Latina women reinforced the harlot stereotype . They were sexualized , were provocatively dressed, and had slim body types (Mastro & Behm-Morawitz, 2005 ). Similar to the findings for African Americans and rap music, colorism was also part of these depictions, with idealized Latinos having more European features. Men with a dark complexion were depicted as aggressive (e.g., the criminal stereotype) , while men with a fair complexion were portrayed as intelligent and articulate.

Entertainment Imagery Summary

Blacks appear to be well represented in entertainment imagery, often in favorable major roles as professionals. However, their positive portrayals appear to be on the decline as situation comedies become displaced by other genres where blacks are less prominent. Although well represented, black depictions continue to embody many stereotypes. African American males are portrayed as unintelligent or “dumb” athletes whose only assets are their inbred athletic abilities. Black men tend to appear as aggressive criminals or brutes in music videos while black women appear as sexualized jezebels with European features.

Latinos, on the other hand, face substantial obstacles related to their lack of representation. They tend to be grossly underrepresented across a number of entertainment outlets including television, magazines, and advertising. When they are seen, they tend to occupy two primary stereotypes, the harlot stereotype and the criminal stereotype. This appears to be a constant across both Spanish-language and English-language outlets.

News Constructions of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity

News remains an important area to consider when it comes to media stereotypes for two reasons. First, news can be considered a powerful purveyor of social truth (Romer, Jamieson, & Aday, 2003 ; Tewksbury & Rittenberg, 2012 ). While entertainment can be considered by lay audiences to have a weak relationship with social reality given its fictional nature, news is rooted in actual events, and therefore seems more real. Stereotypes found in news content may seem believable, increasing these stereotype’s influence on audiences’ perceptions of reality. Second, citizens rely on news to form opinions about policies and politicians (Iyengar, 1987 ; Price & Tewksbury, 1997 ). News reports contain the reservoir of information that citizens utilize to make decisions within our representative democracy (Iyengar, 1991 ). If the news falsely points to racial groups as the cause of social problems, these citizens may advocate for ineffective and misguided policies. The next section explores how the news purveys racial and ethnic stereotypes.

Blacks in the News

A number of early studies suggested that the news often stereotyped blacks as violent criminals , consistently overrepresenting them in these roles by large margins (Dixon, Azocar, & Casas, 2003 ; Dixon & Linz, 2000a , 2000b ; Entman, 1992 , 1994 ). At the same time, many of these studies showed blacks underrepresented in more sympathetic roles, such as victims of crime (Dixon & Linz, 2000a , 2000b ).

However, recent research suggests that the criminal stereotype has not remained consistently part of the news landscape. For example, Dixon ( 2017b ) found that current depictions of blacks in local news reflect actual percentages of blacks in these various roles, including as criminals. Similarly, Dixon and Williams ( 2015 ) found African Americans underrepresented as both criminals and victims. On the other hand, another recent content analysis that investigated black family depictions in the news, conducted by Dixon ( 2017a ), found that black family members were overrepresented as criminal suspects compared to crime reports.

Furthermore, Mastro, Blecha, and Atwell Seate ( 2011 ) content-analyzed articles pertaining to athletes’ criminal activity published in newspapers and found that mentions of black athletes’ criminal activity outnumber white and Latino athletes. Furthermore, mentions of criminal activity among black athletes outnumber their real-world proportion in professional sports (Mastro et al., 2011 ). In addition, crime articles discussing black athletes provide more explicit details of the crime and mention more negative consequences (e.g., jail or fines) than articles regarding white athletes. News narratives also present less sympathetic coverage for black athletes, more support for the victim, a less respectful tone, and fewer thematic frames (i.e., situating the crime in a larger context) for black athletes compared to white athletes.

Besides criminality , news tends to also depict blacks as part of the underserving poor . For example, van Doorn ( 2015 ) content-analyzed images depicting poverty in news magazines (i.e., Time, Newsweek , and USNWR ). News magazines picture blacks as the majority of persons in poverty (52%), while blacks only account for around 25% of Americans in poverty (van Doorn, 2015 ). Blacks experience similar misrepresentations as welfare recipients . Based on magazine depictions, black people comprise 55% of all welfare recipients. However, in reality, blacks only account for 38% of welfare recipients. Furthermore, the black elderly are depicted as only accounting for 1% of poor elderly persons pictured, while the true percentage is 6%. In addition, during times of economic stability, African American association with poverty increases, but during times of economic upheaval (e.g., the Great Recession) white association with poverty goes up.

Latinos in the News

If there is an overarching issue to consider regarding Latino depictions in news, it would again be their perpetual underrepresentation. Overall, Latinos remain severely underrepresented on television news, especially in sympathetic roles. For example, early studies by Dixon and Linz ( 2000a , 2000b ) found Latinos were underrepresented as perpetrators, victims, and police officers in the news. In one of these studies, Latinos were 54% of the homicide victims in Los Angeles County but were depicted as homicide victims only about 19% of the time on television news. A recent update to this study found that Latinos were accurately represented as perpetrators, but continued to be underrepresented as victims and police officers (Dixon, 2017b ). This invisibility extends to newspapers and magazines (Sorenson, Manz, & Berk, 1998 ). For example, Latinos are underrepresented in Time and Newsweek as part of the obese population, 5% in these magazines versus 18% according to medical statistics (Gollust, Eboh, & Barry, 2012 ).

When we considered the pervasive stereotype that is present with Latinos, it revolved around the issue of immigration and Latino immigrants as criminal or cultural threats . For instance, a meta-analysis (i.e., a type of method that unearths patterns of academic research) by Rendon and Johnson ( 2015 ) on studies that analyzed media coverage of Mexican affairs in the United States revealed a Threat Phase, from 2010 to 2014 . During this phase, reporters investigated the notion that immigrant Mexicans imperil the United States. Furthermore, Chavez, Whiteford, and Hoewe ( 2010 ) found that more than half of analyzed stories concerning Mexican immigration from the New York Times , Washington Post , Wall Street Journal , and USA Today focused on illegal immigration. Furthermore, within these immigration stories, crime was addressed most often (50.6%), followed by economics (e.g., job competition) (30.6%), and legislative deliberations (28.1%). Similarly, Branton and Dunaway ( 2008 ) found that English-language newspapers were almost twice as likely as Spanish-language news to depict immigration in a negative light.

Kim, Carvahlo, Davis, and Mullins ( 2011 ) found that illegal immigration stories produced by the media focus on the negative consequences of crime and job competition. A more recent study conducted by Dixon and Williams ( 2015 ) appears to confirm the media link between immigration, Latinos, and criminal behavior. They found that criminal suspects identified as immigrants in news stories were greatly overrepresented as Latino. In addition, almost all of the illegal or undocumented immigrants appearing in the news were depicted as Latino, which is a great overrepresentation based on official government reports. Dunaway, Goidel, Krizinger, and Wilkinson ( 2011 ) confirm that news coverage encourages an immigration threat narrative, meaning that the majority of immigration stories exhibit a negative tone.

Whites as the “Good Guys”

While black representations as criminal suspects does appear to vary in intensity and Latinos tend to be depicted as either invisible or threatening immigrants, white portrayals remain consistently positive in this domain. Classic studies of both news and reality-based programming show whites overrepresented as officers and victims (Dixon et al., 2003 ; Dixon & Linz, 2000a , 2000b ; Oliver, 1994 ). This includes network and local news programs. More recent studies show that this continues to occur regularly and remains a news programming staple (Dixon, 2017b ). When contrasted with black and Latino representations, this reinforces the notion that whites resolve social problems and people of color create social problems.

Summary of News Constructions of Culture, Race, and Media

Based on this literature review, three significant findings that summarize news’ construction of race and ethnicity emerge. First, African Americans tend to be overly associated with criminality and poverty . However, the intensity of these portrayals depends on context (e.g., a focus on families, athletes, or general economic conditions). Second, Latinos tend to be largely underrepresented, but when they are seen, they tend to be overly associated with problematic illegal immigration , especially immigrants who may pose a threat or be prone to criminality. Third, news depicts whites most favorably, overrepresenting them as victims (e.g., innocent portrayals) and officers (e.g., heroic portrayals).

Digital Media Constructions of Culture, Race, and Media

The vast majority of research detailing the portrayal of people of color in the media relied on the analysis of traditional media sources including television and magazines. However, increasingly, people turn to digital media for both entertainment and news. This section provides an overview of this growing industry that will eventually dominate our media landscape. The discussion first entails video games and Internet news websites. Speculation about the role social media will play with regard to these depictions follows.

Black Depictions in Video Games

An abundance of research focuses on racial representation within video games (Burgess, Dill, Stermer, Burgess, & Brown, 2011 ; Williams, Martins, Consalvo, & Ivory, 2009 ). Similar to traditional entertainment media, African Americans comprise approximately 11% of popular video game characters for major game systems (e.g., Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, Nintendo GameCube) (Williams et al., 2009 ). Conversely, blacks are underrepresented in massive multiplayer online games (MMO) in which players customize their own avatars’ features, including gender and skin tone (Waddell, Ivory, Conde, Long, & McDonnell, 2014 ). In this environment only 3.84% of all unique characters within MMOs are black.

When considering gender differences in portrayals, more problematic depictions exist. For instance, black women are underrepresented in gaming magazines and almost completely absent from video game covers (Burgess et al., 2011 ). Meanwhile, black men are typically portrayed as either athletic and/or violent . Black aggression does not occur in socially sanctioned settings (e.g., war). Instead, many black males appear as outlaws (e.g., street fighters).

Black Depictions in Digital News Sources

There is limited research on news depictions and race within digital media contexts, but this will most likely become the focus of future scholarship over the next few years. This focus will be fueled by the rise of political figures, such as Donald Trump, who utilize media stereotypes to advance their political agendas (Dixon, 2017a ). Much of what we do know stems from research on websites and digital news sources. One earlier study of this phenomena found that African Americans were underrepresented as part of images and headlines used in these web news stories (Josey et al., 2009 ). They were also more strongly associated with poverty than what the actual poverty rates suggest. A more recent analysis of a wide variety of online news sources similarly found that black families were overrepresented as poor and welfare dependent (Dixon, 2017a ). In addition, black fathers were misrepresented as excessively absent from the lives of their children. Finally, African American family members were overrepresented as criminal suspects. These findings complement the traditional news conclusions reached by previous scholars.

Latino Depictions in Video Games

Waddell, Ivory, Conde, Long, and McDonnell ( 2014 ) found that the trend of Latino underrepresentation in media extends to the video game industry. Latino avatars were not observed in the highest grossing MMO games in 2010 (0%). Williams, Martins, Consalvo, and Ivory ( 2009 ) also assessed the racial characteristics of video game characters across 150 games and found that white characters were observed more often (59.32%) than Latino (1.63%) characters. Furthermore, Latino characters were never observed assuming primary roles.

Latino Depictions in Digital News Sources

In terms of digital news sources, the research presents extremely similar findings between Latinos and African Americans. Latinos continue to be largely underrepresented across a variety of roles in web news (Josey et al., 2009 ). They are underrepresented in both headlines and images. They are also likely to be overassociated with poverty (Dixon, 2017a ; Josey et al., 2009 ).

Summary of Digital Constructions of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity

In summary, underrepresentation remains the norm for both African Americans and Latinos in digital media. At the same time, digital news overly associates these groups with poverty . Clearly, as traditional media and its audience migrate to new digital platforms, this area will continue to be researchers’ focus well into the future. One digital platform not mentioned is social media. Many users receive, consume, and share entertainment and news content via social media. This includes music and music fandom content (Epps & Dixon, 2017 ). Social media’s specific and unique characteristics may contribute to media stereotype cultivation and prevent positive intergroup contact (Dixon, 2017c ). Much work needs to be undertaken in the future to explore these possibilities.

Conclusions

This article began with a discussion of the possible impact of mediated stereotypes to contextualize our discussion. Social categorization theory, social identity theory, and priming/cognitive accessibility suggest that the prominent black stereotypes of black laziness , criminality , innate athleticism , jezebel, and poverty would be embraced by heavy media consumers. Similarly, even though Latinos remain underrepresented, the reinforcement of Latino stereotypes like poverty , harlot , criminal , and illegal immigrant would result from regular media consumption. While underrepresented, Latinos receive enough mainstream media attention for scholars to conduct quantitative social research. Asian and Native Americans’ underrepresentation in mainstream media, however, indicates these groups’ general absence.

When educators teach these topics in class, they are often asked: Why? Why does media perpetuate these stereotypes? Consider these two prominent answers. First, media creators suffer from mostly unconscious, and sometimes conscious bias, that scholars believe facilitates an ethnic blame discourse (Dixon & Linz, 2000a ; Romer, Jamieson, & de Coteau, 1998 ; Van Dijk, 1993 ).

This discourse tends to occur within groups (e.g., whites conversing with one another) and leads them to blame social problems on ethnic others (e.g., Latinos and blacks). Given that media producers remain overwhelmingly white, this explanation appears plausible. As white people engage in these discussions, their way of thinking manifests in their content. The second explanation revolves around the structural limitations and economic interests of news agencies (Dixon & Linz, 2000a ). This explanation suggests that media agencies air material most appealing to audiences in the simplest form possible to increase ratings. This process heavily relies on stereotypes because stereotypes make processing and attending to media messages easier for audience members. In turn, profits increase. This points to problems related to the relationship between media content creation and the media industry’s profit motives. Skeptics may question these explanations’ plausibility, but overall, mediated stereotypes remain a persistent part of the media environment. Digital media exacerbate the negative effects of mediated stereotype consumption.

Further Reading

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• Dixon, T. L. (2016). Rap music and rap audiences revisited: How race matters in the perception of rap music . In P. Hall (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Music Censorship (pp. 1–10). New York: Oxford University Press.
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How Racial Stereotypes in Popular Media Affect People — and What Hollywood Can Do to Become More Inclusive

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In 2015, the average U.S. resident consumed traditional and digital media for about 15.5 hours each day. In the same year, eight- to twelve-year-old children consumed an average of six hours of media a day and teens consumed nine hours. This mind-boggling amount of media consumption shapes how U.S. residents see the world, and racial imagery in the media has cumulative effects on society. Often biased media portrayals of racial groups cannot be dismissed as mere entertainment, especially not if their impact on youth are taken seriously.

Harms from Portrayals of Racial and Ethnic Minorities in the Media

Researchers have found that prolonged television exposure predicts a decrease in self-esteem for all girls and for black boys, but an increase in self-esteem for white boys. These differences correlate with the racial and gender practices in Hollywood, which predominantly casts white men as heroes, while erasing or subordinating other groups as villains, sidekicks, and sexual objects. Studies also show how media images of Native American mascots lower the self-esteem and affect the moods of Native American adolescents and young adults (who suffer from high suicide rates). 

Beyond specific effects on particular groups of viewers, racial images packaged as entertainment can skew the way all viewers understand and categorize people. Popular media can have a negative impact on whites’ perceptions of people of color and racial stereotypes in film and television can exacerbate preexisting racist fears. One study finds that popular media depictions of nonverbal features of people of color, including facial expressions and body language, influence racial biases for white viewers. 

When there is a lack of contact between racial groups, people tend to rely on media stereotypes to formulate ideas about people outside of their own race. For instance, stereotyped depictions of Latinx people in the media can lead audiences to associate immigration with increased unemployment and crime. Furthermore, the media’s tendency to fuel racial misperceptions can contribute to public support for harsher punishments for people of color.

How Hollywood Can Take Strong Corrective Actions

Diversity may be a buzzword in Hollywood, but full participation by people of color continues to lag behind that of white males. Hollywood requires better strategies. Studios can work to diversify Hollywood’s employment and content by establishing responsibility structures, including specific committees, staff positions, and hiring plans dedicated to increasing representation of people of color. Doing that, research shows, could help boost racial diversity in workplaces, particularly at the managerial level. 

Hollywood should hire staff members who demonstrate a track record of creating content for people of color and casting them in varied and complex roles. Most companies use professional recruiters, and Hollywood should do the same across all ranks. Each studio and network should have at least one designated recruiter for diverse talent behind the scenes and a designated casting director who is trained to find actors of color and in anti-racist practices. They should have experience working with and recruiting diverse populations.

Studios should set hiring targets for people of color —both in visible and behind the scenes positions— in accord with their shares in the U.S. population. Research shows that setting specific hiring goals aimed at increasing the number of people of color is one of the most effective ways of diversifying workplaces. To increase the number of people of color in the pipeline, new hiring should occur semiannually or even quarterly. Although many networks host diversity programs and showcases for actors, writers, and directors from underrepresented groups, networks could go further and set aside shares of jobs for underrepresented groups.

Current diversity programs require improvement, because most diversity writers are released from their shows after hiring them to fulfill quotas. Studios need to mentor, train and provide a longer trial period for such hires, as they would for any other valued employee. In other words, studios and TV networks need to value increasing their staff of color enough to support them beyond the initial hiring period. Furthermore, studios and networks should rethink the name, “diversity hire” because a stigma of lower qualifications or free labor is often associated with such labels. 

Besides hiring, networks and studios need to focus on retention. They should establish networking and mentoring programs for people of color, which research shows to have a positive effect on retention. They should pair new hires of color with key experienced people. This practice already exists; for example, ABC mandated that Shonda Rhimes, who had no television experience prior to her first show, Grey’s Anatomy, be paired with the more experienced James Parriott. This practice could be instituted across all ranks and positions, because such pairings do not just benefit the incoming people of color in terms of training and mentorship, but also veterans, who get exposure to fresh perspectives and new ideas. 

By generating inclusive social networks, Hollywood would attract and retain more talent of color. Chris Rock attributes his own success to the help of established black actors, such as Eddie Murphy, Keenen Ivory Wayans, and Arsenio Hall, who took “chances” on him. He, in turn, helps develop other black actors, such as Leslie Jones. More people of color in key positions and in the pipeline will help accelerate racial inclusion in the industry. 

In an ever more racially diverse world, Hollywood’s ability to include different racial and ethnic groups is pivotal. Industry leaders must take responsibility for diversity problems, and white elites should not hide shortfalls behind a facade of colorblind tolerance. Demographic changes and an ever-expanding international box office will put pressure on Hollywood to diversify, but not necessarily to overhaul longstanding racially relevant barriers — unless more concerted efforts are made. As Viola Davis stated in her 2015 Emmy award acceptance speech, “If they exist in life, then we should see it on TV. We should see it on stage or on the screen. As many people are out there are as many stories that should be being told.”

Read more Nancy Wang Yuen, Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism (Rutgers University Press, 2016). 

Related Content

How Stereotypes Impact Our Social Interactions

The impact of stereotypes can be profoundly shaped through social interactions..

Posted May 24, 2023 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma

• Little is known about the brain and developmental factors shaping stereotypes' impact on social interactions.
• A new study links stereotype effects to individual variation in a crucial prefrontal brain structure.
• Early-life exposure to social interactions shapes the ability to moderate stereotype tendencies.

Stereotypes are generalizations about groups of people that allow us to quickly judge individuals without having to spend a lot of time getting to know them. This ability for rapid categorization likely carried evolutionary advantages, aiding our ancestors in efficiently navigating their environments and making swift decisions.

However, over-reliance on stereotypes can prove problematic when they do not align with the actual characteristics or behaviors of the person we are interacting with. For example, a teacher’s didactic tone may come across as patronizing when it turns out that the young person being spoken to is also an educator rather than a student.

Yet our current scientific understanding of how stereotypes truly shape our social interactions, particularly in the face of contradictory evidence, remains limited. This understanding is needed if we want to address the biases associated with stereotypes and foster a more inclusive and equitable society.

Interaction Games

A new line of research is shedding light on this matter. At the heart of this research lies the recognition that computer-mediated interaction games offer a unique toolset. Because study participants cannot see or hear one another during gameplay, researchers can experimentally alter individuals’ beliefs about their interaction partners. This enables subsequent assessment of participants’ tendencies to behave in accordance with those preconceived beliefs.

To illustrate this idea, researchers can design a game where participants interact with two distinct partners: a 5-year-old child and an adult. The twist is that both of these ‘roles’ are performed by the same individual, who remains unaware of which role they are assuming in each interaction. This setup ensures that any perceived disparities between the child and adult partners are solely attributable to the participants’ stereotype-driven beliefs about their capabilities, rather than actual differences in behavior and understanding between the two partners.

Previous research using this experimental setup has shown that participants instinctively make subtle adaptations when they believe they are interacting with the ‘child’ partner. Much like how we naturally modify our communication style with children by adjusting the tone and inflection of our voice, participants in these games tend to place more emphasis on important portions of the digital game board when engaged with the presumed child partner.

Sources of Individual Variation

Interaction games thus present a promising avenue for capturing the behavioral effects of stereotypes in a controlled and systematic manner. This enables researchers to explore whether individuals vary in their capacity or propensity to utilize preconceived notions about people during their social interactions.

A study aimed at addressing this question investigated patients with prefrontal lobe damage, a brain region situated above the eyes that is known for its involvement in social behavior. The findings of this study revealed that patients with prefrontal damage did not demonstrate slower or clearer behaviors while engaging with the presumed child partner. This discovery highlights the crucial role of the prefrontal lobe in shaping individuals’ responses to stereotype-related cues within social interactions.

In a separate study, researchers examined whether the development of this social ability is influenced by environmental factors, such as socioeconomic status and the extent of exposure to social interactions within and outside the family setting. The study specifically targeted 5-year-old children, as this age is known for well-developed social skills and allowed for a comprehensive assessment of the child’s social environment.

The study revealed a significant relationship between the amount of time children spent in daycare (days per week) from birth until the age of 4 and the extent to which they spontaneously organized their interactive behaviors according to their beliefs about their partner at age 5. These initial insights shed light on the factors that contribute to individual variations in this crucial aspect of human interaction.

A Sensitive Developmental Period

The study involving 5-year-old children offers evidence supporting the longstanding notion that our ability to interact with others develops through social interactions. However, it remains unclear whether the consequences of social experiences acquired in a daycare environment extend beyond early development.

Humans differ from other primates in both the extent and nature of social interactions encountered from early infancy. Unlike chimpanzee infants, who typically remain under their mother’s care until around 5 years old, human infants are regularly exposed to interactions with a variety of individuals from an early stage. This striking contrast has prompted anthropologists to propose that these early-life social experiences may play a crucial role in the development of human interactional abilities that endure into adulthood.

A rare opportunity presented itself to investigate a unique cohort of 17-year-old adolescents who had been meticulously tracked since infancy. These individuals had consistently reported their social statistics annually, including details such as the number of friends and or siblings they had, the extent of time spent with them, and notably, the amount of time they had spent in daycare during their earliest years.

By acquiring participants’ brain scans and employing the same interaction game utilized in the aforementioned studies, this investigation yielded two insights. First, the study identified a specific sub-region within the prefrontal lobe known as the anterior cingulate gyrus, which remarkably predicted an individual’s tendency to act in accordance with stereotypes associated with their interaction partners. This finding aligns with previous observations of impaired adaptation in patients with prefrontal damage encompassing the anterior cingulate gyrus.

Second, participants who had a long history of daycare exposure demonstrated a heightened capacity to adapt their communication style to match the actual behavior and understanding of both child and adult partners. These individuals treated both partners equally and showed reduced reliance on stereotypes as they gathered interaction-based evidence against their preconceived assumptions about their partners.

In conclusion , these observations highlight the important role of interaction-based evidence in shaping the impact of stereotypes. Our ability to align the influence of stereotypes with evidence derived from social interactions develops through engagement in social interactions, particularly in early life.

By the same token, these findings underscore the real-world significance of utilizing interaction games as research tools, highlighting the importance of studying stereotype beliefs within the context of live social interactions, where they matter most.

Stolk, D’Imperio, di Pellegrino, Toni (2015). Altered communicative decisions following ventromedial prefrontal lesions. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2015.03.057

Stolk, Hunnius, Bekkering, Toni (2013). Early social experience predicts referential communicative adjustments in five-year-old children. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0072667

Koch, Tyborowska, Niermann, Cillessen, Roelofs, Bašnáková, Toni & Stolk (2023). Integrating stereotypes and factual evidence in interpersonal communication. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.23.540979v1

Arjen Stolk, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor at Dartmouth College, where he directs the Mutual Understanding Laboratory. His research focuses on communication, social interactions, and autism spectrum disorder.

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Prejudices in Cultural Contexts: Shared Stereotypes (Gender, Age) versus Variable Stereotypes (Race, Ethnicity, Religion)

Susan t. fiske.

Princeton University

Some prejudices share cross-cultural patterns, but others are more variable and culture specific. Those sharing cross-cultural patterns (sexism, ageism) each combine societal status differences and intimate interdependence. For example, in stereotypes of sex and age, lower-status groups— women and elders—gain stereotypic warmth (from their cooperative interdependence) but lose stereotypic competence (from their lower status); men and middle-aged adults show the opposite tradeoff, stereotypically more competent than warm. Meta-analyses support these widespread ambivalent (mixed) stereotypes for gender and age across cultures. Social class stereotypes often share some similarities (cold but competent rich v warm but incompetent poor). These compensatory warmth v competence stereotypes may function to manage common human dilemmas of interacting across societal and personal positions. However, other stereotypes are more variable and culture specific (ethnicity, race, religion). Case studies of specific race/ethnicities and religions reveal much more cultural variation in their stereotype content, supporting their being responses to particular cultural contexts, apparent accidents of history. To change stereotypes requires understanding their commonalities and differences, their origins and patterns across cultures.

“Universal” is a dangerous word. During most of 20 th century, American research on prejudice seemed to assume that its newly discovered principles applied everywhere. In the author's own review ( Fiske, 1998 ), following the lead of a foundational volume ( Allport, 1954 ), culture does not appear. By its absence, universalism is implied, or at least not questioned. That is, to one reviewer at least, processes seemed universal: Categorizing others occurred everywhere. Implicit ingroup bias was widespread. American White-on-Black racism stood in for all kinds of prejudice.

But the science of prejudice was developing, and culture was entering into consideration (e.g., Pettigrew & Meertens, 1995). European research on intergroup relations understood this before American research did. European social psychology generated its own models more sensitive to the European cultural contexts ( Yzerbyt & Demoulin, 2010 ), which then spread to the U.S. For example, European-originated Social Identity Theory posits the relativity of categorization, depending on context, with people aiming for positive and distinctive identities that reflect their category-based behavior ( Brewer, 1991 ; Tajfel, 1982 ; Turner, 1987 ). An example would be people identified as immigrants versus native-born, each reflecting past and current cultural contexts.

As a field, American prejudice research took awhile to take culture into account. Most people are not Americans, or even WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic; Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010 ). Our 20 th century WEIRD samples do not stand in for human nature. Mea culpa: The lion's share of the references in my own 1998 review were American and European, on the unspoken assumption that our empirical phenomena represented everyone on the planet. Nevertheless, we Westerners as a field eventually came to our senses, realizing that culture is crucial, as this Perspectives symposium indicates, and to good effect.

Consider as a case study, my own research trajectory. In our lab, we backed into cultural explorations by serendipity. People from other countries contacted us to use our materials, and their results sometimes supported the generality of our U.S. findings and sometimes not. WE had to take notice of what the data were telling us. This essay makes sense of the patterns that emerged over the last two decades of cultural challenges to our work on stereotype content, as an illustration of what prejudice research can gain from taking account of culture. The essay is a Perspective, with examples from our own research program. Per the editorial invitation, this essay is frankly speculative, but consistent with some data.

Gender and age always appear in cultures describing their salient groups. From one perspective, gender and age perceptions should have developed in fundamentally similar ways across cultures. Both social categories have both biological and social foundations. People usually have in their families both men and women, younger and older people. Humans are delightfully and obligatorily interdependent across gender and age boundaries. No such argument can be made for cross-race relationships. Arguably, racial and ethnic relations are inevitably shaped by cultural and historical context (although they may draw on universal adaptations for detecting alliances).

Consistent with this perspective, several precedents contrast the context-driven nature of race/ethnicity encoding with the inevitability of encoding gender and age. Social dominance theory makes precisely this argument in studies of support for group hierarchies (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999): Gender (and age) hierarchies appear unavoidable, but race, ethnicity, and religious hierarchies are arbitrary sets. Average sex differences in endorsing social dominance (men more than women) are medium, reliably larger than the average arbitrary-set differences (Whites more than Blacks). To be sure, across-nation variability is considerable and related sensibly to various socio-structural predictors ( Lee, Pratto, & Johnson, 2011 ). But from a broad-brush perspective, patterns for gender are shared across cultures more than are patterns for race and ethnicity.

From another empirical precedent, an arbitrary coalition (teammates) easily overrides race but not sex ( Kurzban, Tooby, & Cosmides, 2001 ; see also van Bavel & Cunningham, 2009 ). Likewise, our own paradigms easily override race encoding by manipulating context ( Wheeler & Fiske, 2005 ). All this evidence fits with a cultural-context-driven approach to race/ethnicity.

Moving beyond perception to stereotypes, as this review will show, our research programs turn out to support shared gender and age stereotypes across cultures, consistent with their possibly functioning to support obligatory interdependence—but in contrast, we find much cultural variability of race/ethnicity stereotypes. To this mix, our recent data suggest social class stereotyping may have cultural commonalities—and perhaps also a response to dilemmas shared across cultures (but not within families). This essay thus reviews stereotype content that is more nearly universal (gender, age, possibly class) versus more culturally variable (race, ethnicity, religion).

Cross-Cultural Similarities: Gender, Age, Class

This section presents evidence consistent with the notion that gender and age stereotypes (and maybe class stereotypes) share many features across cultures. To be clear, these are stereotypes, not necessarily accurate descriptions of groups or their individual members.

Gender Stereotypes

Ambivalent Sexism Theory (AST; e.g., Glick & Fiske, 1996 ) hinges on the tension between biologically obligatory male-female interdependence and essentially universal male dominance in societies. AST developed to explain how people manage this dilemma by holding prescriptive stereotypes about men and women, not just how the genders are (descriptive), but how they should be (prescriptive). Two forms of sexism follow, depending on whether women cooperate with prescriptive gender roles. (A parallel analysis holds for anti-male stereotypes, but sexism is more at issue for women because of male societal power; Glick & Fiske, 1999 .)

Hostile sexism (HS) reflects the familiar form of stereotypes against women, mainly targeting women who do not cooperate with traditional forms of male-female interdependence: resenting women who violate prescriptive gender roles: by competing with men at work, by being sexually controlling, or by rejecting intimate heterosexual relationships. HS targets career women, feminists, and lesbians, for example ( Glick et al., 1997 ), and it openly denigrates such challenging women. HS stereotypes uncooperative women as relatively competent but cold ( Eckes, 2002 ).

The other form of prejudice, benevolent sexism (BS), is AST's innovation, mainly expressed as patronizing affection for women who cooperate with traditional male-female interdependence; they adhere to prescriptive gender roles: by remaining subordinate to men at work, by being sexually subservient to male requirements, or by embracing prescriptive heterosexual relationships. Subjectively positive for the perceiver, BS subordinates secretaries, cheerleaders, and housewives. Because BS beliefs report cherishing such women, putting them on a pedestal, BS seems benign, but it demonstrably undermines female autonomy and achievement (e.g., Dardenne, Dumont, & Bollier, 2007 ). BS stereotypes cooperative women as warm but incompetent.

As two modestly correlated dimensions, HS and BS serve complementary functions: HS punishes women who resist prescriptive gender interdependence, while BS rewards women who comply. This dynamic reinforces both male-female interdependence and male dominance, so it solves our human two-pronged predicament. As such, ambivalent sexism likely was not invented yesterday. (For precedents in the psychology literature, see Glick & Fiske, 1996 .)

We cannot administer the ASI back in time—to see how timeless it might be—but we can compare more and less developed countries in the present. What is striking is the cross-national similarity, albeit with some diminished sexism as nations develop. Across 19 nations and about 15,000 respondents, HS and BS each show reasonable separation and internal coherence in by-country factor analyses and reliabilities ( Glick et al., 2000 ). HS and BS correlate significantly less among men than among women. More sexist people and nations in general show less correlation, more independence of the two dimensions. Perhaps more egalitarian people and places recognize BS as sexism, so they reject both: HS together with BS.

Distinct patterns replicate across countries: Men always score higher than women, especially on HS. The gender gap in BS is smaller because women do not reject it as much as they do HS. Across nations, BS predicts protective but demeaning stereotypes of women who comply with prescriptive gender roles (tender, warm, sweet, sensitive), whereas HS predicts resentment of women who resist prescriptive limitations (jealous, sly, touchy, selfish).

Besides the HS-BS correlations, a few cultural differences do emerge: In more sexist countries, women accept BS relatively more than do women in more egalitarian countries. Perhaps when surrounded by HS, the BS pedestal looks good. If less surrounded by HS, women recognize BS as patronizing and reject it to a greater degree.

Men's hostile sexism correlates with United Nations indices of gender development— women's health, education, and welfare—and gender empowerment—women being in elite professions and government positions. As the dominant group, men's hostility constrains women more than women's hostility to some women constrains either men or women. Male BS correlates with gender development indices as well, but less so. In maintaining male societal dominance, male hostility to female prescription-violators matters more than male benevolence toward female prescription-adherents.

The gender-development/sexism correlation means that the constraints of male-female interdependence, plus male societal dominance, especially shape less gender-developed societies. Ambivalent sexism's correlation with gender development suggests that this dynamic can change as male dominance decreases and economic development offers opportunities to men and women alike.

But the twin dimensions, HS and BS, will likely persist, for two reasons: Despite alternative reproductive technologies and childcare for hire, children usually result from and often thrive through parental interdependence, which is usually heterosexual. And as social role theory recognizes, male-dominant, traditional gender roles partly follow from biological factors such as male upper-body strength and female parental investment, as well as from more culturally malleable social structural factors ( Eagly & Wood, 2013 ). Gender stereotypes reflect pervasive human contexts, so ambivalent sexism's patterns remain common across countries, although with cultural variations.

Age Stereotypes

People of all ages also depend on each other, and people routinely have family members across the age spectrum. Prescriptive stereotypes characterize ageism ( North & Fiske, 2012 , 2013a ) for many of the same reasons that hold for prescriptive sexism. In the case of age, the interdependence tensions revolve around control over resources and the timing of when elders step aside for the next generation.

Prescriptive stereotypes of older people mandate their resource sharing: Elders who comply are praised; elders who resist are derogated. The contested resource domains include orderly succession (family wealth, job seniority, political power), pooled consumption (healthcare costs, retirement subsidies), and generational identity (music, styles). The role of intergenerational tension appears in evidence of younger raters (as opposed to middle-aged or older ones) most resenting noncompliant elder targets (as opposed to noncompliant targets of other ages). Likewise, youth most reward compliant elders (versus other ages). Individual differences in prescriptive ageism (Succession, Identity, Consumption; North & Fiske, 2013b ) predict polarized responses to complying versus resisting elders.

These prescriptive stereotypes also appear in the default elder stereotype, absent information about individual compliance. Just as the default woman is compliant, so is the default elder. General old-person stereotypes describe elders as doddering but dear: incompetent but warm ( Cuddy, Norton, & Fiske, 2005 ), that is, not a threat. This ambivalent stereotype resembles the default female one, both driven by the prescriptions of interdependence that subordinate one group to the needs of the other, with some mandated reward contingent on cooperating, all in the context of status asymmetry.

This age-based interdependence appears pervasive across cultures, so our data find elders to be disrespected as incompetent, but liked as warm, in samples around the world ( Cuddy & Fiske, 2002 ). The only samples that admire their old people are African Americans ( Fiske, Bergsieker, Russell, & Williams, 2009 ) and Native Americans ( Burkley, Durante, Fiske, Burkley, & Andrade, 2016 ).

Contrary to popular wisdom that Eastern cultures revere their elders, but as the ageist resource-tensions theory predicts, meta-analysis shows the derogation of elders everywhere and by perceivers of all ages ( North & Fiske, 2015 ). Across 23 countries (21,090 participants), elders are most derogated in Asian cultures (especially East Asia, compared with South Asia), compared to Western ones. In the West, elders are most derogated in non-Anglophone Europe, least derogated in Anglophone Europe and other Anglophone Western regions. Consistent with the resource-tension perspective, ageism seems to be a function of a nation's growing elder population, controlling for industrialization. Resource tensions matter because we are intimately interdependent across age categories.

To be sure, North and I address only anti-elder stereotypes here, saving anti-youth stereotypes for future work. When mentioned, children are universally viewed as high warmth, low competence. But young people are sometimes just moderate on both dimensions (in Canada, England, Kenya, New Zealand, Sweden; Durante et al., 2017 ), perhaps collapsing over polarized subtypes that combine protected children and contemptible youth. Several youth subtypes at least sometimes appear simply negative (Emos, Goths, Boy Racers, all low-low in New Zealand, as are teens in the US). In other places, young people are the high-high hope for the future (Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey) (see also Kervyn et al., 2015 US data). More systematic work remains to be done.

The takeaway for elder stereotypes is how prevalent prescriptive ageism appears to be, and how much it reflects resource tensions resulting from cross-age interdependence. But regions do vary, depending on aging populations that strain resources. Like sexism, ageism is a near-universal stereotype, with cultural variations.

Class Stereotypes

Social classes have predictable stereotypes that do not vary much by culture. As background, consider that a comprehensive map of stereotype content arrays each society's social groups in a warmth X competence space. Warmth (trustworthy, friendly) describes groups' stereotypic intents for cooperation. Competence (capable, agentic) describes their stereotypic ability to act on their intentions ( Fiske, 2015 ; Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, & Xu, 2002 ). Across dozens of societies, these two dimensions differentiate among social groups ( Cuddy et al., 2009 ; Durante et al., 2013 ; Durante et al., 2017 ): a country's own citizens and middle class are stereotyped as high on both, in contrast to the poorest people (refugees, undocumented immigrants, and homeless people), stereotyped as low on both dimensions. The Stereotype Content Model (SCM) innovation is the ambivalent combinations: Rich people for instance are stereotyped as competent but cold, and as noted, older people are stereotyped as warm but incompetent.

The same two social structural dimensions appear for class as for age and gender. Perceived warmth comes from interdependence: perceived cooperative or competitive and exploitative threat determine stereotypic high or low warmth ( Fiske et al., 2002 ; Kervyn, Fiske, & Yzerbyt, 2015 ). Middle-class and old people seem warm because they are cooperative, but homeless people and rich people take away resources from others, so they do not seem so warm. In impressions, warmth perceptions (trustworthy, moral) appear to be primary in judgment speed ( Willis & Todorov, 2006 ) and in accounting for variance ( Wojciszke, Bazinska, & Jaworski, 1998 ).

The other main dimension, stereotypic competence, follows from status. All societies rank their members ( Fiske, 2010 ), often by resources, such as income, wealth, education, job prestige, or titles. The status dimension confers competence on higher-class stereotypes and incompetence on lower-class ones ( Fiske, 2011 ). This pattern holds across cultures: Perceptions of the rich as cold but competent are pervasive, as are perceptions of the poor as warm but incompetent ( Durante, Tablante, & Fiske, 2017 ).

Why is this rich-versus-poor contrast so consistent? Logic parallel to pervasive patterns of sexism and ageism would suggest a role for prescriptive classism: The poor should know their warm but (in)competent place. Rich people have a stake in maintaining their advantage, so perhaps their rewarding compliance and punishing resistance would apply here, although the interdependence is not as intimate as for age and sex.

Conversely, feelings of justice may be served by granting competence to the rich but denying them warmth/honesty. Speculation aside, the poor but warm/honest stereotype and rich but cold/dishonest stereotype have been invoked in system justification ( Kay & Jost, 2003 ) and particularly in supporting societal inequality ( Durante et al., 2013 ).

Granted, some cultural variants occur in class stereotypes. More unequal societies display more ambivalence, as if they have more explaining to do: Rich and poor are more divided, but that inequality may seem more acceptable because it is not just about status. Some poor seem stereotypically deserving (older people, those with disabilities), and some seem not (immigrants, welfare recipients) ( Fiske et al., 2002 ). Likewise, some rich seem stereotypically deserving (doctors, professors), and some seem not (lawyers, CEOs) ( Fiske & Dupree, 2014 ).

More equal societies show less ambivalence, enfolding together the ingroup poor (welfare recipients), the middle class, and all citizens into the high-high (warm, competent) cluster and excluding as low-low only the outgroup poor (asylum seekers, undocumented immigrants). Everyone else is in the homogeneous ingroup social safety net, where competition is not competent ( Durante et al., 2013 ). The next section elaborates these points.

Summary of Gender, Age, and Class Stereotypes

Pervasive patterns of sexism, ageism, and classism invoke ambivalent stereotypes that tradeoff warmth and competence, warmth to the subordinated group and competence to the higher-status group. These consistent patterns apparently emerge across cultures, with some variations. For sexism and ageism, which involve interpersonal interdependence, the ambivalent stereotypes are prescriptive. For classism, the prescriptiveness evidence remains to be gathered, but societal stability may depend on the shared ambivalent stereotypes under inequality.

Cross-Cultural Contrasts: Race, Ethnicity, Religion

Unlike sex, age, and class, more socially constructed societal groups—such as race, ethnicity, and religion—are less likely to operate through prescriptive stereotypes that typify face-to-face interdependence. People's lives are more segregated by race, ethnicity, and religion than by gender and age. People have different ages and genders in their families more often than different race/ethnicities and religions. Because intimate interdependence occurs less often between races, ethnicities, and religions, people have less need for shared prescriptive stereotypes that control interdependence across status divides. Unlike distinct genders and ages, different ethnic groups do not have to cooperate. Intergroup patterns across race/ethnicity and religion are solving different cultural problems across different contexts, so cultural similarities should diminish. The next section explores preliminary patterns across cultures for race/ethnicity/religion generally and then illustrates with specific cases.

Ethnicity and Race in General

Across 38 countries and more than 4,000 respondents, Durante et al. (2017) mapped each country's own groups on stereotypic warmth and competence and assessed the degree of ambivalent stereotypes (mixed combinations). Most, or at least equal, numbers of groups land in the ambivalent clusters, compared with univalent ones. As noted, the warmth-competence tradeoff identifies stereotypically deserving poor (e.g., allegedly warm but incompetent disabled people and pitied ethnicities, such as Irish and Italians in the US, at some times; Bergsieker et al., 2012 ). And the tradeoff also differentiates them from the stereotypically undeserving poor (each nation's homeless, nomads, refugees, or undocumented migrants, which vary by country, but are seen as low on both dimensions; Mexican migrants in the US and Roma in Spain illustrate at this time). At the other extreme, the tradeoff identifies the deserving well off (usually the dominant ethnic group; Whites illustrate in the US and Spain), seen as high on both dimensions. And the tradeoff also differentiates them from the allegedly undeserving well off (usually outsider entrepreneurs; Asians illustrate in the US and Spain currently). Each country's specific history locates different ethnic groups in each stereotype quadrant (but see below for some sporadically similar patterns). Many racial, ethnic, and religious stereotypes are accidents of history.

As to what predicts ambivalence, as noted earlier ( Durante et al., 2013 ), income inequality (Gini coefficient) correlates with a country's use of ambivalent stereotypes, as if inequality requires more explanation ( Durante et al., 2017 , replicates this effect with an expanded dataset). Under inequality, deserving and undeserving rich and poor may make the system seem fairer (the US and Latin American countries illustrate this pattern). Under income equality, in contrast, most groups lodge within a more unified national identity, everyone sharing the social safety net, except for resident foreigners (Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries illustrate). Fewer ambivalent stereotypes thus reflect national equality.

Then, using the Global Peace Index, produced by the Institute for Economics and Peace, Durante et al. (2107) measured each nation's relative peace-conflict, discovering two ways to an unambivalent, unified national identity. First, peaceful, equal countries, such as Switzerland and Scandinavia, are unified by harmonious shared identities, favoring the in-group and excluding outsiders, such as refugees, nomads, and undocumented immigrants.

The other way to national unity is conflict (regardless of equality). In conflict-ridden war zones, such as the Middle East, groups band together against other groups for a united cause. In Pakistan, for instance, the in-group comprises Muslims in general and educated people, but Christians are foes. These stereotype patterns reflect conflict but enforce overall unity.

Countries intermediate on peace-conflict (regardless of equality) include the United States and Latin America, with our mix of indigenous people and long-term flows of immigrants, which together produce more ethnic diversity. Mixed ethnicities and backgrounds challenge intergroup relations in these regions. Intermediate peace-conflict requires a more complex story that includes ambivalence. Nevertheless, if external conflict arises, the country unifies, as during a world war or major terror attack.

In sum, the ambivalence-inequality correlation is linear: more inequality, more ambivalence. The ambivalence-peace/conflict relationship is curvilinear: both the extremes of peace and conflict minimize ambivalence, but the intermediate levels show ambivalence in stereotype content. Ethnic, race, and religious stereotypes depend on historical moments more than on long-term patterns of interdependence and status.

Case Studies of Religious Groups

Some religions appear commonly, which allows a descriptive comparison across cultures. The comparisons suggest that religions have contextually variable stereotypes, consistent with being arbitrary sets.

Generally, when salient in a country, Jewish people are stereotyped as low-warmth, high-competence (US over time; Bergsieker et al., 2012 ; also Chile, England, Jordan, Mexico, Spain in Durante et al., 2013 , 2017 ). Their stereotypic warmth is never high (low in Peru, Iraq; medium in Canada, Italy, Spain, French and Italian Switzerland). Stereotypic competence is low only in Iraq. Jews in diaspora have often filled roles as outsider entrepreneurs, and merchant classes' stereotypes generically land in this competent-but-cold quadrant. (Their self-rating in Israel is high-high.)

National politics drive stereotypes of Muslims as admired high-high groups, in places where they form the societal reference group (Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Malaysia, Pakistan, Turkey). Elsewhere, at least some Muslims are apparent adversaries, viewed as either low in both warmth and competence (Denmark, Greece, Kenya, Spain, German-Switzerland) or low in warmth and moderate in competence (Australia, Belgium, Canada, England, India, New Zealand, French-Switzerland, US). Muslims are moderate on both dimensions in only four samples (Italy, Northern Ireland, Sweden, Uganda). Two nations explicitly sub-group them by Sunni/Shia (Afghanistan, Iran). Social context clearly drives Muslim stereotypes.

As with the two previous religions, when they are a dominant religious ingroup, Christians are stereotyped as high on both dimensions (Australia, Canada, England, Greece, Kenya, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Spain, German Switzerland, Uganda, US, and unaccountably, Iraq). But Christians stereotypically appear more moderate in Egypt, India, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, and (for other historic reasons) Bolivia, all places where they are less numerically dominant. Subgroups (Catholics, Protestants) usually appear where the generic group does.

Case Studies of Races

Besides Jews, another group filling an outsider entrepreneurial role in diaspora, Asians (when mentioned, also specific Asian nations when mentioned) are generally stereotyped as low-warmth, high-competence (US over time, Bergsieker et al., 2012 ; Kervyn et al., 2015 ; Canada, England, Jordan, Spain). In a few places, they appear neutral on both dimensions (perhaps due to subtyping in Australia and New Zealand, which have large Asian populations, though not in Northern Ireland). Asians' own self-ratings are neutral, consistent with cultural modesty norms. Besides the outsider-entrepreneur role driving stereotype content, self-ratings also respond to cultural context.

Black people generically appear moderate on both dimensions (Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Mexico, Portugal, Northern Ireland, Spain, German Switzerland, US), but in the US at least this conceals divergent subtypes of poor Blacks (low-low) versus Black professionals (high-high; Fiske et al., 2009 ). South Africa differentiates Africans (high-high) from Black foreigners (low-low). These seem likely to be culture-specific creations as well, with the patterns of subgroups distinctive to each country.

Indigenous people are stereotyped as low low (Canada, Australia) or low on competence but moderate warmth (Peru) or high warmth (Mexico). Neutral ratings in the US ( Fiske et al., 2002 ) may conceal divergent subtypes ( Burkley et al., 2016 ) that reflect social roles.

Clearly a case of culture-specific construction, Mestizos range from admired reference group (Bolivia) to neutral (Peru) to abhorrent low low (Fascist Italy; Durante et al., 2010 ).

When the dominant racial group (Australia, Canada, England, Finland, Northern Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italian Switzerland, US), or a historically powerful one (Bolivia, Kenya), Whites appear high on both dimensions.

Conclusion about Race, Ethnicity, and Religion Stereotypes

Why do different races, ethnicities, and religions end up with differing stereotypes? Historical accidents by national circumstances and immigration serendipity seem to explain the cultural variability of these stereotypes. But of course this is speculation.

A final example illustrates apparently arbitrary social construction of commonly stereotyped groups: rural and urban dwellers often appear respectively as warm but incompetent versus cold but competent ( LeVine & Campbell, 1972 ). Farmers are warmer in Costa Rica, Greece, Iran; city-dwellers are more competent in Bolivia, England, Egypt, Iran, and Lebanon.

What Did We Learn from Cultural Comparisons?

Some stereotype content is pervasive across cultures, with variations in intensity but not patterns: Women and older people who comply with prescriptive stereotypes are cherished as warm but incompetent; those who resist are resented as competent but cold. This helps solve the interpersonal dilemma of intimate interdependence coupled with asymmetrical societal dominance. In a more societal interdependence, lower and higher social classes might have parallel stereotypes of being deserving or not, depending on their abiding by class prescriptions. Stereotype content across cultures suggests these gender, age, and class stereotypes plausibly serve a common adaptation to disparities in societal rank, when coupled with some degree of interdependence.

Specific religious and racial/ethnic groups have stereotypes that vary more dramatically by culture, suggesting the importance of historical and current cultural context to these groups, who are less interdependent. Their stereotypes are less prescriptive.

Overall, however, cultures vary in their use of ambivalent stereotypes, depending on their inequality (more ambivalent) and extremes of peace and conflict (more unity, less ambivalence). More unequal and the most intermediately conflictual societies, such as the US and many Latin American countries, have more explaining to do, and their intergroup relations are complicated, as in the US ethnic heterogeneity. Across cultures, however, gender, age, and perhaps social class display shared prescriptive stereotypes that solve common human dilemmas. If we understand the culturally shared and distinctive forms of stereotypes, perhaps we can change them.

By invitation for Perspectives on Psychological Science. Discourse also presented to Universidad de Granada at the ceremony of Doctora Honoris Causa, 2017.

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