Political Psychology Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The evolution and development of the subfield of political psychology began to take shape during the pre–World War II (1939–1945) period. This is when political science incorporated political psychology more directly; informed largely by psychoanalytic theory, this work focused primarily on leadership studies and the nature of attitudes. Such notions and interests became more peripheral to the broader fields of political science and psychology, as well as the larger world, in the wake of the behavioral revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. While some of these later methods and concepts remained part of U.S. politics, most of the central ideas and concerns of political science began to fall outside the purview of existing psychological models.

Psychodynamic Theory And The Behavioral Revolution

The impact and importance of personality is what distinguishes political psychology from many other areas of political science: its specific and intensive focus on the individual level of analysis, and the central place held by individual decision makers in political processes.

Sigmund Freud’s (1856–1939) psychological ideas drew on the model of the newly invented internal combustion engine, positing a primarily sexual and aggressive energy that drives the human psychic machine. Yet his notions were also heavily influenced by his overarching interest in archeology, and he assumed that uncovering core motives held much in common with sorting through the surface debris of an archeological site to find buried treasures. In Freud’s view, children are born with hedonistic tendencies, the so-called id, and become socialized by society, primarily in the form of their parents, into civilization through the internalization of the superego, or conscience. The individual’s successful attempt to integrate the id and superego into a functional ego represented the life’s work, and failures to effectively synthesize these forces led to psychological pain and illness. Freud also speculated that a person’s repressed internal drives will unconsciously manifest themselves in behavioral outcomes, in the forms of jokes, slips of the tongue, and other uncontrollable outbursts. Freud’s propositions concerning human motivation and action remained definitive for half a century and continue to be influential, at least in some clinical and cultural settings, today.

While the most lasting and significant of Freud’s insights remains his characterization of the unconscious, whether conceived in motivational or purely cognitive terms, his larger belief in the dynamic conflicts between individual desire and larger societal constraints provided a powerful model of personality and action. As a flexible model of human character, psychoanalysis proved adaptable in a number of ways. In addition, Freud’s ideas concerning socialization offered a comprehensive theory for understanding the interaction between the individual and the larger society, whether that exchange took place in a smaller family unit or within a larger cultural context such as the Catholic Church or the army. This model readily suggested many applications and implications for political science.

Freud’s psychoanalytic ideas were widely adopted in various subfields in political science and quickly became embedded into the literature in various formulations of both group and individual behavior. The two main areas in which these ideas exerted their greatest impact involved leadership studies and work on attitudes and behavior.

Freud himself began the work on leadership studies, albeit outside of the political context, with his psychobiography of Leonardo da Vinci, wherein he attributed much of Leonardo’s creative energy to his presumed homosexual desires, as manifested in a famous reported dream. Such analysis sought to locate the origins of individual accomplishment in childhood experiences and the source of personal pathology in repressed sexual and aggressive desires. Indeed, early experiments in the psychology of leadership were conducted on children. In perhaps the most famous of these studies, Kurt Lewin (1890–1947), a German Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, sought to understand the power that Hitler had exerted over his compatriots. Lewin examined the impact of leadership style over group dynamics by randomly assigning one of three types of leaders to groups of boys. One displayed an autocratic style of leadership, a second a democratic style, and a third a laissez-faire style. In each case, the leader was a confederate of the experimenters. The results proved instructive. Boys in the autocratic group worked hard, but only while under supervision. Predictably, boys in the laissez-faire group simply goofed off, while boys in the democratic group emerged most efficient. More striking, however, was the fact that boys in the autocratic group displayed over thirty times more aggression than boys in either of the other groups. Boys in the autocratic group destroyed their own property and then blamed others for their misdeeds, displacing their anger, frustration, and aggression onto weaker boys. It is notable that Lewin went on to conduct some of the earliest work on persuasion and attitude change, systematically examining various factors, such as strength of argument and vocal intonation, to determine the sources of attitude change.

Knowing that such variables failed to achieve predictable effects, Leon Festinger (1919–1989) went on to develop his powerful model of cognitive dissonance, based on the discrepancy between perceived choice and external justification, showing that arousal encourages people to maintain consistency between their thoughts and behaviors. When perceived choice appears high, and justification remains low, internal attitudes exhibit the most change.

Harold Dwight Lasswell (1902–1978), a real father of the field of political psychology, was the first to translate these psychoanalytic notions into the explicit study of political leadership in several important works. Lasswell explicitly incorporated psychoanalytic theory into his studies of political behavior. Specifically, he argued that individuals project their psychological conflicts onto the external political world. Lasswell’s seminal work substantively affected the direction of research in this area for decades by concentrating attention on the ways in which psychological processes in general, and pathological ones in particular, influence subsequent political development and expression. By establishing this unidirectional focus, Lasswell’s research precipitated and modeled the development of subsequent work to concentrate almost exclusively on the effect of psychology on politics, paying almost no attention to the potential impact of politics on individual psychology. This directionality in political psychology continues today.

The application of psychodynamic theory to leadership and personality studies came to its most masterful fruition in Alexander George and Juliette George’s psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson. In this work, George and George combined Freudian theory with Lasswell’s notions to argue that Wilson used power as a compensatory mechanism to bolster his inadequate self-esteem. By documenting Wilson’s deeply ambivalent relationship with his brutal father, a powerful Presbyterian minister, they showed that Wilson’s later inability to compromise with powerful male authority figures was rooted in his unexpressed defiance of the father he both loved and loathed. In demonstrating the repeated nature of Wilson’s battles of will as president of Princeton, governor of New Jersey, and president of the United States, the George and George elucidated the repetition compulsion that tragically forced Wilson to become the assassin in his own demise by refusing to compromise with Senator Henry Cabot Lodge over the League of Nations treaty upon which he had staked his political career.

Other work that used psychodynamic models to investigate the relationship between individual motives and societal outcomes included Lloyd Etheredge’s study of actual senior Department of State officials. Using assessments of leaders’ personality traits, Etheredge found that he could predict over 75 percent of their policy preference in forty-nine crises between 1898 and 1968. In particular, he noted that individuals who displayed high dominance behavior in their interpersonal interactions were much more likely to advocate the use of military force abroad.

By the late 1950s through the 1970s, the behavioral revolution began to supplant psychoanalysis as the dominant model in academic psychology and the broader intellectual world. No new theory of power and personality emerged in psychology that could explain the interaction of the individual with the group or larger culture in the same comprehensive manner as psychoanalysis; instead, the psychological study of personality progressed into a more outside-in model that examined the effects of social processes, such as conformity and obedience, on individual behavior. This represents a complete reversal from the earlier Freudian notions that explored individual psychology from an inside-out perspective. In the absence of the development of an equally comprehensive theory of personality in psychology from within the behavioral paradigm, political scientists proved unable to develop their own alternative appealing theory for the relationship between personality and power, and psychological leadership studies more broadly floundered and tended to fall by the wayside.

A second notable example of the incorporation of psychodynamic notions into research in political attitudes arose in the context of the examination of attitudes and attitude structures. This pursuit found its fullest expression in work on the authoritarian personality. The early research, largely conducted by a group of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany at the University of California, Berkeley, sought to explain the origins of fascism within individual personalities. These scholars devised an F-scale that ostensibly connected attitudinal traits including anti-Semitism, ethnocentrism, and political and economic conservatism to public policy preferences and outcomes. High authoritarian individuals appeared preoccupied with power and status and demonstrated a low tolerance for ambiguity. The authoritarian personality argument rested on the psychodynamic assumption that interpersonal hostility would inevitably project onto the external world in measurable ways, which could then be correlated with predispositions toward hostile and punitive foreign policy stances.

These early attitudinal studies in political science were inextricably rooted in psychodynamic assumptions of human behavior—and rightfully so. Such models incorporated comprehensive and internally consistent theories of personality, attitude, power, and action. Moreover, they provided a systematic explanation for the interrelationship between the individual and the group that remains such a crucial aspect of any political context and that many other models, even more recent ones, often lack. However, this work faltered because little empirical evidence corroborated the central theoretical association between interpersonal attitudes, as elicited in self report questionnaires, and policy preferences and behavior. Given the lack of support for this central contention, work on the authoritarian personality came under increasing attack for embodying inherent political motivation and bias. In particular, critics argued against the one-sided focus on right-wing authoritarianism to the exclusion of left-wing dogmatism.

The study of attitudes and attitudinal structure, however, unlike the work on leadership, survived in the face of the behavioral revolution precisely because political science proved able to develop theories of attitude and attitudinal structure that were not rooted in psychological models in general, or psychodynamic theory in particular. Taking advantage of methodological advances in survey research during the behavioral revolution pioneered by sociologists as well as psychologists, important and valuable new work in U.S. politics emerged. Early work in voting studies conducted by Paul Lazarsfeld and colleagues investigating applied social research at Columbia held to a more sociological formulation. Later work epitomized by the Michigan approach displaced these models with a more psychological and attitudinal approach to voting.

The most notable and influential work in this regard quickly became a classic. Angus Campbell and colleagues’ American Voter (1960) employed nationwide surveys of large samples to uncover the dynamics underlying public opinion and American voting behavior. This argument located the source of political attitudes and behavior in individual political party identification, which the authors suggested was largely socialized, and learned at the knees of a parent. Such a model posited implicit social processes of group identification but failed to specify the particular psychological mechanisms undergirding this process very carefully.

Later work, such as John Zaller’s influential Nature and Origins of Mass Opinions (1992), elaborated this survey tradition in attitude research by describing the relationship between the mass media, the assimilation of information by the public, and their opinions in quite sophisticated fashion. This model has proved quite influential in demonstrating the relationship between exposure and assimilation in explaining the effect of the media on public opinion. Zaller’s work with Stanley Feldman (1992) similarly provided important insight into the nature of framing and priming effects on response bias in survey questionnaires, where framing refers to the order or method of presentation of questions and responses, and priming indicates unrelated external cues that may influence responses. In particular, salience and accessibility effects appeared to stimulate response instability across time.

Attitudinal research thus became rooted in the methodological advances of behaviorism, most notably the widespread use of the survey instrument to elicit public opinion attitudes and responses. In this way, the behavioral revolution really brought the psychological underpinnings of political behavior to the forefront, and this type of research became largely incorporated into mainstream political science, while simultaneously shedding itself of any explicit association with psychological models. This work remained mostly restricted to the arena of U.S. politics in general, and the study of voting behavior in particular. However, when psychoanalytic theory collapsed as the dominant theory of human behavior in the wake of the behavioral revolution, the study of attitudes, action, and behavior did not fall away in political science in the same way that leadership studies had, precisely because of the incorporation of behavioral methods into the study of voting research.

The Limits Of Political Psychology For Other Subfields

Because the study of psychology and that of voting behavior both rest on models of individual behavior, their integration proved a match made in heaven. In addition, to the extent that applications of psychology to other subfields in political science took place at the level of the individual, progress and success remained possible. Most notable and influential in this regard was Robert Jervis’s seminal and definitive masterpiece, Perception and Misperception in International Relations (1976). However, many pressing questions in comparative and international politics occur at higher levels of analysis, thus requiring larger group-based notions of collective behavior in order to fully explicate underlying causal processes.

Over time within psychology, research in personality psychology declined in stature as its dominant model, psychoanalysis, waned in influence. In many departments, personality psychology no longer exists as a subfield, and in many others its adherents have been folded into clinical subfields. This movement away from deterministic theories of personality and behavior was only strengthened by the backlash against behaviorism that arose in the late 1960s, with the rise of humanist and existential perspectives, such as those advocated by such luminaries as Carl Rogers; this humanist emphasis then lasted through the rise of the cognitive revolution in the mid 1980s, and the later neuroscientific revolution of the last 1990s. As a result, psychology itself has become increasingly fractured. It thus became more difficult both for political science to keep up with quickly changing models of human behavior and to use and justify contentious models of personality in developing and testing their theories of leadership, group membership, or behavior.

The real challenge for political science subfields outside of U.S. politics to adopt psychological models in a widespread fashion results from the paucity of applicable group-based theories within psychology. Indeed, work in sociology may have proved more fruitful in such a pursuit, and, in fact, work in that area helped to spawn the introduction of constructivist models in international relations in the late 1980s. To the extent that any consensually accepted model of group behavior has emerged in psychology with relevance for political science, it is social identity theory, developed by Henri Tajfel. This theory offered two important insights. First, social identity theory posited that people automatically divide themselves and others into categories as a way to organize their social environments. People engage in a process of social comparison to determine the extent to which they are similar to, and different from, others they encounter. Second, Tajfel suggested that human motivation to divide into groups derived from the important self-esteem benefits derived from such membership. There are implicit psychodynamic motivational underpinnings inherent in this model.

Numerous experiments in this vein have demonstrated that individuals form groups easily on the basis of the most minimal reasons, and that once such membership becomes established, predictable differences in the distribution of resources between in-group and out-group members arise. For example, Jonathan Mercer invoked this theory to explain why interstate relations remain inherently competitive. Because of the consistency and robustness of the finding of in-group privilege concomitant with out-group denigration, much of this work concentrated on uncovering the origins of prejudice and discrimination. Social identity theory has been largely supplanted in psychology by self-categorization theory, where researchers stress the ways in which individuals maintain agency through their active choice over the number and intensity of their group memberships and identifications.

Because many political scientists remain interested in large-scale questions and problems related to identity, culture, and other important manifestations of political action, the challenges posed by external validity have limited the applicability of many psychological theories and methods based on experimental research. In U.S. politics, this limitation has been surmounted in large part by the use of survey instruments and other field experiments, including the innovative use of experiments embedded in nationally representative survey samples, which use large numbers of subjects, thus assuring the external validity and generalizability of findings. Most psychologists do not feel a need to solve problems associated with external validity in their studies because they are more interested in underlying processes of human decision making within a laboratory setting, where internal validity is much more crucial in establishing the reliability and validity of findings. Although models of group association or influence might interest some psychologists, methodological differences limit the reverse adoption of ideas and questions from political science into psychology. A few exceptions exist, such as work on the impact of minority positions on majority opinion, but such work remains relatively rare.

The Cognitive Revolution

The behavioral revolution began to lose ascendency in psychology in the late 1960s precisely because of the larger political phenomena occurring in society at large, especially the Vietnam War (1959–1975). Such overarching political pressures on intellectual development in academia have not been unusual. Indeed, the close interrelationship between much behavioral research and the pressing social and political problems of World War II and the cold war provided the impetus for a great deal of work in political psychology, offering both challenging questions, as well as funding to attempt to find answers. In fact, the work of Lasswell and Lewin, among others, came out of government-sponsored projects.

As interest in information processing blossomed in the context of improvements in artificial computing, the domain of investigation shifted from behavior to thought. This new emphasis on the former “black box” of decision making sparked the cognitive revolution in psychology that characterized the main work of the 1980s. As the field of psychology reconstituted itself to address certain specified problems, such as the nature of human information processing, at the expense of others, such as basic human drives and motivations, prospects for political applications remained more amenable in some subfields than in others. In particular, the study of leadership moved into the investigation of individual decision making. This coincided with a movement in U.S. politics away from elite leadership studies in favor of concentrating on mass public opinion and political behavior.

This cognitively oriented research reached its apex with the seminal and definitive contributions of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in their work on judgmental heuristics and prospect theory. This work documented the importance of the kind of framing effects noted in Zaller and Feldman’s work, along with the systematic way in which people’s estimates of probability and frequency become biased by assessments of similarity, availability, and anchoring. In work on prospect theory, which won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2004,Tversky and Kahneman showed experimentally that perceptions of gain and loss affect risk propensity in predictable ways, such that individuals confronting situations of loss appear much more likely to take risks than those more interested in consolidating gains. Prospect theory has been applied in political science most commonly in the subfield of international relations.

This cognitive work constituted the opposite end of the psychoanalytic pendulum, which located human action in motivated biases that unconsciously drive behavior. The cognitive model, working off the later-day machine analogy of the computer, instead delineated human biases that operated as a kind of bug in the psychological software, similarly unconscious in operation but divergent in their lack of motivation. Once people were told of the errors of their ways, they proved quick to recognize and admonish them, if not so capable of extinguishing them. Thus, “hot” motivated biases, rooted in primitive sexual and aggressive urges, were replaced by interest in “cold” cognitive biases, which predicted systematic errors in human decision making as the inherent side effect of largely effective and efficient cognitive strategies. More recent neuroscientific work has uncovered the artificial nature of this divide.

Advances In The Cognitive Neurosciences And Future Directions

In psychology, the pendulum began to swing back toward a renewed emphasis on emotion in the 1990s after Martin Seligman established a prestigious and lucrative prize for research in the area of positive psychology. This newfound concentration on the sources of happiness in particular coincided with the development and more widespread availability of new technologies, particularly functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which radically improved scientists’ ability to uncover and locate the neural mechanisms of human brain functioning. These advances in cognitive neuroscience have sparked the dawn of a new revolution. In combination with similar technological developments in the field of behavior genetics in particular, new avenues for exploring the biological bases of human social and political attitudes, preference, and behavior have emerged. Some of these methods have also been used in concert with other noninvasive techniques such as implicit association tests (IAT) and electroencephalograph (EEG) technology, which both provide measures of reaction time among other outputs.

Many of the empirical advances in the domain of the cognitive neurosciences have taken place in the context of theoretical perspectives drawn from human evolutionary development and behavior. While some of the older evolutionary models in political science impaled on the stake of social Darwinism and associations with racism, sexism, and other prejudices, the modern variants in biology and psychology attempt to develop ecologically valid models of human thought and behavior that remain rooted in evolutionary goals and strategies, but manifest empirically in demonstrable ways. The bottom-up empiricism of much work in the cognitive neurosciences finds an obvious theoretical exposition in evolutionary approaches. This interaction improves on previous models to provide a coherent theory of human thought and behavior. Also, like the perspective offered by psychoanalysis, evolutionary models provide comprehensive explanations for the interaction of the individual and larger society, rooted in essential reproductive tasks related to finding mates who are not relatives, and establishing coalitions to fight against those who challenge control over scare resources for survival. Although the nature and motives of the model differ, the comprehensive nature of their explanations should offer similar attractions for those who study political structures and behaviors. In combination with increasingly sophisticated work on the nature and manifestation of individual variance from within the field of behavior genetics, evolutionary models offer a theoretical and empirical basis to explore the nature of individual differences within a context of human universals.

Bibliography:

Adorno, Theodor, Else Frankel-Brunswick, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford. The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper, 1950.
Campbell, Angus, Philip E. Converse,Warren E. Miller, and Donald E. Stokes. The American Voter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960.
Etheredge, Lloyd. A World of Men. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978.
George, Alexander, and Juliette L. George. Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House: A Personality Study. New York: Dover, 1956.
Jervis, Robert. Perception and Misperception in International Relations. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976.
Kahneman, Daniel, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky. Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Lasswell, Harold. Psychopathology and Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930.
Lazarsfeld, Paul, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet. The People’s Choice. New York: Columbia University Press, 1968.
Tajfel, Henri. “Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations.” Annual Review of Psychology 33 (1982): 1–39.
Zaller, John. Nature and Origins of Mass Opinions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

This example Political Psychology Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.