Making sense of the world, challenging truths

As a youth, I was immersed in politics and the outcome of politics. Born in County Armagh in 1970, I was a child of the Northern Irish Troubles. I spent my youth trying to make sense of what I saw and heard on the streets, or through the nightly television news reports of hatred and violence surrounding me.

Indeed, many of my earliest memories are of the conflict – the British Army on the streets around my home, or passing through barriers and checkpoints on the walk to nursery school, my family experiencing intimidation and threats from the 'other' community, then doing a 'midnight flit' to a safer but more segregated area of the town. Thankfully, the last 30 years have seen huge changes and improvements in community relations as a result of the Peace Process, and hopefully, the recent restoration of the devolved Northern Ireland Assembly points to a more positive future.

For me, studying psychology, and in particular, studying under Ed Cairns, offered the opportunity to begin to understand these events and to challenge many of the 'truths' I had grown up to believe. It offered a means to make sense of the world around me and explore the psychological patterns that seemed to underpin the actions and attitudes I was witnessing in friends, family and strangers.

In a nutshell, political psychology aims to help us understand why political events unfold in the often messy and irrational ways in which they often do. Why is the Israeli/Palestinian conflict so brutal and entrenched? What is it about Putin's character that makes him want to continue a war in Ukraine when so many people are dying? Why do American Republican voters want Donald Trump back in the White House? Much of the behaviour of those engaged in these political events may seem at first sight to defy logic.

In an attempt to layer on reason and explanation, political psychology draws on theories and research from many branches of psychology, such as personality, psychoanalysis, developmental psychology, social psychology, cognitive psychology and intergroup relations. While it is at least officially, a relatively youthful branch of psychology, it has long roots stretching back to the formalising of psychology as a discipline, and beyond into philosophy, sociology, economics and other disciplines.

Roots and growth

The first university course in 'political psychology' was taught in 1970 by Jeanne Knutson. She wrote the first Handbook of Political Psychology three years later and was the driving force behind the inauguration of the International Society of Political Psychology in 1978, with the journal Political Psychology – which I now co-edit – following in 1979.

Clearly, though, there are deeper roots, reaching back to the inspirational work of political philosophers such as Niccolo Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes. The influences of the grand theories of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Webber are also clearly visible in many works of political psychologists.

Around the turn of the 20th century – through the work of Gustave Le Bon, and Sigmund Freud along with the founder of psychology in the USA, William James – we can begin to see the emergence of the first political psychology texts. The field really began to develop after the horrors of the First World War with Freud's conceptualisation of Thanatos, or death instinct; and biopsychological studies of the role of personality in politics, and in particular psychanalytical approaches to understanding political leaders.

Harold Laswell, the protégé of Charles Merriam from the University of Chicago, is often viewed as the founder of Political Psychology. Laswell's PhD thesis studied the use of propaganda during WWI and, was heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud, having undertaken psychoanalytical training. He applied Freudian theory and techniques in understanding 'political personality' and how the private lives of leaders displaced problems into the public sphere. Laswell published the first books intermeshing politics and psychology, with Psychopathology and Politics in 1930, and Power and Personality in 1948.

The post-war years saw a momentous growth in political psychology, with theorists and researchers struggling to make sense of the horror and destruction of World War Two and the Holocaust. Much of this endeavour was fuelled by researchers drawing on their experiences of the war, many of which were victimising. For example, Muzafer Sherif faced persecution and exile from Turkey due to his communist sympathies and beliefs, while Konrad Lorenz, a member of the Nazi party (an accusation he always denied), spent years as a prisoner of war after capture on the eastern front by the Red Army.

Many others had honed their methodological skills and ideas while supporting the war effort. So, it is no surprise that much research attempted to understand how individuals, groups or even seemingly whole nations could engage in murder and brutality on an industrial and genocidal scale. 

Indeed, some of the most famous studies and theories in psychology – such as Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments, Theodor Adorno and colleagues' study of The Authoritarian Personality published in 1950, or the Frustration-Aggression hypothesis from John Dollard et al. – were all attempts to directly understand obedience to authority, antisemitism and to provide a psychological understanding of the rise of fascism and the events leading to the Holocaust.

Likewise, there was a huge growth in interest in intergroup relations following World War II, with Muzafer and Carolyn Sherif's famous Robbers Cave experiments and the resulting Realistic Conflict Theory having an enduring impact on the field. Gordon Allport's 1954 book The Nature of Prejudice and the contact hypothesis added weight to the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education US Supreme Court decision which paved the way racial desegregation of US schools, and is still one of the main methods of improving intergroup relations employed across the world to this day.

The 1960s and 70s

The 1960s and early 1970s witnessed the American Civil Rights movement and growing discontent with race relations in the US, running alongside increasing ingroup tensions and challenges to the hegemony of the state through resistance movements globally. In particular, the 1968 protests and civil conflicts erupting across Europe and elsewhere coupled with the Anti-Vietnam protest movements fuelled an interest in intergroup relations and mass movements research.

Relative Deprivation Theory provided a useful lens to explore this era of protest. Rooted in sociologist Samuel Stouffer's Studies in Social Psychology in World War II: The American Soldier psychologists such as Ted Gurr and Garry Runciman employed the theory to understand the Civil Rights movement and race riots in the US, coupled with anxieties around class relations in the UK.

Also, during the 1960s and 70s there was a shift away from focusing on elite personality to focus on the mass population, and large-scale surveys of voting behaviour and political attitudes, such Angus Campbell et al.'s The American Voter (1960), which explored the importance of subjective psychological variables in determining voting behaviour. This consolidation of quantitative survey methods still heavily shapes the field of political psychology and the methodologies that are routinely employed today.

The Cold War and threat of nuclear armageddon pushed a focus towards international relations and conflict management. Ralph K. White's study of the mirror-image qualities of Soviet-US relations provided a critical viewpoint of international relations, and his work also aimed to make a difference through activism and critical engagement with governments. 

Likewise, Herb Kelman's passionate lifetime dedication to using psychology to understand and reduce conflict at international and intrastate levels, particularly through the use of track-two workshops in the Middle East, have inspired generations of scholar-practitioners who use psychology to attempt to build peace and positive community relations across the globe.

The 1970s also saw the birth of, in my opinion, the most elaborate and insightful theory to be used in political psychology, and the one which helped me to challenge many of the common truths I'd been led to believe about the conflict on my doorstep in Northern Ireland. Henri Tajfel, like many of his generation, had been profoundly affected by the events of World War Two. 

A Polish Jew who lost his family to the holocaust, he survived the war after only after being categorised as a French prisoner of war, rather than Jewish, due to him signing up to the French army at the outbreak of the war while a student of the Sorbonne. The development of Social Identity Theory from Tajfel's early minimal group studies exploring school boys' preferences for modern art in the early 1970s helped to propel the study of intergroup relations into the mainstream of social and political psychology. 

Since its inception and development, social identity approaches have been heavily used to understanding many of the seemingly intractable conflicts of the 20th and 21st centuries, such as Northern Ireland, South Africa and Israel/Palestine.

From the 1980s till today

Like the rest of the discipline, the cognitive revolution of the 1960s and 70s had an enduring impact on the direction of political psychology, both theoretically and methodologically. While it is premature to define the major contributions in this period, there has been much political activity to focus the minds of political psychologists. This includes ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, Rwandan genocide, the horror of 9/11, and the resulting endless war on terror and associated abuses such as those at Abu Ghraib.

Unfortunately, reflecting much of psychology, theory development has been unsystematic, particularly as researchers tend to focus on their area of interest. Likewise, some of the new emerging theories feel like the old ones, simply repackaged for a new audience and a new time.

Neuroscience has offered new techniques to look at the age-old problems of understanding political candidate evaluation, ideological difference, racial prejudice, political decision making and voting. No doubt, as technologies improve this field will further expand and begin to fulfil its early promise. 

A renewed focus on the role of emotion, fear and uncertainty have been important in shedding light on many of the challenges around radicalisation and the rise of populism and authoritarianism. Also, research on social norms, especially on promoting pro-social behaviour and challenging intergroup bias seems to offer a profitable route for research and the promotion of positive intergroup relationships and countering some of the challenges of climate change.

Towards the future

So, where is political psychology going? As co-chair of the forthcoming 47th Annual Scientific Meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology in Santiago Chile from 4-6 July 2024, the themes and submissions provide my personal crystal ball to illuminate the current focus of political psychologists and to attempt to glimpse at its future direction.

The conference theme is the decline of democracy and rights across the globe, and the insecurities caused by the rise in authoritarianism, the war in Ukraine, the ongoing crisis in the Middle East and the ever-growing climate crisis. Approximately 500 presenters across 100 panels will explore topics dealing with conflict and terrorism, gender and racial inequalities, international relations, intergroup relations, political opinion and political communications, political personality and leadership and identity.

So, while the subject area has expanded and the methodologies and theoretical paradigms have developed, the underlying reason for the study of political psychology stays the same. And that remains my own personal reason for loving life as a Political Psychologist after all this time – I'm still trying to understand the messy, irrational political world that challenges me every day.

Neil Ferguson is a Professor of Political Psychology at Liverpool Hope University. [email protected]