bq. The Jews are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality…But they are able people.
The “latest revelation”:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/11/us/politics/11nixon.html?_r=1 from the Nixon tapes hardly tells us something we didn’t already know about Richard Nixon. But I was struck by how well Nixon’s view of Jews fits with psychological research on stereotypes.
In particular, the work of Susan Fiske and colleagues suggests that there are two basic dimensions to stereotype content (see this “earlier post”:https://themonkeycage.org/2009/08/two_perspectives_on_the_obama.html). The first is warmth, which captures the intentions of a group. How friendly, hostile, etc. are they? The second is competence, which captures the abilities of a group. How smart, hardworking, lazy, etc. are they?
In “this article”:http://www.nd.edu/~wcarbona/Fiske-et-al-2002.pdf (pdf), Fiske, Amy Cuddy, Peter Glick, and Jun Xu asked respondents a battery of items about various groups, and then plotted the average evaluations of each group on these two dimensions. Here is the graph from my earlier post, which is similar to ones in the article:
Jews are on the righthand side. They are stereotyped as “competent” but not as particularly “warm.” So Nixon’s view lines up with this finding nicely. Perhaps the only difference is that his description of Jews as “very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious” sounds like he sees them as even less warm than the Fiske et al. sample.