Contesting category salience: A study of the perceptions of the sides involved in the Persian Gulf War

Previous studies of political rhetoric in general, and the rhetoric surrounding the Gulf war in particular, have suggested that social categories are not defined by perceptual features of context, but rather rhetorically constructed and contested for the purposes of mass mobilisation. Thus western leaders portrayed the conflict as ‘Civilisation against Saddam Hussein’ in order to maximise the pro-war constituency, while leaders of the western anti-war movements portrayed it in terms of ‘Western leaders against ordinary (Iraqi) people’ in order to minimise the pro-war constituency. However these studies focus exclusively on leaders and fail to show whether ordinary people differ in their construction of social categories and whether those supporting a given stance share the category constructions of leaders. This study of 229 schoolchildren in Britain and Spain was undertaken in the course of the Gulf War. Subjects were given a series of images, which they could choose to describe the nature of the war, and another series from which they could choose images to symbolise the sides involved in the war. Factor correspondence analyses of these two measures showed, firstly, that those subjects who either supported or opposed the official war policy did indeed construe the categories involved in the war in different ways. Secondly, their constructions matched those of the pro- and anti-war leaders. Thirdly, while the constructions of British and Spanish subjects who shared a similar stance (pro- or anti-war) were broadly similar, there were nevertheless differences which suggest that category construction is mediated by culturally (rather than intrapsychically) available resources. In conclusion, the importance of acknowledging that people's definition of categories may differ even in the same context, and the need to add a rhetorical dimension to the understanding of salience is stressed.