Mentality and mentality-driven behavior stereotypes: theoretical and methodological foundations of the research

The paper summarizes and systematizes theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of the concept of “mentality”. The authors review historical-philosophical, cultural-anthropological, psychological, ethnographic, socio-cultural and sociological, socio-economic and interdisciplinary approaches. Special attention is paid to the system approach that considers how mental characteristics are manifested. The paper presents the structural approach that focuses on individual continents of mentality and an approach to the study from the standpoint of the “level of the nature of mentality” (conceptual-semantic, values-and-target, and behavioral levels). The authors substantiate the necessity of using an interdisciplinary approach to the determination of mentality. This is due to the fact that this scientific category is widely used in different sciences (sociology, psychology, the humanities), which requires unified conceptual analytical methods. The authors reveal distinctive features according to which mentality can be classified; they include: 1) the level of analysis (individual, professional, social mentality); 2) territorial feature (urban/rural (provincial)); 3) the level of historical development (primitive/ modern (civilized))...