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A people deprived of the ability to control the opinions about itself can become a victim of opinion makers, who can impose suicidal ideas into a nation and incite other peoples on it. An important factor here is the population number of the people, since the more people is in the nation, the more reasons for conflicts it has and the more difficult the distribution of benefits and preferences is. The advantage of large numbers of people is that people are needed to maintain the property, power and ideological influence. Very small peoples can never achieve much. But we can see that strong are those relatively compact ethnic groups, which concentrate huge material assets, influence and control over the minds not too large in number though.
Moreover, in today’s world a psychological shift in the attitudes of people is felt – a greater interest to the roots, traditions and customs of previous generations. This mindset is the consequence of international conflicts, the danger of nuclear war, environmental threats (Taylor 21-22). One feels the instability of the world; one’s optimism is reducing along with the desire to look ahead. More and more people – even young ones – tend to look backwards, to seek for support and protection in the stable values of their ancestors. Therefore, stable intergenerational communities, particularly small ethnic groups, despite the predicted by M. Mead, and indeed emerging trends to their destruction, are becoming more significant in the life of a modern man (Taylor 45-47).
So, one of the psychological reasons for the growth of ethnic identity of small nations in the second half of the 20th century is the search for orienting points and stability in the unstable world supersaturated with information . The second psychological reason is the intensification of inter-ethnic contacts, both direct (labor migration, student exchanges and moves of millions of immigrants and refugees, tourism) and indirect with modern means of mass communication from the satellite TV to Internet connectivity, and related processes of globalization and the influence of the dominant Powers.
As the empirical data describe it, ethnic identities are more clearly understood, but the knowledge about the differences between the groups are perceived earlier if a child lives in a multiethnic family. But how accurate this knowledge is and how positive social attitudes are in many respects depends on which group one belongs to – the majority or minority (Kunovich 573-593). British social psychologists found that children of Pakistani immigrants to Scotland get an idea of ethnic groups earlier than the Scots, who are the majority ethnic group. The children from the minority group inevitably aware of the dominant culture as by means of mass communication, and through personal contacts. At the same time, their peers from the majority group may not have knowledge of Pakistani culture, if they do not have neighbors of this nationality. They communicate mostly within their group, and contacts with national minorities occur in the context of dominant norms of their culture. But even if members of minority groups are aware of the differences between the two cultures, it does not mean that they necessarily recognize themselves as belonging to a minority.
During numerous studies of development of ethnic identity, held in the US, Britain, and New Zealand, preschoolers were offered a set of dolls or pictures of people of different races and ethnicities, and they had to choose those that are more similar to themselves. Children from minority groups often chose “wrong” incentives, for example, black children chose white dolls, while white children picked up the dolls that look really like them (Taylor 66-75).
The tendency of minority groups members to identify with the dominant group reflects the early awareness of children about the existence of a particular social structure, that some groups in society are valued higher than others. In the selection of dolls, little children with social identity not yet formed whether aspire to belong to a group with a higher status, or even consider themselves as belonging to it.
With the development of ethnic identity the members of ethnic minorities usually experience a shift to the intra-group orientation. In the process of socialization and inculturation a child acquires new knowledge about ethnic differences and more clearly defines its belonging to a particular group. At the same time, members of ethnic minorities have a wide choice of strategies when determining the ethnic identity.
The most natural strategy is an effort to maintain or restore a positive ethnic identity, which gives a sense of psychological security and stability. To do this they use the strategy of social creativity, consisting in revising the criteria of comparison. An example of successful use of new criteria for comparison was a pro-black movement in the 70-ies in the US that contributed to the increasing positiveness of the identity of Afro-American minority (Taylor 51).