The mechanism of manifestation of national mentality (national-psychological features) of people is a social categorization on the basis of ethnic orientation. The latter represents a certain state of internal readiness (mood) of an individual and groups of representatives of this or that ethnic community for specific for each of the manifestations of feelings, intellectual-cognitive and volitional activity, dynamics and character of interaction and communication.
Ethnic attitude is fixed in the course of the historical development of national consciousness of people. As a result, entire systems of such fixed attitudes are formed, which are constantly updated and initiate a peculiar course of mental processes and states of personality.
The nature of the behavior, interaction, communication of representatives of certain ethnic communities, providing their internal readiness for a certain form of response to emerging situations. They accumulate particles of experience and culture of a concrete nation, examples of actions of its representatives in similar situations.
It is impossible to make a specific psychological passport for representatives of a huge number of peoples of the globe, to explain correctly the existence of common specific features, even of similar personalities of one nationality, not so the second paradigm of ethnic psychology - cultural-historical - began to originate.
It acted as a basis for research at the intersection of psychology and a number of humanitarian disciplines, such as historical psychology, anthropology, sociology, ethnology, cultural studies, and now exist in many forms, including as sociocultural approaches, cross-cultural and ethnopsychological research.
In ethnopsychology, the cultural-historical paradigm emerged on the basis of socio-psychological research and makes it possible to trace the specifics of the development of the phenomena it studies in accordance with three methodological approaches.
Firstly, the historical and gnoseological approach, which allows understanding of how the studied psychological phenomenon has arisen, what stages took place in the process of its development and what this phenomenon is now.
Secondly, the principle of cross-cultural comparison and comparison of psychological phenomena. In this case, ethnopsychology makes the main emphasis on studying the specifics of manifestation of ethnic identity and tolerance in different peoples, the peculiarities of perception and cognition of individuals and groups of people as representatives of specific nations, pays much attention to the socio-psychological problems of life of ethnic minorities, the course of migration, acculturation, etc.
Identification and comparison of ethnic and cultural peculiarities contribute to the establishment of mutual understanding between peoples, formation of intercultural and interethnic tolerance, prevention of interethnic conflicts.
Thirdly, there is also an ethnic-functional approach to understanding the essence of the compared psychological phenomena. It is supposed that psychological phenomena develop and are shown according to parameters of ethnogenesis and perfection of ethnoenvironment.
In psychology ethno-integrating and ethnodifferentiating functions of ethno-environmental images and their modalities, social perceptions, figurative content of stages and stages of development of society are considered. This approach applied in the considered paradigm allows explaining correctly the interrelation of culture with manifestations of ethnic mentality, to reveal the results of their interaction and influence in the society and in the relations of people in it.
Thus, the consideration of descriptive and cultural-historical paradigms of ethnic psychology allows not only to describe correctly the formation of the essence, originality and content of socio-psychological phenomena, which it studies, but also to compare and compare correctly the behavioral aspects of cross-cultural interaction of people in organizational and functional perspectives in accordance with the parameters of social environment development.