Ethnic Stereotypes and Personality Traits in Multinational University Students

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to consider personality traits as the factors of social perception determining the characteristics of ethnic stereotypes and prejudices in multinational university students. Based on an analysis of the published data we suppose that such personality traits as self-confidence and aggression are connected with the peculiarities of the social perception in general and ethnic perceptions in particular. A total of 95 respondents took part in the research, including 36 young men and 59 young women. All the respondents were the first, second and third year Russian students of various departments of the multinational university (PFUR). The age of the respondents is from 18 to 21 years, the average age is 19 years. The self-confidence and aggression levels were measured by the Questionnaires developed by A. Krupnov (Krupnov, 2008) in accordance with the System-Functional Model. The features of the ethnic stereotypes of Russian students were measured by the technique of the Semantic Differential (Osgood, Suci, Tannenbaum, 1957). We used a modified version of the semantic differential called “Personal Differential” (Fetiskin, Kozlov, Manuilov, 2002). The Mann–Whitney U-test and regression analysis were used for statistical analysis. Summing up the results of the study, it can be concluded that the characteristics of the ethnic stereotypes and prejudices of the Russian students are more associated with the degree of self-confidence they have, rather than aggressiveness. DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2014.v4n2p72