BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

Social psychologists since the 1960s have concentrated on the need to discern genuine
cultural differences without projecting them onto cultural personae, thus avoiding the
“fundamental attribution error” or tendency to attribute individual actions to personality traits
regardless of situational factors. 83 This newer perspective finally discarded conventional
Aristotelian notions of innate character disposition that had been propagated during Victorian
times, particularly in connection with nationality. While socio-psychological studies have since
aimed at rational explanations of cultural difference based on sociological or historical data,
nearly all nineteenth-century literature on national character either assumed the existence of
innate difference or never bothered to distinguish cultural from biological traits. The distinction
between cultural identity and ethnicity remained too weak to ward off the irrational appeal of
national myths and stereotypes that negated anxiety by bolstering a sense of superiority over
outside ethnic groups. 84 Writers generally supported an ethnocentric hierarchical mentality by
criticizes Max Weber’s stereotype of the “driven tradesman,” the embodiment of the Protestant
ethic, thinking only of business and making money. Firchow, Death of the German Cousin, 202,
also cites incidence of stereotypy in Salvador de Madriaga’s Portrait of Europe and faults
Barbara Tuchman in The Guns of August (1962) for referring to a combination of arrogance,
rigidity and stupidity as a “natural quality in Germans whose expression so often fails to endear
them to others.”
83 Stanley Milgram’s Stanford study of obedience to authority, conducted in 1963, wherein
a majority of subjects “shocked” their “students” to death in a sham learning experiment,
revealed the fallacy of drawing conclusions about character based on experimental results. The
fundamental attribution error seemed to stem partly from a strong Western cultural bias toward
individualism and partly from a sense of denial among observers that one could act in a manner
similar to test subjects in a given situation. L. Ross and R. Nisbett, The Person and the
Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991), 56-58, reexamine
the impact of situational factors on Milgram’s results.
84 Howard F. Stein, “Culture and Ethnicity or Group Fantasies: A Psychohistoric Paradigm
of Group Identity,” in From Metaphor to Meaning: Papers in Psychoanalytic Anthropology,
Series in Ethnicity, Medicine, and Pychoanalysis, no. 2, ed. Stein and Maurice Apprey
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