This involves the identification of people, ethnicity, and races according to specific, indomitable cultural characteristics.
Examples of national character studies in America include those undertaken to differentiate the Japanese character from the Chinese within the initiative of understanding Asians on a more strategic level after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
By 1953, national character studies included the cultures of France, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Russia, East European Jews, Syria, and China.
In it, Gorer argues that the personality of the Russians, so distasteful to their enemies and his sponsor, the Americans, resulting from their practice of swaddling infants, wrapping them tightly in blankets.
This theory became known as the "swaddling hypothesis", and was generally regarded as unworkable, simplistic, and hastily determined.