ATTITUDES OF STUDENTS TOWARD THE JAPANESE.

The reasoning processes of an individual may often be modified by under- lying viewpoints which may or may not agree with the opinions he expresses overtly. These distortions of reasoning may be used as an index of the underlying opinions of respondents. The evidence for the validity of this procedure has been set forth in preceding articles published elsewhere; this study is an attempt to apply the method to determine how a particular group of students feel about certain Japanese characteristics. The four issues studied were assimilability of the Japanese into American society, eye inferiority of the Japanese, trustworthiness of the Japanese, and Japanese cruelty. Our study seems to warrant the following conclusions: 1. Our respondents show but a slight tendency to reject the statement that the Japanese are not assimilable into American society and, at the same time, manifest no confusion of thinking on this issue. 2. Our respondents overtly express a disbelief that the eyes of the Japanese are inferior to those of other races and show that they are not emotionally prejudiced about this issue. 3. The students who took this test show considerable distortion in their thinking about the untrustworthiness of the Japanese. Whereas in a control syllogism, where the issues were altogether unemotional, they showed considerable preference for a statement which was equivalent to the proposition that "None of the Japanese are trustworthy"; in a syllogism which openly expressed this opinion they tended to reject it in favor of the more tempered opinion that "Some of the Japanese are not trustworthy." 4. Our students tend to avoid a direct judgment about the cruelty of the Japanese. In a control syllogism they favored a conclusion which would be equivalent to saying that "80 per cent of the Japanese are cruel"; whereas in the syllogism which dealt directly with the issue of Japanese cruelty they swung toward the conclusion that "No logical conclusion can be drawn from the given statements." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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