How amazing it is to behold the ways in which otherwise intelligent and creative people can be extraordinarily resistant to recognizing scientific advances at the threshold. Western Union, the greatest international communication system of the world, is said to have generated an internal memo in 1876, with this message: “This telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.”

While many of these presumed verities are part of our scientific folklore, there is apparently no doubt that Lord Kelvin, an important contributor to the principle of the conservation of energy, and the president of the Royal Society in London, said in 1895, “Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible” (Lindley, 2003).

Sometimes our vision of the future requires not a leap of faith but a scientific jump-start. Grass-roots visionaries are sometimes both imaginatively bolder and less delayed by establishmentarian constraints. Recent advances, for example, in childbirth practices involving less use of maternal anesthesia, the redesign of birthing areas in maternity hospitals, and the acceptance of nurse-practitioner midwives, have resulted largely from pressures brought by women resisting the old ways.

If the development and widespread use of the telephone, or of aircraft, or of computers had been delayed for a year or two, due to the short-sightedness of those in positions required to promote their development, perhaps little would have been lost in the total picture of things, especially in the long run.

In Erving Goffman's analysis of the encounter, rituals are seen as only one element revolving around stereotypical sequences of talk and other gestures that sustain the smooth flow of the interaction. Goffman's great insight was the recognition that rituals penetrate and punctuate just about every aspect of face-to-face interaction. Rituals open and close the encounter. They keep the interaction on track and on topic. They help focus individuals' attention. They key and re-key the frame. They arouse emotions if directed at a totem marking group membership, and they repair breaches. Thus, for Goffman, encounters cannot be opened, closed, and sustained without the constant flow of ritual sequences of talk and body gesturing. Formal rituals and ceremonies, such as those practiced in collective worship in church or in a graduation ceremony, are only a special case of a much more pervasive phenomenon: interaction ritual. Every interaction at each moment, from its beginning to its end, and even thereafter in people's retrospective and introspective thoughts about an interaction, involve ritual dynamics that influence the flow of emotions.

These insights came to Goffman from the work of Émile Durkheim (1912/1965) coupled with his ethnographic observations of people in face-to-face interaction. Interaction ritual theory as developed by Randall Collins (Collins, 1975, 2004) over the last 30 years takes the basic insights of Goffman and Durkheim, but transforms them into a somewhat different view of rituals.

Over the past 50 years, U.S. policies for low-income families with children have evolved and changed dramatically. Although poverty rates among families with children were higher in the 1950s than they have been since, policymakers gave relatively little attention to problems associated with child poverty until the War on Poverty began in the 1960s. Developmental psychologists participated in the war on poverty largely by creating, testing, and evaluating intervention programs for children, including Head Start, Follow Through, and many others. Economic interventions, subsumed in the label “welfare policy,” that included cash assistance, medical care, and employment services for low-income families were, however, primarily the province of labor economists. Scholars and policy researchers designed, administered, and evaluated various policies, using sophisticated methods and theoretical models, from the 1960s onward, but there was little communication between economists and developmental psychologists.

In the late 1980s and the 1990s, these two research communities began to converge. Specialists in child development joined interdisciplinary teams to study the impacts of welfare and employment policies on children and families. Psychologists and sociologists spawned a series of empirical investigations, based in sophisticated theory, of the effects of poverty, family income, and income loss on the development of children and adolescents (e.g., Conger & Elder, 1994; Elder & Caspi, 1987; McLoyd, 1990, 1997, 1998). The result is a body of research, drawing on different methods and theoretical traditions, that not only informs policy, but also makes a contribution to developmental science.

Research and policy on child care have developed along parallel tracks. Their influence on each other has been modest, despite the shared historical context in which each has evolved. This stands in stark contrast to Head Start (Zigler & Valentine, 1979; Zigler & Muenchow, 1992), a product of the 1960s and the War on Poverty, in which policymakers engaged researchers in a variety of roles, from designers to evaluators. Today, these roles have converged into what White and Phillips characterize as “a virtual industry of Head Start research,” an industry that continues to be closely aligned with the policy community surrounding the program (2001, p. 83). The origins of modern-day child-care policy and research can also be traced back to the mid-1960s, when maternal employment and child-care usage began their steep upward trajectories. Why have research and policy on child care remained separate endeavors? Why has the relation between them evolved so differently from that between research and policy on Head Start? Can we hope for greater convergence in the years ahead?

To explore these questions about the disconnect between research and policy on child care, we begin by acknowledging the differing ways in which scientists and politicians think about child care. We then offer brief histories of child-care policy and research, which illustrate the mismatch between the central concerns and incentives guiding these two “distinct cultures,” described by Shonkoff (2000). Next, we apply the roles for developmentalists outlined by White and Phillips (2001) for Head Start to child care.

Introduction

Entering Harvard as an undergraduate in 1946, Sheldon (Shep) White intended to study psychology. With strong prior interests in both literature and politics, scientific psychology seemed a reasonable extension of those interests, perhaps a way of being rigorously scientific about human behavior and experience. However, he was dropped into the middle of the fray of debate about what constitutes a properly scientific psychology (White, 2001).

It felt like being in a broken home, with White shuttling back and forth between two parents. On one side were the experimental psychologists in the basement of Memorial Hall, Edwin G. Boring, S. S. Stevens, and by 1948, B. F. Skinner. He took Psychology 1 with Boring, focusing on experimental studies of sensation, perception, and reaction time. “It was scientifically virtuous but dull as dishwater” (White, 2001, p. 2). On the other side was the newly formed Department of Social Relations, with personality and social psychologists, sociologists, and cultural anthropologists (Allport, Murray, Parsons, Kluckhohn), with the personality and social psychologists still located in Emerson Hall. He took Social Relations 1a with Allport, which had some colorful readings and lectures, but wondered “what did it all mean programmatically or scientifically?” (White, 2001, p. 2). Neither group seemed to have an adequate account of what it and the other group of psychologists were doing.

White attended graduate school at Iowa, a leading department of experimental psychology dominated by Hull–Spence theory. He experienced this as an improvement and had a “marvelous time” there.

This chapter reviews findings of studies that investigated views of Israeli Jews about Arabs. This line of research emerged in the late 1960s and still continues. Using different samples and research methods, researchers investigated the psychological repertoire prevalent among Israeli Jews concerning Arabs, in general and various specific Arab subgroups, as a function of different variables such as age, ethnic origin, gender, or political orientation. Some of these studies were done with a limited number of respondents, drawn from specific groups (e.g., university students or high school students), and some were done with the national sample of Jewish adults or with a national sample of a particular social sector (e.g., high school students). The studies also differ with regard to the psychological intergroup repertoire investigated: some examined stereotypes; others were interested in social distance (i.e., attitudes), emotions (e.g., hatred), or behavioral intentions; and a number of studies investigated several of these variables simultaneously. Finally, the studies were done at different times and thus reflect the nature of Arab-Jewish relations in particular periods.

A discussion of the research methods employed in the studies about intergroup relations is beyond the scope of the present book. We only note that the most frequently used method to examine stereotypes in the reviewed studies is by presenting a list of characteristics, usually traits, to the respondents, asking them to evaluate the extent to which they characterize a given group.

Ethnic and political conflicts have been part of human experience throughout history. The persistence of conflicts in contemporary times is evident in examples such as Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sri Lanka, Basque Provinces, Chechnya, Rwanda, South Africa, Kashmir, and the Middle East. In these places groups clash and resort to violent means, including terrorism, atrocities, wars, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, that bring widespread suffering to the civilian population. In these conflicts psychological components play an important role. Group members act on the basis of the knowledge, images, attitudes, feelings, and emotions that they hold about the conflict; about their own past, present, and future as a group; and about the rival group. Although we do think that conflicts are about disagreements and contradictions with regard to real issues such as territories, self-determination, resources, or trade, we also believe that psychological determinants contribute greatly to their evolvement, maintenance, and management.

In discussing the psychological foundations of conflicts, the representation of the rival groups is of special importance, since it plays a determinative role in the intergroup relations. This representation, which includes cognitive-affective elements, determines the level of animosity, hostility, and mistrust between the groups that eventually may lead to violent acts that continue to reinforce the representation. In S. T. Fiske's words, “thinking is for doing” (1992, p. 877); we suggest that feeling as well as thinking about the other is for doing.

This book has demonstrated the unequivocal and essential influence of the context of intergroup relations on the psychological intergroup repertoire that a society in conflict holds about its rival group. Indeed, the main thesis of the book is that the intractable conflict between Israelis and Arabs has strongly marked the way Jews perceive and relate to Arabs. This happened because of the very powerfully negative experiences that characterize intractable conflict. As a result, the societies involved in the intractable conflict – in our case, the Israeli Jews – blame the other side for the outbreak of the conflict, for its continuance, and for the violence. They do so by attributing very negative dispositions to the other side(s), even using coarsely delegitimizing labels and concepts.

This book focused on the Jewish side, but there is firm evidence for suggesting that representations of Arabs by Israeli Jews are a mirror image of those held by Arabs to represent Israeli Jews (see, e.g., Abdolrazeq, 2002; Bar-Tal, 1988; Bar-Tal & Oren, 2003; Heradstveit, 1981; Kelman, 1999a). Moreover, the case of the Israeli Jews is assumed to be representative of a rival in societies engaged in intractable conflict. Therefore, our main proposition is as follows. Societies that are engaged in intractable conflict may differ in their specific content of negative stereotypes and/or emotions they experience toward the rival. However, the shared negative psychological intergroup repertoire about their rival(s) follows a similar developmental trajectory, is extensively disseminated, and is widely used by society members.

The variety of studies presented in Chapter 7 and the consistent findings obtained in them demonstrate that the representation of Arabs in the Jewish Israeli society attracted the interest of many researchers. However, most of the studies concentrated on the content of stereotypes, attitudes, and behavioral intentions expressed by adolescents or adults. The results of these studies, as well as the examination of the representation of Arabs in political discourse, media, literature, art, and school books (see Chapters 4–6), indicate that the negative representation of Arabs has a long-standing history, is deeply embedded, and is widely spread in the Israeli culture, reflecting the conflict between the two nations.

In view of these findings, a question as to how this shared psychological intergroup repertoire about Arabs evolves is inevitable. In order to answer this question, we conducted a decade-long, systematic, and comprehensive research project that aimed to shed light on the acquisition and development of the mental representations of the parties engulfed in the active and violent conflict, that is, the self-reference group (Jews, Israelis) and that of the rival group (Arabs). Specifically, some of the studies carried out in our laboratory aimed to describe or, as termed by Hirschfeld (1996), to document empirically the process of acquisition and development of the multifaceted mental representations of Jews and Arabs held by Jewish children, adolescents, and young adults in Israel. Other studies were theory-based, aiming to examine specific developmental predictions.

In this chapter we present the development of an assessment methodology for the appraisal of implicit social representations based on human figure drawings (HFD) and the findings of studies in which it was utilized. The definition of “implicit social representation” includes implicit attitudes and stereotypes that according to Dovidio et al. (2001) refer to “evaluations and beliefs that are automatically activated by the mere presence (actual or symbolical) of the attitude object. They commonly function on the unconscious level” (p. 176). These implicit stereotypes and attitudes are of interest because they develop “with repeated pairings, either through direct experience or social learning of the association, between the category or object and evaluative and semantic characteristics” (Dovidio et al., 2001, p. 176), and, as such, their developmental trajectory can be compared with that of the explicitly expressed stereotypes and prejudice described in the previous chapters. Also, the comparison of implicit and explicit representations may be performed in the same study. For instance, HFDs may be accompanied by explicit measures such as a structured interview (for younger children) or by a questionnaire (for older children). Indeed, in the studies we conducted the HFDs were accompanied by a short version of an open-ended interview or questionnaire similar to those we used before (see Chapters 9, 10).

INTERGROUP BEHAVIOR

The study of the psychological basis of intergroup relations is one of the major endeavors in social psychology (see, e.g., Brewer & Brown, 1998; Brown & Gaertner, 2001; Sedikides et al., 1998; Stephan & Stephan, 1996a). This interest is not surprising in view of the fact that most social life takes place within groups. Individuals are born into a group or organize themselves into groups, and as a result most of their behavior is performed within a group framework. Also, as a consequence of being part of a group, people develop their social identity as group members, and much of their thinking, feeling, and acting is carried out in the framework of knowledge about this identity. Because group membership, as reflected in a person's social identity, is one of the most salient and important human characteristics, individuals not only consider themselves as group members but also perceive and treat others according to their group membership.

The categorization of self as a group member and others in terms of group membership is a pervasive and central human cognitive process that enables the organization of the complex social world into a meaningful structure (Tajfel, 1969, 1981b). In this process, individuals aggregate people who share particular properties into one category and view them as a separate entity. There are numerous ways to classify people into social categories because humans have many different characteristics.

The Israeli perception of the Israeli-Arab conflict that we described in the previous chapter has served as a major foundation for the evolvement of the Israeli Jewish negative psychological intergroup repertoire about Arabs. In line with the model presented in Figure, we turn in the next three chapters to the presentation of this repertoire in the societal, political, educational, and cultural channels of Jewish Israeli society.

We believe that the formal societal institutions and channels of communication transmit and disseminate the psychological intergroup repertoire (mostly beliefs but also attitudes and emotions) and at the same time reflect the repertoire as held by society members. The institutions and communication channels of a society not only transmit and disseminate beliefs, but they also strengthen the confidence in them and maintain them. They present the beliefs that are shared by society members and also introduce new beliefs, which may become established and shared in the future (Bar-Tal, 2000a). In the latter case the lines of communication fulfill the role of “innovator” by exposing society members to new ideas. However, new beliefs can also originate among society members spread through informal channels of interpersonal communication, and only later appear in the formal societal channels and institutions, in which case they serve as “reflectors” of the prevailing shared beliefs.

Our analysis of Arab representation in the communication channels of Jewish Israeli society begins with a description of public discourse about Arabs, which takes place mostly through the mass media.