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National Character: an Old Problem Re-Examined

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Arvid Brodersen

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Human groups, such as families, tribes, and nations, are often perceived as possessing mental qualities and characteristics more or less common to the group as a whole. This ancient tendency to attribute properties of personality or individuality to human aggregates is particularly strong nowadays with regard to nations, the basic units of political action in this age of nationalism and internationalism.

In the recent UNESCO study by W. Buchanan and H. Cantril, How Nations See Each Other (1953), based on an eight-nation sample, few findings are more revealing than the low frequency of respondents who declare themselves unable to characterize their own nation. All but a very small proportion gave their views freely when asked to describe the character of their countrymen. When this same question was asked with regard to a series of other nationalities, the “Don't know” responses (“impossible to characterize”) were in some cases much more frequent—up to 71 per cent as in the case of the German sample in regard to the Chinese; in others again very low—down to 3 per cent as in the western European responses regarding the United States. These variations are assumed to reflect differences in the degree of familiarity of nations with each other, depending on their mutual relationships over time, their physical proximity or distance, and so on.

Type
Notes and Discussion
Information
Diogenes , Volume 5 , Issue 20 , December 1957 , pp. 84 - 102
Copyright
Copyright © 1957 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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