Mentality: this is in simple words. What is mentality in simple words? What is the difference between mentality and mentality?

How to look like you belong abroad? Why do people belonging to the same large group (professional or national, for example) have similar behavioral traits? This becomes easier to understand by answering the question of what mentality is.

In simple words, mentality is a special way of perceiving the world that is characteristic of certain groups and distinguishes them from other groups. History, cultural studies, sociology, philosophy, political science and psychology became interested in the concept.

Terms

The meaning of the word “mentality” goes back to the Latin “mens”, which means “spirit”. Mentality is the spirit of a people or group. It reflects the characteristics of a particular group in the sphere of intelligence, feelings, culture, and values.

In Europe, the word “mentality” began its history with the concept “mentality”, which was used with a pejorative connotation and meant something opposed to culture. If the aristocrats had culture, then the common man had mentality.

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, in his work “Primitive Thought,” devoted to the study of collective ideas among primitive people, uses the word “mentality” to denote their mentality. In the twentieth century, there was a shift in emphasis on human privacy.

Researchers began studying the inner world of people, which led to the need to use the words “mentality” and “mentality,” indicating stable structures in the psychology of people of a particular culture. In this understanding, mentality is a sum of attitudes, an expression of collective psychology.

The work of scientists has made it possible to more accurately formulate the definition of the concept. Mentality is unconscious attitudes, structures of consciousness, including ideas about both the world, society, and the person in them, inherent in a social group. The content of mentality, according to Dinzelbacher:

Fears and hopes.
Aesthetic and ethical ideas.
Religiosity and cosmology.
Forms of communication.

Mentality has a great influence on the hierarchy of values and stereotypes. It brings together representatives of the same group. In foreign literature, the concept of “national mentality” corresponds to the term “cultural identity”.

In the structure of mentality, the national idea and the national prototype (positive hero) are especially prominent. Due to the fact that the national mentality reflects the goals, values, norms of behavior, interests, ideals and other characteristics of different peoples, familiarity with it is necessary for productive communication with representatives of other nationalities.

Special Features

Three nations - three styles

Madariaga, a politician, historian and psychologist, tried to outline the attitude to the life of three nations (the British, the French and the Spaniards). Based on his materials, the British mentality can be expressed in the formula “fair play”. The essence of the phrase lies in the action as such, the adaptability of what is included in the game to its conditions.

Pavlovskaya, considering the mentality of the British, emphasizes self-irony and self-respect. You can also highlight:

The special nature of raising children, full of strictness and rules, which leads to unpretentiousness.
The English are not afraid to lose; a challenge, a battle (mostly even just with their weaknesses or life circumstances) is more important to them than winning.
Restraint, the desire to “save face.”

The French mentality is honored with the expression “le droit” (“the law”). Madariaga gives the following analogies: idea, decision through reflection. First the French build the system, and then act within it. The motto of this style is “infallible intellect.” Distinctive features:

Wit, eloquence (sensitivity to the aesthetic aspect of communication is manifested; the French make a choice in favor of intellectual games rather than pouring out their souls in conversation).
Non-categorical and lack of conflict (sharp meanings are camouflaged by allusion).
Taboo personal topics.
Tight control of emotions.

Madariaga associated the mentality of the Spaniards with the concept of “el honor” (“honor”). Noble passion is a reflection of the Spanish mentality: only a noble person, having rejected all social laws and norms, can do the truly right thing, but in his own way. Traits that are clearly visible among the Spaniards:

Individualism.
Spirituality and emotionality.
The concept of honor.
Pride, patriotism.
Openness.
Lack of concern for time and inclination to make plans.

People from everywhere

Energetic, adventurous, disruptive... robbers? The first Americans are spoken of differently: the rabble that was thrown overboard from Europe, or the brave souls who built a new world?

The American mentality is largely based on confrontation with Europe. The American mentality is a rebellious spirit, simplicity, rejection of the past in favor of the future. Other distinctive features:

Optimism.
Setting up for success and the associated great attention to work.
Commitment to equality.
The cult of strength and youth.
Attention to correct wording, use of neutral phrases and words.
Law-abidingness and everyone's contribution to maintaining order.
Striving for comfort.

Theater

Leonardo da Vinci, Rossi, Petrarch, Dante are the great Italians of the past, their homeland is still one of the centers of world art. What does the Italian mentality correspond to?

Theatricality, serious and natural adherence to the role.
Structured and measured life.
The desire to make a good impression, to show confidence and determination.
The desire to be “on top.”
The ability to enjoy life.
Immoralism.

The Italian mentality is the quintessential ability to play one's role to perfection in order to turn it into reality. At least this is how Pavlovskaya characterizes him, citing as an example many sketches in which Italians appear as heroes of either comedies or tragicomedies.

Like a clock

Perhaps no one except the Germans is distinguished by such a commitment to rules, order, and organization. The extreme desire to organize everything is manifested, for example, in the voluminous works that philosophers, historians and other scientists in Germany gave and are giving to the world. Other characteristic features:

Dimension and orderliness.
Amazing law-abidingness, sometimes contrary to common sense.
Beauty and grace give way to purity and logic.
Seriousness.
Commitment to a healthy lifestyle.
Simplicity in relation to the physiological needs of the body, even love affairs are somewhat mechanized.

East

The mentality of the Japanese and Chinese is characterized by mystery and understatement. The Japanese have recently attracted the attention of many scientists trying to understand what is the secret of the rapid progress of this country. Key Features:

Restraint and slowness.
Peacefulness and politeness.
Responsibility and hard work.
Dedication.
Formalization of relations.
Traditionalism, attachment to hierarchical structures.
What is quasi-said and unsaid has no less weight than what is spoken.
Prevalence of group interests over individual interests, sacrifice, long-suffering.

The Chinese mentality includes the idea of the inseparability of the individual from society, a tendency to view people through large groups. Their mentality is very closely related to culture, namely Confucianism. Peculiarities:

Peacefulness, goodwill, but also an attitude towards one’s nation as higher than others.
Respect for elders, collectivism.
Modesty, increased suggestibility.
Commitment to traditions and norms.
Persistence.

Endless space

The Russian mentality is usually associated with the breadth of soul, spirituality, and the desire for community, just like the mentality of Ukrainians and Belarusians. However, traditional Russian values turned out to be not so widespread.

A 2008 study showed that, compared to Europeans, the average Russian is striving for quite earthly things - wealth and power, perhaps this is a legacy of the USSR, which was “hungry” for predatory capitalism. Thus, the mentality of Russians is associated with great egoism; Russians have lost a little in transpersonal values (caring for others and the environment, equality, tolerance).

Zakarovsky paints a somewhat different picture of the mental field of the Russian person. He identifies the following striking features of thinking and behavior:

Expressed responsibility and conscientiousness towards the group.
The need to build personal relationships in business interactions for their successful development.
The inseparability of the idea of oneself and the idea of the group (identification of the individual with society serves as the basis of patriotic sentiments, but also leads to a decline in activity and independence).

Mentality is changeable, and what was the rule a hundred years ago is now an atavism, moreover, it may be characteristic of a historical period (for example, the Soviet mentality), an era to a greater extent than the people themselves. Yurevich cites as an example nihilism and dreaminess about the future - those traits that, according to Berdyaev, were characteristic of Russians at the beginning of the 20th century, when the revolutionary dawn flared up. It was these features that included the mentality of the French during the revolution in France.

The mentality that invisibly influences us is an intangible reflection of tradition. Almost any group has its own special mentality, which differs from others in key points (geography, climate, history, economics, socio-political situation). Without taking it into account, it is impossible to establish a productive dialogue between peoples, and in the conditions of globalization, remaining mute, as well as speaking at random, is extremely unprofitable. Author: Ekaterina Volkova

The content of the article

MENTALITY (MENTALITY)–(lat. mens, mentis – mind, thinking, prudence, way of thinking, mental disposition) - a set of socio-psychological attitudes, automatisms and habits of consciousness that form ways of seeing the world and representing people belonging to a particular socio-cultural community. Like any social phenomenon, mentalities are historically changeable, but changes in them occur very slowly.

A social psychologist sees in mentalities (mentality) interconnected psychological reactions, ideas and qualities that carry the remnants of the experience of previous generations, “self-understanding of groups” (J. Mitke) as a synthesis of consciousness and the collective unconscious.

A social historian considers mentalities to be a generalized way of perceiving the world, a manner of feeling and thinking, characteristic of people of a certain era.

A sociolinguist considers mentality to be a semantic matrix that predetermines the semantic reactions of cultural subjects. From the point of view of linguistics, in the study of mentalities it is important to emphasize the role of language in modeling consciousness.

A common characteristic feature of mentalities - in contrast to doctrines and ideological structures, which are complete and thought-out systems - is their openness, incompleteness, continuity, diffuse nature, “spillage” in culture and everyday consciousness. Mentalities express not so much the individual attitudes of each person, but rather the impersonal side of social consciousness. The subject of mentalities is not the individual, but the society. They manifest themselves in verbal language (the verbal culture of society) and sign language, in behavior, customs, traditions and beliefs.

The concept of the mental allows us to combine analytical thinking, developed forms of consciousness with semi-conscious cultural codes. The mental connects numerous oppositions - natural and cultural, emotional and rational, irrational and rational, individual and social. The concept of mentalities is especially productively used to analyze archaic structures and a long-gone time with its characteristic forms of mythological worldview.

In modern humanitarian knowledge, the concept of mentality has acquired an expanded meaning and is used not only to designate certain cultural stereotypes typical of large social groups or to characterize the spiritual mood of the entire society, but also to interpret the way of thinking, beliefs, and “spiritual skills” of a small group of people.

Most representatives of domestic humanities tend to use the definitions of “mentality” and “mentality” as synonymous, although in general their synonymous or separate use has not been established. Sociolinguists present the two terms as incompatible. From their point of view, the concept of “mentality” should be understood as “the basic characteristic of the system of psychological representation of experience in the minds of people of a historically defined linguistic and cultural community, fixing functional-dynamic aspects of this experience", while the more common word "mentality" means meaningful his sides. Some of the scientists who are not inclined to equate the concepts of “mentality” and “mentality” believe that the latter has a more general, in a certain sense, universal meaning (“medieval mentality”), and the term “mentality” is correlated with the concepts of “thinking.” "or "feeling" (for example, French or Russian mentality, the mentality of a nobleman, the mentality of an individual, etc.) (L.N. Pushkarev). Finally, another point of view comes down to considering different mentalities (religious, ethical, etc.) as parts of the mentality (M.M. Gromyko).

History of the term.

The term “mentality” was used back in the 19th century. American philosopher and poet R. Emerson (1803–1882), who tried to connect together the metaphysical and psychological problems of public sentiment. The concept of “collective mentalities” was also used by the French politician and historian A. de Tocqueville, author of the book Democracy in America(1835), who sought to find the root causes of the prejudices, habits and preferences common in the American society he described.

The term “mentality” was introduced into scientific circulation by the French ethnologist and socio-anthropologist L. Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939), who studied pre-logical thinking and “collective ideas” (or “mentalities”) so-called. "primitive peoples" L. Levy-Bruhl considered the characteristic feature of mentalities to be inexplicability with the help of ordinary logic and common sense, “mysticism” (also emphasized by the “father of sociology” E. Durkheim), and the participation of everyone in universal beliefs or misconceptions (the so-called “law of participation”, loi de participation). He was the first to emphasize the difficulty of trying to understand the collective life of unliterate peoples based on modern concepts.

Philosophical the understanding of the concept of “mentality” is associated with the name of the German neo-Kantian thinker E. Cassirer (1874–1945). He put approximately the same content into the concept of “mentality” as L. Levy-Bruhl, emphasizing that the types of mentalities can be systematized according to the ways of perceiving the surrounding world, especially, as he believed, nature.

Psychoanalytic and sociopsychological research tradition, within the framework of which psychohistory was born, tended to present mentality as an analogue and synonym for “social character.” Neo-Freudian sociologist E. Fromm (1900–1980) at work Escape from freedom(1941) used the concept of “social character”, considering it synonymous with the concept of collective ideas or mentalities. The French psychologist G. Boutul believed that mentality - as a set of ideas and intellectual attitudes - is located between a person and the world he perceives “like a prism” ( Mentality, 1952).

In the middle and second half of the 20th century. the concept of mentalities was actively used in the philosophical systems of phenomenologists and structuralists, who introduced into the linguistic norm the term “episteme” (cognitive system and mental picture of the world), which is close in content to the concept of “mentalities.”

Basics socio-historical considerations of mentalities are laid down by the French historical school. It was she who forced us to begin a scrupulous development of the history of concepts that shape the lives of people in society and prove that their changing content is an inseparable part of culture.

According to the vision of the prospects for recreating bygone centuries by the “new historical science,” one of its founders, L. Febvre, believed that the historian is capable not so much of reconstructing the objective world (gone once and for all!), but rather of recreating the world view and mentalities of the people being studied them of the era, i.e. their subjective assessments of the world with all the realities important to them, including gods, demons, etc. L. Febvre, who founded the Annales school together with M. Blok, saw in collective mentalities not so much biological as social foundations, nature and determinants. Seeing in them the processes of “secondary recoding” of the picture of the world with the help of sign systems, L. Febvre and M. Blok were the first to show the possibility of deciphering these semiotic embodiments: “The historian must strive to discover those mental procedures, ways of perceiving the world, habits of consciousness that were inherent in the people of a given era and of which these people might not have been clearly aware, using them as if “automatically,” without reasoning about them, and therefore without subjecting them to criticism,” noted M. Blok in one of his works .

Thus, the French historians, who stood at the origins of the study of the “history of mentalities” as an independent direction, placed the “mental” between conscious, obviously structured, reflected (that is, forms of social consciousness - religion, ideology, morality, aesthetics, etc.) and unconscious (unconscious) in the collective, and partly in the individual psyche of people. The most important, constructive sphere of mentality is the “sphere of ideas about a person” (R. Sprandel).

History of mentalities (mentality)

The history of mentalities (mentality) is a field of study of the past, an integral part of the “new social history” as socio-cultural history. It took shape as an independent movement in the 1960s, first in Western and then throughout European humanities within the framework of this. called “historical-anthropological turn” - interest in man, his ideas and way of life. The strengthening of the position of the history of mentalities precisely in the decade of the “overthrow of the foundations” and the maturation of the student revolution of 1968 (the “new left” movement) is associated with attempts to reorient the science of the past from the “history of heroes” (rulers, thinkers, leaders, diplomats) to the “history of ordinary people” . The views of the people, the emotions and thoughts of ordinary people, including “ordinary people”, and the analysis of the driving mechanisms of their social behavior (E. Leroy Ladurie in France, H. Medic, A. Lüdtke in Germany) were placed at the center of scientific works.

Following L. Febvre and M. Blok, their successors, grouped around the journal “Annals”, forced the “history of statements” of philosophers and politicians, rulers and military leaders to take a backseat, highlighting the “history of hidden thought structures” inherent in all or most members of society , analysis of ideas that are not controlled by their carriers and act against their will and intentions.

In addition to social psychology, structural anthropology gave a strong impetus to the birth of the history of mentalities, which made it possible to present society as a comprehensive system of relations “from the basement to the attic” (M. Vovel). Seeing in the reconstruction of the “mental” an element of recreating history in its integrity, the younger contemporary of L. Febvre and M. Blok F. Braudel, proposed to analyze two levels of “structures” in the life of any society: the structures of material and immaterial life, covering human psychology and everyday practices . The second level was called by him “structures of everyday life.” It was in them, F. Braudel believed, that the values and symbols of faith of a person of a certain era were formed, therefore, to understand the motives of people’s behavior, the semiotic embodiments of their picture of the world (images, ideas, habits, sensations, predictions, etc.) means to understand the era itself , it’s time to understand the interaction of different aspects of social life, from everyday details to political preferences, from primary material interests to the analytical work of the human mind.

Simultaneously with the appearance of the first studies on the “history of mentalities” in France, the so-called development was underway in Russia. “schools of semiotics” - the science of sign systems or the Tartu school (Yu.M. Lotman, Vyach. Vs. Ivanov, B.A. Uspensky, V.N. Toporov). Growing out of linguistics and beginning to expand into other humanities, including history, this school allowed the formation of new approaches to the study of the past, all spheres of human activity, which the followers of this school proposed to consider as texts and signs to be deciphered. Another Russian direction in the study of mental processes was outlined by the works of M.M. Bakhtin, published at the same time (1960s), who showed the promise of studying the hidden layers of social consciousness, closely related to the everyday life of people (for example, “carnival laughter culture” , characteristic of the Middle Ages) and ignored by previous science.

The ideological unification of the School of semiotics, the direction of M.M. Bakhtin in literary criticism and the developments of historians of mentalities (in France and, a decade later, in Germany) could become a breakthrough in a new understanding of historical reality. However, the “Iron Curtain” between the USSR and the West, the rigid ideological and political barriers that separated Russian humanists from new trends in the development of world science, prevented unification and doomed historians in the USSR to a lag that they have been trying to overcome only in the last decade.

Subject of history

mentalities – reconstruction of modes of behavior, expression and silence that convey a public understanding of the world and worldview; methods and content of thinking; beliefs and images, myths and values recognized by individual groups or society as a whole. Unlike the history of everyday life, which is interested, in addition to the “time of stability”, also in the “short”, “nervous” time of specific events, and also in contrast to psychology, which also focuses its attention on easily changeable states of the psyche, the history of mentalities puts in the focus of research attention is the study of everything constant (socio-psychological constants), slow, latent changes, extended over a very long time (la longue durée). Historians of mentalities are interested in “times of long duration” in the general spectrum of social times as preserving the most typical in psychology and behavior, that which is embedded in the consciousness of people by their upbringing, culture, language, religion and makes changes noticeable only when considering large chronological periods of history.

Range of topics and problems“history of mentalities” is the perception of the geographical environment, attitude to nature, space and time in the broadest sense, allowing us to understand the perception of people of that time of history itself - its progressive development or its “circular” repetition, regression, statics, movement. It also includes the whole range of problems associated with the system of beliefs, the relationship between the earthly world and the other world, the perception and experience of death, the distinction between the natural and the supernatural, the spiritual and the material. In some aspects, historians of mentalities are close to specialists in the history of everyday life - when they study people’s attitudes regarding the perception of work in the home and outside the home, marriage, sexual culture, raising children and attitudes towards them, gender stereotypes, illnesses, deformities, disabilities, old age, family, when exploring orientation to the new or to the traditional. Through the history of mentalities, the study of law, which J. Le Goff called “the historian’s scarecrow”, returned to the “new social history” - but this is not a traditional description of norms and regulations, but a reconstruction of their perception by ordinary people in written and customary law, a reconstruction of the legal consciousness of a certain era. The focus of the historian of mentalities is always on the socio-political aspects of the spiritual life and collective mentality of people - their assessment of society and its components, understanding of the relationship between the whole and the individual, individual and social, the degree of individual independence in society or inclusion, dependence on it, attitude towards labor, property, poverty and wealth, power, domination and subordination, understanding of freedom, will, access to storage and dissemination of information.

Target

historian of everyday life - studying people's worldview from the point of view of their own perception. However, a modern historian has to use for this purpose the conceptual apparatus, theoretical schemes and models that have developed by now, and constantly compare the differences in the content of established and only seemingly unchangeable concepts. The constant comparison of the “external” point of view, determined by the modern system of knowledge, with the “internal” point of view inherent in the people of the era under study, creates a situation of a new vision of history, the so-called. “stereoscopic vision” (A.Ya. Gurevich). This allows us to preserve the principle of historicism and avoid transferring modern ideas into the era being studied.

TO sources, reflecting hidden mental structures and complexes of collective ideas (unconscious, unreflected) - can be attributed to “everything created by man and retaining the spiritual essence of its creator” (P. Dinzelbacher). Therefore, almost all types and types of sources, both written and folklore, ethnographic, archaeological, numismatic, etc. may be involved in the research. However, materials of personal origin are of greater importance - wills, diaries, letters, memoirs, autobiographies, works of art that reflect the worldview of their authors. For researchers of mentalities of the recent past, “oral history” (which also formed a separate direction in the 1960s) is of great importance - interviews of all types (narrative, semi-structured, biographical, leitmotif, focused, etc.). “Oral histories” collected by a historian of mentalities, from a collection of facts common in traditional research, are transformed into a new type of empirical material, structured according to themes and chronology of the so-called. "secondary source".

Study methods

mentalities are very diverse. Since mentality is “something inexpressible that cannot be written out from the source text and that can only be revealed by the researcher from the opinions and judgments expressed by the author of the text under study” (F. Graus) - the historian is forced to use not only historical, but also many other techniques and methods – psychological, ethnological.

Since ordinary people of the distant past practically did not leave any ego-documents (personal sources - letters, diaries, memoirs), the historian has to analyze the entire range of sources that could reflect their way of thinking and value system. He has to ask the sources who recorded the statements or assessments of these ordinary people the questions that ethnologists working with living respondents usually ask. This method was called “historical-ethnographic”.

The history of mentalities borrowed a number of analytical techniques from semiotics, which developed ways of understanding foreign culture by searching and analyzing symbolic (semiotic) forms - words, images, institutions, actions, through which people in certain circumstances represented themselves and other people. A researcher of mentalities has to interpret the meanings and symbols associated with the objective world and the world of phenomena through the world of reality close to the experience of people of the past - the world of everyday life, ordinary speech, habitual actions (Yu.M. Lotman). Recently, one of the ways of researching the history of mentalities has become the analysis of discursive practices (primarily dominant discourses), which are understood as “practices of speech behavior” (M. Foucault) - that is, methods, rules, logic of discussing something verbally and nonverbally ( language of actions and gestures) by.

Levels of Study

mentalities depend on the formulation of research tasks and the analyzed field of interaction of social objects. Broadly, civilizationally-minded culturologists tend to set the task of studying the general mental “background” of each era (J. Huizinga, F. Ariès, J. Le Goff, in Russia - M. M. Bakhtin, A. Ya. Gurevich). On the other hand, the followers of F. Braudel in France and G. Tellenbach in Germany showed the possibility of analyzing mentalities and individual social strata (for example, J. Duby, who described the characteristic features of the behavior of the French elite, from knights to priests, E. Leroy Ladurie, who concentrated his attention to the mentality of peasants in a village in the 13th century or Yu. Mitke, who studied the mentality of medieval mendicant orders). Modern ethnologists and ethnopsychologists also offer their approaches and levels in the study of mentalities, reconstructing the history of the formation of national characters and national cultures (E. Stefanenko). Specialists in the field of gender studies occupy a special place in the study of the history of mentalities. and feminist historiography, close to them, insisting on the differences between male and female mentality, male and female value systems, ways of perceiving the world, fixing what is imprinted in memory (O. Houghton, E. G. Davis, T. de Lauretis, D. Reilly, in Russia - N.L. Pushkareva, S.G. Aivazova, E.A. Zdravomyslova, A.A. Temkina).

The meaning of the “history of mentalities” in science is determined by the desire to break the invisible barrier separating socio-economic or political history and the history of spiritual life, to unite autonomously developing historical disciplines, penetrating into the depths of the spiritual life of people of the past. Having emerged as a “testing ground” for new research practices of medievalists and specialists in Western European history of the early modern period, the history of mentalities quickly found a place in the studies of later eras and contributed to the writing and their history as an inextricable unity of material and spiritual life, society and culture. The long-lasting interest in the research direction of the “history of mentalities” is explained by the wide possibilities of scientific synthesis, combining the results of research analysis and methods of work of various humanities disciplines - history, ethnology, psychology and ethology, linguistics, cultural studies, semiotics, literary studies, geography, ecology.

Lev Pushkarev,Natalia Pushkareva

Reading time: 2 min

Mentality is a complex of intellectual, emotional and cultural traits, value guidelines and prescriptions characteristic of a social or ethnic group or people. This concept unites the human worldview, points of view, assessments, values, behavioral norms, moral guidelines, mindsets, religious views and other aspects inherent in a particular social group. Mentality is considered to be ideology, perception of the environment and one’s own person in it, spiritual attitude, value guidelines, worldview characteristic of an individual or group of people. The clear contrast between personal mentality and that of an outsider is easy to notice when staying in an unfamiliar cultural environment or among representatives of other nations.

What is mentality

The concept in question implies a worldview, a mindset. It is revealed in the form of cultural characteristics, emotional, intellectual characteristics of the human worldview inherent in a certain ethnic category. Worldview helps us understand why different ethnic groups behave differently under similar circumstances. The nature of the described concept is conservative. It is impossible to quickly modify it, as well as the feelings, way of thinking, and behavior of many individuals. Worldview influences the educational process, which, in turn, contributes to the reconstruction, reconstruction and correction of mentality.

Mentality is of great importance. It is, first of all, used to designate a unique way of thinking, a mindset. More often, this term refers to the totality and individual form of organization of the human psyche, as well as its manifestations.

Worldview contributes to the study of social. It has the following heuristic capabilities: it contributes to the understanding of the unique spiritual world of the subject, helps to understand the specificity of the perception of the environment and interprets the behavioral response and activity of the individual.

The basis of the individual worldview is the genotype, the formation of which is determined by the social environment and natural environment, as well as the personal spiritual creativity of the individual. Worldview predetermines what character traits the subject will be gifted with, what behavioral patterns, activities, and speech he will have.

There are three components of mentality: uniqueness (feelings, ideas, patterns inherent in one individual are absent in others), individuality (a combination of individual characteristics characteristic only of this collective subject), quantitative ratio of characteristics (for example, using the IQ indicator you can distribute people according to professional categories: people with an intelligence level of 120 units are shown the profession of a banker, lawyer, 109 - aircraft mechanics, electrician, 98 - painter, driver).

Factors in the formation of mentality

It is traditional to distinguish four factors that affect the development of this concept, namely: natural-geographical reasons, socio-historical aspects, religion and education. At the same time, the listed factors of worldview determination invariably intersect with each other. In addition, these reasons are also the parties influencing their historical transformations.

Worldview embraces the system of value guidelines and goals of a particular individual within the boundaries of his or her characteristic sets of beliefs.

So, among the main determinants that determine the formation of a certain type of mentality, the following are distinguished:

– individual evolution;

– parents’ worldview;

– biological reasons;

– the influence of individuals: teachers, coaches, friends;

– social institutions;

- literary works, films, and other types of art that an individual has become familiar with since childhood.

The peculiarities of the mentality of human individuals are most pronounced when exposed to stressors, when “confrontation of goals” arises.

The specific worldview of a nation is formed throughout the history of its formation. Mentality cannot be attributed to an external sign of nationality. So, for example, the large nose of Caucasians, Slavic brown hair, narrow eyes of Yakuts are not features of the national mentality, since it has no relationship with external characteristics, but is determined by the essence and perfect content of the nation.

The mentality of a nation is not acquired once and forever. The national worldview has been formed over centuries and is characterized by a relatively constant and non-progressive content. At the same time, the worldview is not without the ability to strengthen, enrich and change.

The national mentality cannot have either positive or negative content. In other words, it is not of the same type in nature, since it includes positive aspects and negative aspects. The people themselves, noticing the conservatism and absurdity of some elements of their own worldview, can free themselves from them. However, this process is lengthy, covering a long period of time.

Society mentality

The worldview of society is presented as a deep level of consciousness of society, a stable system of life guidelines. Moreover, such guidelines are a certain “background” for the perception of realities; they determine the attitude towards events, things and the nature of activity. Since the meaning of mentality implies a complex of the most general characteristics, there are some special cases of the development of characteristics, which, naturally, will be only a subset of the countless components of mentality.

World perception in relationship with consciousness acts as unreflected ideas, images, on the basis of which the individual perceives and interprets the world.

Mentality cannot be considered identical to consciousness, since it does not coincide with the images of actions and thoughts expressed by the individual. The worldview is behind them, defining the line between the thinkable, acceptable and felt as “incredible”, “impossible”.

Mentality is not based on logical categories and concepts. It is based on dual, “implanted” images, or on patterns of opinions and actions that predispose an individual to certain types of reactions.

Mentality can be called an extraordinary mechanism that determines the nature of long-term forms of behavior and views of a person within the boundaries of a certain community.

The peculiarities of mentality lie in the absence of opposition between the cultural and natural aspects, the emotional factor and the rational, the rational component and the irrational, the collective and individual components in human nature.

Through the concept under consideration, it is possible to characterize a wide range of cultural phenomena, ranging from traditions, stages of the spiritual development of culture to views, the type of mental activity of various communities.

The mentality of a society acts as an indicator of the state of direction and level of consciousness (collective and individual), its ability to assimilate norms and life values, level to the social environment, and the ability to reproduce the experience of past generations.

In the social class sense, one can distinguish the slave worldview, serfdom, peasant, landowner, feudal, noble, mass, bureaucratic, proletarian, marginal, aristocratic.

In order to determine the worldview of a society, you can use a universal formula, which is as follows. The mentality of society is equal to social consciousness minus universal human values.

Love for relatives, one’s own children, the pain of their loss, hatred for those who have caused them harm - all this is inherent in human beings. However, the moral and ethical acceptability of blood vengeance is a feature of the national worldview of the eastern peoples, encouraged by the religion and tradition of the people.

Thus, the mentality of a society represents forms of behavior accepted in society, patterns of life decisions, standards of views that distinguish a given community from another society.

Social mentality undoubtedly has a strong impact on an individual’s worldview. Moreover, the degree of its impact is determined by the activity or passivity of a given individual in social life.

Developing a mentality takes approximately 12 years. It begins at the age of three and ends at the age of sixteen.

Types of mentality

Human worldview is a rare alloy of mental characteristics, features and variants of their manifestations. Mentality can be classified, taking as a basis the spheres of social life, into political worldview, cultural, economic, social, spiritual and moral. Based on the types of activity, the worldview can be technical, industrial, scientific, administrative and literary.

In accordance with the way of mental activity, the worldview can be religious, urban, national, civil, rural, military.
According to the historical stages of the formation of society, there are 4 variants of the mentality of society: barbarian, aristocratic, intellectual and bourgeois.

The first is based on strength, resilience, lack of fear of death and sexual activity. A representative of the described type of mentality does not perceive abstract concepts, and therefore freely changes religious views. In the scale of importance for a barbarian, the family is in first position, so he will punish anyone who encroaches on it. At the same time, he takes a much cooler position in relation to the state.

The aristocratic version of the mentality appeared simultaneously with the advent of feudalism. Its distinctive features are considered to be fidelity to duty, sexual selectivity, and the presence of refined manners. The fear of showing weakness forces representatives of the described type of mentality to take bold actions in order to satisfy their own principles, views and beliefs.

The Intel version of mentality arose during the Renaissance. Then the level of security and life increased significantly, so the need to survive and the ability to withstand difficulties lost relevance. The main characteristics of this type are collective interests, high efficiency, renunciation of rich excesses, fear of pain, fear of death.

The bourgeois option is guided by economy, prudence, and workaholism. The desire for power and the desire for short-term profit are considered determining in the actions of representatives of this type of mentality. Here the family has lost its importance, religious attitudes and moral values are modified according to circumstances.

The described types of mentalities can rarely be found in their “pure” form. Most often, during the development of personality, a wide variety of influences intersect and “composite mentalities” are formed.

Moreover, most mixed variations of mentality are less stable than pure options. This is due to the impossibility of combining the goals of different mentalities within the boundaries of one person. Accordingly, combined mentalities have less vitality, but greater dynamism. The mental development of mixed types occurs faster than that of “pure” variants. He considers the combination of a bourgeois type of worldview and an aristocratic one to be the most shaky combination, since their values are opposite.

The interaction of different variations of mentality is always an attempt to resolve antagonistic contradictions. Since a worldview is directly formed through induction, it inevitably tends to induce its own structure (guidelines, priorities, values) into the environment. The more clearly the values differ, the more serious the confrontation will be.

Today, the concept of mentality is one of the most popular terms in modern psychology. It acts as a factor in constructing an integral image of reality (picture of the world); psychologists use it to try to explain the peculiarities of people’s behavior. This concept is relatively new, and therefore not everyone understands its semantic meaning. What does mentality mean in simple words?

Content:

What is mentality?

Mentality (from the Latin “mens” - spirit, soul and “alis” - others)– these are the characteristics of the thinking of a group of people or an individual, which include: a system of values, norms, ideals, moral guidelines, attitudes and ideas; cognitive, intellectual, emotional, cultural characteristics; mentality; way of thinking; worldview, attitude and worldview. This is a kind of embodiment of the cumulative experience of previous generations. The mentality is formed and transmitted on the basis of the general historical, cultural, social and economic development of a particular community, nationality, nation.

The roots of this concept can be traced in the works of C. Montesquieu, J. B. Vico, I. Herder, Hegel, D. Locke, F. Bacon and others. The first to introduce this term into scientific use was the French historian and ethnologist L. Levi -Bruhl. In 1921, he published his book “Primitive Mentality,” in which he explained in detail the meaning of this concept based on the study of Stone Age man. Mentality was originally a term of historical sciences and later became a subject of study in sociology and psychology.

Conscious and unconscious

In psychology, there are two approaches to the interpretation of mentality:

This is the opposition of two bases: conscious and unconscious; Consciousness is the ability to purposefully evaluate objective reality through the construction of visual images and logical reasoning, the manifestation of emotions and feelings. Consciousness can be individual and social. Often a person, so imbued with the collective spirit and merging with any group of people, begins to subordinate his personal views to public ones. The unconscious component permeates all human mental processes; it is what underlies his behavior and emotional state. But the person does not realize this. The unconscious, just like consciousness, can be individual and collective. The latter is based on archetypes - the so-called unconscious images (of literary and folklore heroes), which influence the formation of human behavior patterns, adopted from distant childhood and then reproduced on an unconscious level in everyday life for a long time.
This is a combination of rational (the totality of knowledge about the world) and irrational (faith, which is social memory) components of human thinking.

Important! Mentality is something common, born from natural data and components determined by belonging to a community, which reveals a person’s idea of the surrounding reality, it is a picture of the world, embodied in a system of images and ideas, mass consciousness at a deep level.

Peculiarities of personality mentality

In order to distinguish one person from another, to distinguish him as an individual in a social environment, to determine his psychological characteristics, psychologists use the term “personal mentality” or individual mentality. It is not constant throughout a person’s life, but changes under the influence of various factors that depend directly on the individual and those independent of him (external).

The first include:

life experience;
efforts of will;
psychological stability.

The second ones include:

the influence of stronger personalities: idols, authorities, teachers;
public policy;
knowledge obtained from external sources (journalism, television, radio, Internet, etc.);
parental attitudes, stereotypical rules of behavior;
mass media;
school education.

The mentality of an individual is formed from 3-4 years to 15-17 years. Despite the fully formed mentality by adolescence, under the influence of various factors, a person’s values can change throughout life. Example: the goals and means of achieving them during the period of teenage maximalism and in adulthood differ significantly.

Important! With age, the number of a person’s responsibilities increases, the sense of responsibility for one’s life and the lives of loved ones grows, so those pressing problems and concerns that are relevant for teenagers, whose life is more subordinate to internal moment-to-moment impulses, very often seem insignificant for older people.

Since today the issue of physical survival is no longer as acute as in ancient times, the problem of psychological immaturity comes to the fore in modern society - when people do not become mature individuals, having raised their own children and lived to a ripe old age, but remain children, infantile and irresponsible. Therefore, the mentality of an individual does not always depend on age.

Types of group mentality

If the formation of an individual’s mentality is more influenced by consciousness, then the group mentality is influenced by the unconscious - stereotypes and archetypes of society, which a person who is part of this society cannot always explain.

Depending on the varying degrees of generality, the types of group mentality are as follows:

mentality of the nation (Russian, Slavic, American, etc.);
professions (military, medical, teaching, etc.);
class (worker, bourgeois, etc.);
parties (liberal, democratic);
age (children, teenagers, mature, old people, etc.);
territorial-geographical affiliation (urban, metropolitan, rural, provincial);
criminal.

The number of mentality types is constantly increasing. Due to the diversity of modern society, each person is a representative of several types of mentality.

Features of the national mentality

The main structural elements of the national mentality are:

speech, language affiliation;
collective memory;
ideas formed in society;
collective emotional experiences and moods;
collective values, ideals and attitudes;
national identity;
style of thinking and public perception;
national character and temperament;
samples and patterns of behavior;
mental cultural representations.

Traits of the Russian mentality:(a Russian is not necessarily a Russian; these include Cossacks, Bashkirs, and Jews living on the territory of the Russian Federation, and outside its borders all former or present Russians, regardless of origin, are called Russians):

Conciliarity: everything is common, everything is our own, what people say - manifests itself in the lack of privacy and the ability to interfere in other people's lives.
The desire to live “in truth”, and not to be law-abiding citizens of their country.
The predominance of feelings over reason: sincerity and sincerity are two character traits of the composite image of the Russian person.
The predominance of negativism over positivism: most Russians look for flaws in themselves, not virtues.
A smile is not a mandatory attribute of politeness: it is not customary for us to smile on the streets, look into the faces of others and meet strangers.
Love of debate on global philosophical issues.
Belief in the victory of good over evil.
Guide to the life rule “Keep your head down.”
The habit that everything in life comes for nothing, the conviction that you can’t earn a lot of money through honest work.
Health is not the main value in life.
Caring for the poor and needy.
Instead of humanism, preference is given to pity.

In simple words, the basis of the national mentality are stereotypes of thinking, various established characteristics of a particular people.

What is mentality

This word, so common today, is widely used both in everyday life and in the media. What does it mean and what is the history of its origin? Mentality is a complex of cultural, religious, mental and emotional characteristics inherent in a particular social group or ethnic group.

Less often, this word is used to characterize the inner world of a particular individual. This term was first introduced into circulation by L. Lévy-Bruhl, a French ethnologist; he used it to describe patterns of behavior in primitive societies (translated from Latin mentis - mind, alis - others). What is mentality in the ordinary sense? As a rule, these are certain stereotypes and patterns of behavior characteristic of people united by living in the same cultural space. Mentality is formed in the process of socialization of the individual and is the result of adaptation to and acceptance of the norms and values prevailing in society. The difference in the behavior of different nationalities is explained by different climatic, historical, psychological, religious, etc. factors.

Mentality and mentality - is there a difference?

Some researchers and publicists tend to put an equal sign between these two concepts. And if it is more or less clear what mentality is, then mentality is such an abstract substance that in the Russian language there are no specific definitions for its categorization.

In most cases, using these two terms as synonyms will not distort the meaning. There is only one remark: “mentality” is a broader concept, characterizing the way of thinking as such, and “mentality” is a more specific definition, a general characteristic of specific qualities and phenomena.

What is the Russian mentality like?

The Slavs, like other peoples, have a number of psychological and behavioral traits that are unique to them. So, what is the mentality of the Russian person? Let us list the main features of the multifaceted and mysterious “Russian soul”, which are sometimes so difficult for foreigners to understand:

1. The predominance of the collective over the individual. It is much easier for a Russian person to speak out than to worry about everything within himself. As an example: concepts such as “collective”, “public opinion”, “popular censure” that have taken root among us have never been popular in the West.

2. Disdainful attitude towards the state and laws. “Live in truth” is the motto of the Russian people.

3. Sincerity. Sincere expression of feelings is valued above all else, which is why it is not customary for Russians to “artificially” smile on the streets.

4. Relative passivity in social and political life. Most of our compatriots are not used to taking active part in various events and rallies. It is much preferable to collectively condemn the injustice that is happening.

5. Negativism towards strangers. To verify this, you need to accidentally push a stranger on the street.

6. Rich internal emotionality, where there is a place for good nature, understanding, and mercy.