Download Political Psychology: Introduction and Overview

Political Psychology: Introduction
and Overview
Why study political psychology
• Why do people behave the way they do in
politics?
• What causes conflicts such as those in Bosnia,
Rwanda?
• Is racism inevitable?
• Why do presidents make the decisions they
do?
• People start wars who have lived together
harmoniously: Yugoslavia, Liberia, Sierra
Leone, Syria
• Barbaric violence one another
• Groups commits act of terrorism
• Without understanding the feeling of the
people who make decisions to commit acts it
is difficult to understand why those things
occurred
• Exploration of psychology, personality,
thought process, emotions and motivations
provide necessary basis for understanding
that activity
• Psychological patters that influence how
individuals act in politics
• Challenging rational actor model; lack of
rationality and predictability of human
behaviors
• Psychology as common sense
• Human beings operate based on the belief
that behavior is rational
• To the extend that behavior is rational two needs to
fulfill: understand the world and predict consequences
of behaviors
• People act accordance with personality characteristics,
values, beliefs and attachment to groups
• People: imperfect information processors to
understand the complex world, misperception, being
unaware of the causes of their own behavior
• Irrational behaviors
• Social categorization: non-consciously
categorize others into groups
• Seems logical and rational but there are
dangerous consequences of categorization
• Outcomes of stereotyping: racial
discrimination, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and
genocide in Rwanda, political actions that
cannot be understood through conventional
political science explanations
• If one wants to understand politically
motivated atrocities committed during the
“war” that cannot be explained unless the
psychology of perpetrators is understood
• Political psychology helps to explain political
behavior, such as voting, to the most
extraordinary kinds of behavior, such as mass
terror and violence
What is political psychology
• Both psychologists and political scientists
interested in expanding their knowledge of
issues and problems of common interests
such as foreign and domestic policy decision
making of elites, conflicts (war, genocide,
terror), voting behavior
• Understanding limitations of policy makers to
process information, personality elements,
motivations
• Political psychologist aims to establish general
laws of behaviors that can explain and predict
events that occurred in different situations
• Scientific method: approach to understand
and predict behavior through 4 steps: (1)
making observations, (2) formulating tentative
explanations or hypothesis , (3) further
observation and experiments, (4) refining and
testing experiments
• Political psychology explains what people do
by adopting psychological concepts
• Study decision making process employed by
groups, decisions made by political groups
(e.g. Bay of Pigs, the decision to enter the
Vietnam War)
• Psychologist study of group behavior might be
irrelevant to study real world of politics
• Importance of personality traits that are
important in influencing political behavior:
cognitive complexity
• The political psychology field began in the
1920s, explosion in use of political psychology
application to politics since 1970s
• Focus on psychoanalytic studies of political
leaders, personal characteristics such as
motivation and traits
• 1940s and 1950s: increasing interest in the
systemic study of public opinion and voting
behavior
• 1960s studies of Soviet-American perceptions
of each other to understand nuclear
deterrence, past wars (WWI and WWII),
decision making in crisis, nationalism, ethnic
conflicts
• Explanatory tools: beliefs, schemas, images,
personality, attitude, self-identity; evaluating
environment through cognitive processes that produce
images of other
• Personality: central psychological factor influencing
political behavior
• Values and identity: beliefs about what is right and
wrong and a deeply held sense of who a person is
(identity) e.g. person have value that violence is wrong
usually oppose to war refuse to go military service and
go to prison if necessary to defend those values
• Emotions: politics as emotion-evoking arena of
life
• Values, attitudes and identities are emotional
• Final component of the mind of political being is
cognitive processes: receiving and interpreting
information from the outside (ability to process
information)
• Cognitive processes help to understand an
environment that is too complex for any
individual to interpret
• Cognitive system of brain help to filter
information that is consistent with our preexisting ideas, beliefs, attitudes, and
assumptions about the environment in which
we live in
• Political psychology involves not only
individual but the individual’s interaction with
his/her political environment: groups and
social identity (membership in social groups)
• Group themselves have particular dynamics that
influence people's behavior
• groups demand loyalty, obedience, for example
perpetrators of genocide in the Holocaust who
explained their behavior in terms of obedience of
norms of the group (I did it because it was
ordered to do so)
• Social identity beyond group dynamics; people
are influenced by groups but also personally
driven to support groups that they are strongly
attached
• Political psychology is the question of
whether, by understanding why people
behave as they do in politics, prevent the
worst of human behavior and promote the
best
• Without understanding the political
psychology this is an impossible goal