The first online panel of the international interdisciplinary conference "The role of mentality in human life and culture" took place on the 8th of November.

We thank our distinguished speakers: Dr. Jerry Krase, Dr. Maltsev Oleg, Patrick Hutton, Donal Carbaugh, Vitalii Lunov, for sharing their views on challenging issues presented for discussion.

Questions of the first panel:
1) The concept of “mentality.” Where should studies of mentality begin?
2) How the phenomenon of “mentality” and the distortion of history are related?

▪️ Prof. Dr. Jerry Krase, President of the European Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and Murray Koppelman, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, shared his thoughts on the questions of the panel (here is the fragment):

"In the research I did, we spoke of mentality using the term "attitude," "attitude towards [something or someone]." Attitude is primarily a disposition of the act, that is, mental states in individuals that dispose people to act in certain ways depending upon the stimulus. In my research, I discovered that the attitude is less important than the actions people take, i.e., their behaviors."  

▪️ Dr. Maltsev Oleg, a world-renowned European scholar, head of the "Memory Institute," named after Grigory S. Popov, an academician of the European Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, shared his thoughts on the questions of the panel about the "concept of mentality" (here is the fragment):

"When I was set a task to study the phenomenon of mentality, I authored a  monograph about studying mentality. I looked into all the materials that I gathered during field researches for 30 years. It is not sufficient to look at the mentality through the prism of one discipline. Only interdisciplinary research would give us the entire picture of what mentality is.

The mentality is directly related to two key things:
1) Conditions, where the mentality is shaped and formed
2) The structure of consciousness of the human being 
At this point (2nd bullet point), scholars encounter all kinds of obstacles. No philosopher or psychologist would be able to formulate what "consciousness" is. The problem is that the structure and model of consciousness are not deeply researched, making mentality studies very formidable. "

For this reason, Dr. O. Maltsev looked into the structure of consciousness first, and only after that, he researched the conditions that form one's mentality. In his speech, he presented the list of factors that influence the formation of the mentality and gave three definitions of what "mentality" is.

The resolution of the conference will be available in PDF on the conference website and in Google Books in December 2021: https://mentality.euasu.org/