Nationalism and patriotism in psychological studies
The Head of the ethnopsychology department in Moscow City Psychological-Pedagogical University, PhD in Psychology, Oleg Huhlaev made a presentation “Nationalism and patriotism in psychological studies” on 15th December.
Report showed a brief theoretical excursion into the history of the study of nationalism and patriotism with the presentation of main results of research conducted in 2008-2011 in Russia. O. Huhlaev talked about understanding nationalism and patriotism in terms of sociologists, psychologists, culture and political experts. He also focused on the relationship between these two terms and mentioned the difficulty of finding their position among other psychological phenomena, because boundaries between them are extremely blurred. It is known that nationalism and patriotism are closely related and increase of one can lead to an increase of another.
O. Huhlaev described the results of recent studies where the sampling frame was Russians. Due to research 2008-2009, predictors of nationalism were identified. Firstly, there is a tendency to use aggression to change the problem situation. Secondly, there is combination of two basic beliefs - low meaningfulness of the world and the high value of individual "I". Research using S. Schwarz values theory demonstrated the influence of some individual values in the nationalistic and patriotic tendencies. Research on the Moscow school students revealed relations of patriotism (positive correlation) and nationalism (negative correlation) with the level of positive attitude towards migrants and positive correlation with the level of acceptability of violence on a national basis. So, the studies of phenomena discussed in the report are not only theoretical but also practical.
Marina Lazutkina
Trainee researcher