Adversaries in the Cold War held mirror-image perceptions of each other

Evidence

In 1961, Urie Bronfenbrenner reported how he had been struck, during a visit to the Soviet Union, by the extent to which American and Russian citizens saw the world in opposite ways. Americans generally believed that the Russians were the aggressors on the world scene, that the Soviet government exploited and deluded the Russian people, that the Soviets could not be trusted, and so on. Bronfenbrenner said that the Russians he met felt the same way about the United States government. Together the two sets of perceptions formed a mirror image—probably distorted and undoubtedly dangerous. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 1573

Categorization

• SHARE: Worth sending to anyone in political psychology — Bronfenbrenner’s 1961 mirror-image finding is a classic worth revisiting.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 1573
• XREF: connects to: Postwar France saw America and the Soviet Union as rival visions of the future — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 546