Group self-awareness

Each ethnic group (tribe, nationality, nation, any group of people connected by a common origin and differing in certain features from other human groups) has its own group self-consciousness, which fixes it — real and imaginary — specific features. Any nation is intuitively associated with one way or another. It is often said: “Such and such features are characteristic of the Japanese” - and they evaluate some of them positively, others negatively.
Students at Princeton College twice had to characterize several different ethnic groups using eighty-four words-characteristics (“smart”, “bold”, “cunning”, etc.) and then choose from these characteristics the five features that seem to them the most typical for this group. The following picture came out: Americans are enterprising, capable, materialistic, ambitious, progressive; the English are athletic, capable, abide by convention, love tradition, conservative; Jews are intelligent, self-interested, enterprising, mean, capable; Italians are artistic, impulsive, passionate, quick-tempered, musical; Irish people are pugnacious, hot-tempered, witty, honest, very religious, etc. Already in this simple list of attributes attributed to a particular group, the features clearly show a certain emotional tone, the attitude to the group being assessed appears. But are these traits reliable, why are these ones chosen and not others? In general, this survey, of course, gives an idea only of the stereotype that exists among Princeton students.
It is even more difficult to evaluate national customs and customs. Their assessment always depends on who evaluates and from what point of view. Special care is required here. In nations, as in individual individuals, disadvantages are the essence of the continuation of virtues. These are the same qualities, only taken in a different proportion or in another respect. Whether people want it or not, they inevitably perceive and evaluate other people's customs, traditions, forms of behavior primarily through the prism of their own customs, the traditions in which they themselves were brought up. Such a tendency to consider the phenomena and facts of a foreign culture, of an alien people through the prism of the cultural traditions and values ​​of their own people is what is called ethnocentrism in the language of social psychology.
The fact that each person's customs, customs and forms of behavior, in which he was brought up and to which he was accustomed, is closer than others, is quite normal and natural. Temperamental Italian slow Finn may seem sluggish and cold, and that in turn may not like the southern hotness. Other people's customs sometimes seem not only strange, ridiculous, but also unacceptable. This is just as natural as the differences themselves between the ethnic groups and their cultures that were formed in the most diverse historical and natural conditions are natural.
The problem arises only when these actual or imagined differences are elevated to a superior quality and turn into a hostile psychological attitude towards an ethnic group, an attitude that separates nations psychologically, and then theoretically, justifies the policy of discrimination. This is ethnic prejudice.