Psychological culture

Research output: Contribution to Book/Report typesChapterpeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

“National character,” “modal personality,” “collective unconscious,” “ethnic mentality,” and “cultural identity” are notions designed to capture psychological traits that distinguish one social group from another. Attempts to isolate such hypothetical qualities are no different in principle from efforts to describe religious, legal, or other social patterns found among people who have lived together for a length of time, except that psychological constructs tend to focus on subjective characteristics and are somewhat harder to identify. 1 The link between culture and psychology first came under close scrutiny in the nineteenth century German linguists H. Steinthal and M. Lazarus and psychologist Wilhelm Wundt made an elaborate case for Folkpsychologie, a discipline that examined the interfaces between folklore, language, social institutions, and psychological traits. In this century, around World War II, much attention was given to the “modal personality” and “national character” that purported to describe the ways in which other people, often belonging to enemy nations, raised their children and behaved in their daily life. Margaret Mead, Clyde Kluckhohn, Geoffrey Gorer, Henry Dicks, and other social scientists developed a concept of the Russian national character that sought to explain the contradictions in the overt behavior of America’s arch-enemy in psychological terms. 2 In more recent decades, scholars began to pay closer attention to the role of culture and psychology in nation-building. As economic differences between nations level off, less tangible cultural characteristics-emotional, cognitive, aesthetic, axiological-have come to the fore as key factors determining national peculiarities. Ernest Gellner put it most provocatively when he said that cultures produced nations, not vice versa.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationRussian Culture at the Crossroads
Subtitle of host publicationParadoxes of Postcommunist Consciousness
PublisherTaylor and Francis
Pages99-154
Number of pages56
ISBN (Electronic)9780429966057
ISBN (Print)9780813327143
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Jan 2018
Externally publishedYes

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Psychological culture'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this