Political psychology explains political phenomena trends and behaviors from a psychological perspective — shedding light on why certain decisions were made.
After WWI, political psychology started to emerge as a dedicated field but was not formally established until Modern US voting behavior can be explained by a few psychological concepts, as evidenced in this Vox article. Political psychology relies on an amalgam of theories that address perceptual and intergroup relations, specially in the political arena. To inform and predict preferences for domestic and international policy, it draws upon the following fields:.
Political psychology helps us understand how our cognitive models influence our political behaviors. In other words, it helps us understand our own political actions, but also the actions of policymakers, businesses, and individuals.
Overall, it influences choice. How we make certain decisions and why we feel certain decisions are more important than others. Here are some examples:. For Americans in general, researchers have noted that emotional reactions are the primary determinants for behavioral choice.
By studying political psychology, we can better understand the role that emotion plays in political decisions — and how campaigns leverage emotions to sway votes. The role of emotions in political decision-making is ushering in a new paradigm of choice where policy positions are not as influential in political decision-making as emotional appeals.
Their behavior varies with, and responds to, differences in political institutions, political cultures, leadership styles, and social norms. As Levy notes in his chapter in this volume, psychology influences foreign policy behavior primarily through its interaction with specific aspects of the international system, national governments, and distinct societies.
The same logic applies to a wide range of different phenomena. Consider research on authoritarianism. Do we look to the behavior of leaders or their followers to understand why citizens in the s and s followed fascist leaders who persecuted and killed millions of people? Were the atrocities committed in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia a function of political leadership, the support acquiescence of the public, or both?
In the end it is difficult to believe that someone with authoritarian tendencies will behave in exactly the same way under a fascist regime as in a liberal democracy.
A complex mix of individual psychology and political context also shapes public reactions to terrorism. External forces such as the strength of government national security policy or terrorist determination and capabilities vary over time and across contexts, and they influence, in turn, whether a citizen feels anxious or angry in response to a terrorist event.
Powerful terrorists and a weak government tend to generate anxiety among a threatened population, whereas a powerful government and weak terrorists will likely generate feelings of anger.
Moreover, not everyone responds to threat in the p. Neither individual psychology nor political circumstances alone is likely to fully explain these reactions. Can they deliberate over the issues of the day fairly to arrive at a reasoned judgment, or conversely do they succumb to internecine enmities and fall victim to irrational intolerance?
Many of the chapters in this Handbook grapple with such issues, underscoring the democratic capabilities of the citizenry while highlighting ways in which leaders and citizens fall short of the democratic ideal. In reality, both citizens and leaders exhibit distorted reasoning and a slew of cognitive and emotional biases that are well cataloged in this volume. Many of these same processes are at work among political leaders for whom partisan loyalties loom large, threat impairs their ability to deliberate rationally, and emotions such as humiliation and anger affect their political decisions.
In that sense leaders are vulnerable to emotional and cognitive psychological biases similar to those observed within the electorate. Yet democratic societies work, more or less, and political psychology has focused in recent years on individual differences among citizens to explain why a characterization of the public as biased, ethnocentric, fearful, or any other singular characterization is erroneous.
Individual differences grounded in early socialization, genetic makeup, social context, and personality generate liberals and conservatives, Social Democrats and Christian Democrats, tolerant and intolerant individuals, more and less well informed citizens, and sectarian partisan elites.
Politics emerges from such individual differences, leading to political disagreements that are visible and widely debated within well-functioning democratic societies.
Even if citizens engage in biased reasoning, competing arguments are pervasive and difficult to avoid completely; the passionate are free to make their case, and the dispassionate can evaluate their efforts and arguments.
The democratic process may be messy, unsatisfying, and frustrating, but it is inherently psychological. As scholars we need to know something about both a political system and human psychology to make sense of it. The interplay of psychology and politics, especially within democratic processes, is a central theme of this volume and lies at the core of many of its chapters.
Intellectual Underpinnings of Political Psychology. As we noted in the earlier edition of this Handbook , there is no one political psychology Sears et al. Rather, researchers have employed a number of different psychological theories to study political behavior and attitudes.
Some theories are more appropriate than others for analyzing certain political phenomena, as seen in many of the chapters in the Handbook. For example, in contemporary political psychology Freudian psychodynamics is commonly applied to questions concerning the psychology of political leaders, and discourse theory is applied specifically to the analysis of political rhetoric and communications.
But some of the psychological approaches employed across these chapters are marshaled to understand diverse political phenomena.
For example, the influence of cognitive and emotional processes on elite and citizen decision-making is discussed in a number of chapters. Basic aspects of the affective and cognitive system such as the link between anger and risk seeking or the limits of working memory and attention have broad ramifications for the study of political behavior across diverse political topics. To deepen insight into the intellectual underpinnings of political psychology, we lay out the major classes of psychological theories that have been applied to the study of political behavior see also Cottam et al.
Each of the broad approaches we discuss contains several different theories and concepts yet are brought together by their focus on broadly similar psychological processes and mechanisms. Over the last five to six decades, rational choice theory has been a major influence on political science models of both elite and mass political behavior.
This is understandable since democratic theory is predicated on the notion of a well-informed citizenry capable of handling and digesting information on issues of the day to arrive at well-informed decisions. As Chong explains in this Handbook , rational choice theory is built on a set of basic assumptions about human behavior that resemble the requirements for a well-functioning citizenry: first, individuals have consistent preferences over their goals, which are often defined as the pursuit of economic self-interest; second, individuals assign a value or utility to these goals; and third, probabilities are assigned to the different ways of achieving such goals.
As Chong notes in this Handbook , however, pure rationality is something of a fiction when applied to human behavior. Since Downs, it has become increasingly clear that neither leaders nor citizens make entirely rational political decisions.
Nonetheless, in many branches of political science, researchers are only slowly moving away from a rational model of human behavior. In the Handbook , Stein provides a succinct account of a rationalist approach to threat in the field of international relations and highlights its inadequacy to fully explain elite behavior and decision-making. She documents a number of cognitive, motivational, and emotional biases that distort elite threat perceptions and reactions to threat.
At the level of mass politics, among the earliest challenges to rational choice were observations that major political attitudes were in place well before adults began contemplating the political arena, in studies of political socialization and voting behavior see the chapter by Sears and Brown. Behavioral economics and other well-documented psychologically based deviations from rationality are discussed at some length in the chapter by Redlawsk and Lau on citizen political decision-making.
Tyler and van der Toorn also note in their chapter that justice considerations often lead citizens to make political decisions that are at odds with their rational self-interest. In conclusion, it is difficult to overstate the importance of rational choice theory as a foundational basis for democratic theory and a stimulus to political psychology research. Rational choice theory may provoke political psychologists to document the ways in which p.
Political psychology is also beginning to adopt this perspective, leading to a key focus on biological reasoning and evidence in several chapters in the volume, and a passing reference to biological evidence in many others.
At one level an explanation of human behavior grounded in evolutionary thinking seems entirely consistent with a focus on rationality since human behavior is functional within evolutionary theory, geared toward enhanced reproductive fitness via the process of natural selection.
In the Handbook , Sidanius and Kurzban outline the basic principles of evolutionary psychology, examining the adaptive biological and reproductive benefits of many social and political behaviors, including cooperation and coordination. Evolutionary psychology focuses on attributes of psychology common to all members of the species, but some questions tackled by biopolitics deal with marked individual variation in human behavior. Why are some people open to experience and others closed, or some conscientious and others not?
In her chapter, Funk picks up where Sidanius and Kurzban leave of, providing an overview of major approaches to the study of genetic influences on political behavior that explain individual differences. She evaluates the degree to which different facets of political behavior can be traced back to genes and concludes that genes have extensive influence on political behavior, with heritability shaping a range of fundamental political orientations and behaviors, including political ideology, partisan identity, strength of partisanship, and political participation.
This work raises many intriguing questions about the biological mechanisms through which p. Other chapter authors allude in passing to the growing field of biopolitics.
Brader and Marcus discuss developments in the neural understanding of emotions, and Stein considers similar research in reference to the perception of threat among political elites. Huddy notes biological evidence in support of the primacy of in-group attachments, the speed with which in-group and out-group distinctions form in the brain, and the power of hormones such as oxytocin to generate positive in-group feelings.
Kinder considers the possible genetic bases of racial prejudice. Attention to the biological bases of political behavior will hopefully reinforce existing insights into political behavior, and help to identify basic biological pathways that may be central to an understanding of political psychology.
Personality is usually defined as a collection ofirelatively persistent individual differences that transcend specific situations and contribute to the observed stability of attitudes and behavior. In the last 10 years, political psychologists have shown renewed interest in stable personality traits and their effects on political attitudes and behavior based, in part, on growing consensus on the basic structure of personality traits.
Psychologists commonly identify five basic clusters of personality characteristics or traits—neuroticism, openness to experience, extraversion, conscientiousness, and agreeableness—commonly referred to as the five-factor or Big Five framework of personality. These dimensions are described in some detail and their links to political ideology examined in the Handbook by Caprara and Vecchione.
The five-factor model has broad influence in political psychology and is touched on in Handbook chapters by Feldman, Funk, Taber and Young, Huckfeldt, and colleagues, and Winter. Caprara and Vecchione go beyond conventional accounts of personality within political psychology, however, to suggest that personality is broader than just traits and incorporates political values, such as egalitarianism and the need for security.
These basic political values explain individual differences in political attitudes to an impressive degree, as discussed in the chapter on ideology by Feldman. Winter takes a similarly broad view of personality in his chapter on political elites, drawing on social context, personality traits, cognitions, and motives to analyze individual differences in elite behavior and decision-making.
Sigmund Freud had a great deal of influence on early political psychologists because his psychoanalysis of specific individuals lent itself well to the analysis of the personalities of specific political leaders. Harold Lasswell, in his Psychopathology of Politics , p. Post employs an idiographic approach to perceptively analyze the personality of political leaders from a psychoanalytic perspective. This idiographic approach to personality and politics can be contrasted with the nomothetic approach discussed by Carprara and Vecchione, which statistically places large numbers of people at various positions on specific dimensions of personality.
Feldman adds an important caveat to the study of personality and politics, underscoring the critical interplay between personality traits and political systems.
As he notes, political ideology is not simply a proxy for personality. Conservatives may be less open to experience than liberals, but how personality traits map onto political ideology within a given political system also depends on the structure of political parties, their number, strategically adopted issue positions, and additional religious-secular, racial, and other powerful cleavages within a society.
In the end, personality is an important recent addition to the study of political psychology, but it cannot be considered in isolation from political context. Cognitive psychology and neuroscience have had profound influence on political psychology through their discovery of key features of the cognitive system: limited attention and working memory, implicit attitudes that lie outside conscious awareness, the rapid formation of habitual mental associations, and the interplay of affect and cognition.
In essence, the cognitive system is highly efficient, processing a great deal of information with relatively little mental exertion. Under appropriate conditions, individuals can override the human tendency toward fast and efficient decision-making Kahneman, But political decision-making is often beset with biases that privilege habitual thought and consistency over the careful consideration of new information.
This is not always bad. Indeed, in the realm of consumer and other choices such fast gut-level decisions are often superior to reasoned thought. But in the realm of politics, reliance on this form ofireasoning privileges consistency through the process of motivated reasoning in which disagreeable or challenging information is quickly rejected.
This can lead, in turn, to biased and suboptimal political decisions Bartels, In myriad ways, cognitive psychology has undermined the rational choice model of elite and public decision-making, and we briefly describe how awareness of each aspect of the cognitive system has shaped the study of political psychology over the last decade.
Much of this research is dedicated toward understanding how well or poorly democratic citizens function and the degree to which they deviate from the normative ideal of rational decision-making.
Clear limits on human information-processing capacity underlie the widespread use of cognitive heuristics or shortcuts, which can distort the decision-making of elites Jervis, ; Larson, and members of the public.
Levy discusses the impact of cognitive biases on foreign policy decision-making. Cold biases are based on the application of straight cognitive heuristics such as anchoring, in which prior probability assessments exert a disproportionate weight and in which the updating of priors based on new information is slow and inefficient.
Such biases in adulthood force an examination of the origins of attitudes and beliefs that require such vigorous defense, as developed in the chapter on childhood and adult development by Sears and Brown. Redlawsk and Lau turn to the use of cognitive heuristics among citizens and review work on behavioral decision theory, contrasting normative models with behavioral descriptions of how ordinary people make political decisions.
Here too the cognitive limits on rationality lead to a variety of problem-solving strategies that involve cognitive shortcuts. The use of mental shortcuts is not necessarily pernicious, however. Huckfeldt, Mondak and colleagues explore in considerable detail the role of everyday conversation partners in conveying political information and influence.
They specifically discuss the role played by politically expert discussion partners and find that conversation with such knowledgeable individuals is reasonably common and influential, even if their arguments are not necessarily held in high regard. This provides an example of how citizens can reduce the effort involved in acquiring knowledge by obtaining political information from others within their immediate social circles.
Conscious cognitive activity is a limited commodity, and decisions are often made, and opinions influenced, by information outside conscious awareness. In reality, the brain is largely devoted to monitoring the body, and most of its activity lies outside consciousness, reserving conscious thought for important higher-level activities.
Political psychologists might regard political decisions as a high-level activity warranting conscious deliberation, yet political attitudes can be influenced by information of which someone may be unaware.
Taber and Young discuss this phenomenon most fully in their chapter, focusing on implicit attitudes that exist outside conscious awareness, and the automaticity of preconscious attitude activation. They characterize implicit attitudes as affective in nature, fast to take ef ect, and as interacting with explicit attitudes in various ways that deserve further research scrutiny.
Kinder extends this discussion to implicit racial attitudes, examining their nature and political effects. In their chapter, Al Ramiah and Hewstone note the influence of implicit attitudes on inter-group discrimination, including racially discriminatory behavior.
Overall, the political influence of implicit attitudes and automaticity has been examined in a growing number ofiresearch studies concerned with racial attitudes, candidate choice, and the effects of political campaign ads. Valentino and Nardis weave a discussion of preconscious attitudes into their chapter on political communication, in which they assesses the power of campaign ads, news media content, and other media coverage to sway the public.
In that sense, preconscious attitude activation serves as a useful counterweight to persuasive political rhetoric. The notion of automaticity shares an intellectual link with behaviorist theories that were much in vogue in the middle half of the 20th century.
One version of behaviorist theories emphasizes the learning of long-lasting habits, which in turn guide later behavior. They were inspired by the classical conditioning studies of Pavlov, who showed that dogs could be conditioned to salivate at the sound of a bell if it were always followed by food; by the instrumental conditioning studies of Watson and Skinner, who showed that animals could develop complex habits if their behavior proved instrumental to the satisfaction of their basic needs such as hunger or thirst; and the imitative learning examined by Bandura, who showed that children would engage in imitative behavior without any involvement of need satisfaction.
Such theories long dominated the analysis of mass political attitudes. The field of political socialization, as described in the chapter by Sears p. The process of automaticity is linked to the axiomatic notion, developed by Hebb , that neurons that fire together, wire together. The simultaneous pairing of two objects in the environment leads to the firing of their relevant neurons.
If this pairing persists, the brain associates the two objects habitually and recalls the second when primed with the first in a process of spreading activation. For example, if the word liberal is frequently associated in popular conversation with loose-living, pot-smoking, intellectual, or impractical dreamers, or the media depict African Americans in settings that emphasize their poverty, unemployment, and drug-related crimes, the terms will become connected mentally.
This set of mental associations may lie at the heart of implicit racial, gender, and other group stereotypes discussed in the Handbook by Donald Kinder. The existence of habitual associations in the brain results in consistent thought patterns that link, for example, abortion and liberal-conservative ideology, or positive feelings about capitalism and support for government fiscal austerity measures.
In general, such associations anchor policy positions and contribute to attitude stability over time, especially among those who connect policies to stable political attitudes such as political ideology or other basic values. But habitual mental associations also vary among individuals; political sophisticates with strongly anchored political beliefs show stronger habitual mental associations than those with few or weakly held beliefs.
The existence of consistent mental associations helps to explain why reframing a political issue—discussing a tax cut in terms of reduced government waste rather than growing inequality, for example—will be effective for citizens for whom the concept of a tax cut is not anchored by other stable political beliefs, but will be less successful among political sophisticates. Understanding the factors or situations in which someone will scrutinize their habitual mental associations is of critical interest to political psychology and the study of a democratic citizenry more generally.
In their Handbook chapter on political emotion, Brader and Marcus present evidence that habitual thought is less common when individuals feel anxious. The distinction between more and less effortful information processing is captured within dual-process models that posit both a superficial and more deliberate path to attitude change. The delineation of conditions under which citizens engage in careful political deliberation and are open to new information remains of key interest to political psychologists and will continue to stimulate research in both psychology and political science.
Contemporary political psychology draws heavily on affective processes. The previous volume of the Handbook was published at a time when individual information-processing and research on cognitive biases were popular topics within the study of political behavior. In the last decade, research on affect and emotion has increased exponentially in the social sciences, leading to a far more emotional and affect-laden view of political behavior that is manifestly apparent in the current volume.
There was one chapter devoted to political emotions in the previous version of the Handbook , but few other chapters devoted much space to the topic. That has changed dramatically in the current volume, in which it is difficult to find a chapter that does not make at least passing reference to the role of political emotions in research on citizens or political elites.
Positive and negative affect are integral components of implicit attitudes, as noted by Taber and Young, and in that sense emotion plays a very central role within modern attitude research in both psychology and political science. Al Ramiah and Hewstone consider evidence that members of minority groups react more strongly to negative implicit than explicit attitudes held by a majority group member, underscoring the power of implicit attitudes to shape interpersonal encounters.
Kinder discusses the importance of affect to the study of racial prejudice. Huddy underscores the contribution of intergroup emotions to the development of group cohesion and political action.
Bar-Tal and Halperan evaluate the importance of anger, hatred, fear, and humiliation to the development of intractable conflicts. Brader and Marcus review research on political emotions in considerable detail. Their chapter underscores a fourth crucial aspect of the cognitive system, the intricate interplay between affect and cognition.
Hot cognition underscores the degree to which motivational and affective states influence decision-making, and is discussed at some length by Taber and Young. In essence, it produces rapid and perhaps preconscious dismissal of opposing views. The existence of motivated reasoning generates a paradox, however, when it comes to political sophisticates, who turn out to be most subject to automaticity and motivated reasoning.
The Oxford handbook of political psychology. New York: Oxford Univ. DOI: Essential reference for scholars of political psychology, this handbook features chapters on a variety of topics in political psychology written by many of the most prominent scholars in the field.
Krosnick, J. Visser, and J. The psychological underpinnings of political behavior. In Handbook of social psychology. Edited by S. Fiske, D. Gilbert, and G. Lindzey, — Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. This chapter in the main handbook of social psychology gives an overview and introduction to the field of political psychology. McGuire, W. The poly-psy relationship: Three phases of a long affair. In Explorations in political psychology. Iyengar and W. McGuire, 9— Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Provides a historical overview of research in political psychology and describes how the focus of this work has shifted over time.
Sears, D. Political psychology. Annual Review of Psychology — This review gives a historical overview of work in political psychology, focusing on areas such as personality, public opinion, and conflict.
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