National pride and national pride

[Skybird]

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/uncategorized/national-pride-brings-happinessbut-what-youre-proud-of-matters.html

PRESS RELEASE
December 8, 2011
For Immediate Release
Contact: Divya Menon
Association for Psychological Science
202.293.9300
dmenon@psychologicalscience.org


National Pride Brings Happiness***8212;But What You***8217;re Proud of Matters
Research shows that feeling good about your country also makes you feel good about your own life***8212;and many people take that as good news. But Matthew Wright, a political scientist at American University, and Tim Reeskens, a sociologist from Catholic University in Belgium, suspected that the positive findings about nationalism weren***8217;t telling the whole story. ***8220;It***8217;s fine to say pride in your country makes you happy,***8221; says Wright. ***8220;But what kind of pride are we talking about? That turns out to make a lot of difference.***8221; The intriguing***8212;and politically suggestive***8212;differences they found appear in a commentary in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science.

Reeskens and Wright divided national pride into two species. ***8220;Ethnic***8221; nationalism sees ancestry***8212;typically expressed in racial or religious terms***8212;as the key social boundary defining the national ***8220;we.***8221; ***8220;Civic***8221; nationalism is more inclusive, requiring only respect for a country***8217;s institutions and laws for belonging. Unlike ethnic nationalism, that view is open to minorities or immigrants, at least in principle.

The authors analyzed the responses to four key questions by 40,677 individuals from 31 countries, drawn from the 2008 wave of the cross-national European Values Study. One question assessed ***8220;subjective well being,***8221; indicated by general satisfaction with life. Another measured national pride. The other two neatly indicated ethnic and civic national boundaries***8212;asking respondents to rate the importance of respect for laws and institutions, and of ancestry, to being a true . . . fill in the blank . . . German, Swede, Spaniard. The researchers controlled for such factors as gender, work status, urban or rural residence, and the country***8217;s per capita GDP.

Like other researchers, they found that more national pride correlated with greater personal well-being. But the civic nationalists were on the whole happier, and even the proudest ethnic nationalists***8217; well-being barely surpassed that of people with the lowest level of civic pride.

The analysis challenges popular feel-good theories about nationalism. ***8220;There***8217;s been a renaissance of arguments from political theorists and philosophers that a strong sense of national identity has payoffs in terms of social cohesion, which bolsters support for welfare and other redistributive policies,***8221; says Wright. ***8220;We***8217;ve finally gotten around to testing these theories.***8221; The conclusion: ***8220;You have to look at how people define their pride.***8221;

The findings, he adds, give a clue to what popular responses we might expect to ***8220;broad macro-economic and social trends***8221;***8212;that is, millions of people crossing borders (usually from poorer to wealthier countries) looking for work or seeking refuge from war or political repression. ***8220;It***8217;s unclear what the political implications of the happiness measure are***8212;though unhappy citizens could demand many politically dangerous, xenophobic responses. Ethnic nationalists, proud or not, appear relatively less happy to begin with and more likely to lead the charge as their nation diversifies around them.***8221;
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For more information about this study, please contact: Tim Reeskens at tim.reeskens@soc.kuleuven.be.
The APS journal Psychological Science is the highest ranked empirical journal in psychology. For a copy of the article "Subjective Well-Being and National Satisfaction Taking Seriously the ***8220;Proud of What?***8221; Question" and access to other Psychological Science research findings, please contact Divya Menon at 202-293-9300 or

And the earlier study that the above refers to:

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/22/2/166.abstract

Abstract
We examined the relationship between satisfaction with one's country (national satisfaction) and subjective well-being utilizing data from a representative worldwide poll. National satisfaction was a strong positive predictor of individual-level life satisfaction, and this relationship was moderated by household income, household conveniences, residential mobility, country gross domestic product per capita, and region (Western vs. non-Western country). When individuals are impoverished or more bound to their culture and surroundings, national satisfaction more strongly predicts life satisfaction. In contrast, reverse trends were found in analyses predicting life satisfaction from satisfaction in other domains (health, standard of living, and job). These patterns suggest that people are more likely to use proximate factors to judge life satisfaction where conditions are salutary, or individualism is salient, but are more likely to use perceived societal success to judge life satisfaction where life conditions are difficult, or collectivism predominates. Our findings invite new research directions and can inform quality-of-life therapies.

What it all means? You can't mix foreigners and natives in a society by arbitrary decision and expect they all set down automatically in one big happy family, since both groups may define national pride and loyalty to that state's society and principles maybe very differently, and thus are different in their motives for expressing - by words - such pride and loyalty. Both may use the same terms to describe their relation to that state and soceity, but means totally different things by these very same terms. Also, both groups also vary in their motives and defintions depending on their own social status and material well-being. - Needless to say, but ignroing these findings holds plenty of cultural and social explosives. The decisive variable to decide the the width of the gap between "them" and "us" is the cukltural nearness or distance between both. But does it really take a psychological study to know that...?

You cannot redesign human nature and human society arbitrarily, for idealistic or ideologic motives. Stop this insane social engineering madness.