A schema is a cognitive structure that relies on specific metaphors, analogies, symbols,
and narratives of specific events and general historical developments to make sense of
the world.
A schema performs a number of cognitive functions, including going beyond
the information available to fill in missing elements and thus to form a coherent account.
Schemas make sense of attitudes so that they fit together. Schemas do not necessarily
imply bias: on the contrary, they can be based on a coherent worldview based on a
reasonable interpretation of available facts. When schemas are well-defined and
entrenched, however, they can become hardened. As such, they create enduring distrust
or become a systematic bias or prejudice that colors or systematically filters out positive
or negative information. John Bowen identifies, in chapter 8, different sorts of schemas
operating in France and Indonesia, which vary in their degree of hardness.
Figure 1, which we discuss in section 3 of this chapter, illustrates the relationships
we envisage among opinion, distrust, and bias. Systematic bias leads individuals or
groups to expect the United States to act perniciously and to interpret the behavior of the
U.S. government or of Americans in light of that expectation. But it would be a mistake
to infer that unfavorable attitudes about the United States, its policies, Americans and the
American way of life are necessarily indicators of a systematic bias or prejudice against
the United States that slants all new information in only one, negative direction.
In our conceptualization, the emotional component of anti-Americanism chiefly
affects the intensity with which negative assessments are held, and may therefore affect
behavior. In Figure 2, discussed in Part 3 of this chapter, the horizontal dimension is
emotional: it reflects the degree of fear of the United States felt by a subject. However,
our data in general do not enable us to distinguish the effect of emotion on negative
assessments of the United States. We focus on the politics of anti-Americanism rather
than seeking empirically to disentangle its socio-psychological components.
From a normative standpoint, assessments of the United States can serve as
identity markers, or as ways to regulate behavior. As identity markers, they are “double-
edged” in that they “bind people to each other and at the same time turn people so bound
against others.”
Identities are a type of social norm that constitute the very actors whose
5
Fiske and Taylor 1991, 98. Larson 1985, 50-57. Kunda 1999.
6
Vertzberger 1990: 157.
7
Elias 1996, 160 quoted in Seabrooke 2006, 10.
3
3
Convention