Biases in the Perception and Cognition of the Actions of Enemies

Several studies have demonstrated that once people perceive an individual or group as hostile or threatening, i.e., as an “enemy,” biases enter their processing of information in regard to the actions of that individual or group. These biases may affect any phase of social information processing, including attention, encoding, memory, assessment of credibility, evaluation of hostility, expectation of future action, and attribution. In this paper, we use data from published reports as well as previously unpublished studies to demonstrate that such biases affect how individual citizens of the United States and the U.S. media process information regarding the actions of the Soviet Union. This bias reinforces and exaggerates the U.S. enemy image of the Soviet Union.