Collective emotional states as a factor of legitimation and motivation: natural basis and social horizons

Abstract

Collective emotional states were previously studied mainly as factors of social anomie, while the social norm was associated mainly with the embodiment of concepts in social norms. This approach has undergone significant corrections in recent years: Ukrainian and foreign researchers consider collective emotional states as a social norm and a permanent basis for achieving stable rational consensus. Moreover, researchers are not so much contrasting emotions with intelligence as they are discovering more and more relationships and interdependencies between them. This changes the idea of the essence of legitimation and the status of motivation in the course of social processes. Motivation appears not so much as a too changeable subjective psychological characteristic, but as a permanent collective characteristic of social communities. Motivation determines social identity through the constant direction of people as members of social communities to achieve certain common desired goals. Legitimation also appears as a process of constant recognition by people of each other during the establishment of jointly recognized social norms. Collective emotions play a decisive role in such recognition. The biological basis of emotional behavior of people does not reduce their behavior to biological factors as much as emotions contribute to the sublimation of these biological factors to socially acceptable goals. The emotional basis of establishing national identity has its negative and its positive sides: if the negative influence of emotions can cause the exacerbation of radical nationalism, then the positive influence of emotions contributes to the unity of the nation in situations of existential challenges, such as war. Legitimization of a just war is one of the main tasks of directing collective emotions, in particular righteous anger, to motivate the social mobilization of the nation to resist armed external aggression.