From the Archive, and Where does this image take you?

If this special issue on being political in divisive times has fired your psychological imagination, there are plenty of articles from The Psychologist and Research Digest in the online archive, exploring the connections between being political and psychology. 

For example, there are articles which show the advantages and disadvantages of political skills in the workplace, and which examine the psychology of politicians. Politicians may well have quite different personality types to the people they seek to represent, and fellow founding member of the Political Psychology Section, Peter Bull, finds in the November 2003 article Slippery Politicians that they can employ artful rhetorical ways to avoid answering the question. 

On the eve of the 2010 elections, editor Jon Sutton talked to Jo Silvester about what makes a good politician and how political leadership differs from other forms of leadership. And in the Research Digest during October 2018, Christian Jarrett reviewed the studies into my-side bias in an increasingly polarised world.  

These pieces sit alongside important critiques and reinterpretations of many of the classic in/outgroup studies into obedience and leadership, which often inform today's understanding of divisiveness and polarisation. Looking at Sherif's Robbers Cave studies, Gina Perry (November 2014) understands decision-making from the point of view of the boys who participated. 

Matthew Hollander (reported by Christian Jarrett, February 2015) explores the types of resistance to authority shown by Milgram's participants; and Steve Gibson (July 2015) questions whether the actions of Milgram's participants really amount to obedience. Mark Twain said, 'Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority you should pause and reflect', and Jolanda Jetten and Matthew Hornsey revisit Asch's conformity line studies, to interrogate the line between conformity and resistance.  

Epistemic considerations shape analytical categories, as noted in our guest editors' introduction.  Psychological ways of knowing often risk assuming that certain atomised highly individualised ways of living are normal, rather than simply dominant in our national contexts at the moment. Luis Gómez-Ordóñez and colleagues, in July 2021, work with Deanne Bell's piece in order to call on us to decolonise psychology, using studies and epistemic advances from across the globe. 

This will help us to question what may have become hegemonic, elegantly echoing the call made by John Raven in the November 1989 issue that psychology should 'contribute to the evolution of new concepts of democracy'.

Finally, above is the photo we referred to in our guest editors' introduction. I took it, and I'd like to offer it here with nothing more than the prompt: Where does this image take you?

Continue the conversation with the British Psychological Society's Political Psychology Section.

Kesi Mahendran