Ethnic Minorities Rate Themselves Higher? Testing the Self-Rated Cognitive Advantage and Emotional Paradox in China’s “Non-controversial” Heritage

As a national-level intangible cultural heritage, Yue Kiln celadon is portrayed as a “non-controversial heritage” shared by the Chinese nation. However,who perceives themselves as understanding this heritage better? Are there differences in self-rated cognition among different ethnic groups? Does emotional identification necessarily enhance the level of cognition? Based on 3,036 survey responses, this study constructed three nested regression models to systematically examine the association between ethnicity and the level of self-rated cognition of Yue Kiln celadon. It creatively introduced a “damping mechanism” framework to analyze the independent and interactive effects across four dimensions: cognition, emotion, communication, and time-space. The results show: (1) The self-rated cognitive level of ethnic minorities is significantly higher than that of the Han Chinese, challenging the assumption that “the majority group perceives itself as understanding local culture better”; (2) Cognitive damping significantly enhances self-rated cognitive levels, whereas higher emotional identification inhibits them, revealing an “emotional-cognitive paradox”; (3) The four damping dimensions have directionally different effects on self-rated cognition; however, when simply summed into a total score, positive and negative effects cancel each other out, rendering the moderating effect insignificant and obscuring the independent contributions of each dimension.