Political Psychology

Situations, Individuals, and Cases

David Patrick Houghton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135051778
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Idéologies politiques

What shapes political behavior more: the situations in which individuals find themselves, or the internal psychological makeup---beliefs, values, and so on---of those individuals? This is perhaps the leading division within the psychological study of politics today. Political Psychology: Situations, Individuals, and Cases, 2nd edition, provides a concise, readable, and conceptually organized introduction to the topic of political psychology by examining this very question. Using this situationism--dispositionism framework—which roughly parallels the concerns of social and cognitive psychology—this book focuses on such key explanatory mechanisms as behaviorism, obedience, personality, groupthink, cognition, affect, emotion, and neuroscience to explore topics ranging from voting behavior and racism to terrorism and international relations. The new edition includes a new chapter on the psychology of the media and communication. Houghton has also updated the text to analyze recent political events such as the 2012 election, and to include up-and-coming research in the areas of neuroscience, behavioral economics, and more. Houghton's clear and engaging examples directly challenge students to place themselves in both real and hypothetical situations which involve intense moral and political dilemmas. This highly readable text will provide students with the conceptual foundation they need to make sense of the rapidly changing and increasingly important field of political psychology.

Chapter 1

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Two Conceptual Schemes or Distinctions

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What we know (or think we know) about political behavior is changing rapidly, mostly because our understanding of how the brain itself works and how the mind and body affect one another is being transformed. Our popular conception of the supposed “rationality” of human beings—in which our actions are the outcome of conscious thought and deliberation, and where such rational thought trumps (or ought to take precedence over) “wayward” emotions—has been popular at least since the eighteenth century. It has long had an instinctive appeal with philosophers and the person in the street alike. But it is increasingly being challenged by advances in neurobiology and neuroscience, building in a more and more radical way on a critique which began in earnest with the birth of psychology as a field in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

As the cognitive linguist George Lakoff points out, this standard view of human decision-making is very much a product of a historical period we commonly term “the Enlightenment.” During the eighteenth century, “reason” triumphed over “tradition.” In politics, monarchies were increasingly replaced by republics (and later liberal democracies) in the West, and religion was challenged by science and secularism. Although this period of human history certainly represented a great advance on what had gone before, Lakoff suggests, it had one major downside: it saddled us with a way of thinking about human reasoning and decision-making that we now know to be misleading. We implanted a vision of ourselves as highly reasoned and rational, but modern cognitive science and political psychology fundamentally challenge that. “Most of us think we know our own minds. This is because we engage in conscious thought, and it fills much of our waking life,” Lakoff notes.

But what most people are not aware of, and are sometimes shocked to discover, is that most of our thought—an estimated 98 percent—is not conscious. It is below the level of consciousness. It is what our brains are doing that we cannot see or hear … Your brain makes decisions for you that you are not consciously aware of.¹

We may feel as if we are rational beings, but advances in neuroscience are challenging our understanding of ourselves and the extent to which we “know our own minds.” In particular, the idea that emotion is not usually a destructive force but actually essential to reasoned decision-making is beginning to take hold in the study of political psychology. As Rose McDermott puts it:

Most of us are taught from early on that logical, rational calculation forms the basis of sound decisions … we assume that emotions can only interfere with this process … But what if we were wrong about the general impact of emotion on decision making? What if, most of the time, emotion serves a productive function, providing the foundation for swift and accurate decision making? What if emotion assumed equal, or even primary, status in generating choice?²

We will have more to say about this transformation in our understanding of behavior later on, especially when we discuss the topics of emotion and neuroscience in more depth. But for now we should note that this radical critique ultimately calls into question the notion that we are even conscious agents making choices, and challenges the notion that we can somehow divorce feelings and emotions from decision-making. More broadly, this point about how we commonly assume that human beings make decisions and how they actually do gives rise to the first distinction that we’ll use in this book, between what are commonly called Homo economicus and Homo psychologicus. It is also rather useful, I shall suggest, to distinguish between two more general approaches to understanding political behavior, situationism and dispositionism; in other words, is our behavior most often a product of the situations in which we find ourselves, or do our basic predispositions about the world fundamentally shape the ways in which we react to it? We’ll take each conceptual distinction in turn.

Homo Economicus and Homo Psychologicus (or “Econs” and “Humans”)

Traditionally, psychology has provided only one set of approaches to understanding what drives political behavior, for the development of modern political science has been influenced by economics as well. At present, two models of decision-making still dominate our thinking about political behavior, one derived from economics, the other derived from psychology. Each is summarized in Table 1.1.

Table 1.1 A summary of the features of the Homo economicus and Homo psychologicus models

Homo economicus • Humans are fully rational actors. • They possess perfect information. • Derived from microeconomics. • Actor maximizes “subjective utility.” • Actor weighs up the costs and benefits of various actions. • He/she then selects the option that delivers the greatest benefits relative to cost (optimal choice). • Actors update their beliefs when new information becomes available.

Homo psychologicus • “Boundedly rational” actor. • Actors do not possess perfect information. • There are limits to human beings’ processing abilities. • Derives from social and cognitive psychology, and from neuroscience. • Actor “satisfices” instead of maximizes utility. • He/she employs various cognitive short cuts in order to manage “information overload” or a shortage of information. • Actors fail to update their beliefs, even when new information becomes available. • Group and broader social pressures may lead the actor to behave in non-rational ways, even contrary to his/her beliefs and values.

One point of contention between the two views is that while the Homo economicus model holds that actors update their views when new information becomes available, Homo psychologicus maintains that they very often do not. One classic approach within the latter camp that we’ll discuss later in the book is called “cognitive consistency” theory, and it’s especially well illustrated by the Marian Keech story, which shows what typically happens “when prophecy fails.” During the early 1950s, the psychologist Leon Festinger infiltrated what we would nowadays call a religious cult. Its leader, “Marian Keech”—her name was changed in Festinger’s book to protect her identity—was predicting that the world would soon come to a cataclysmic end, and she specifically predicted that this would happen on December 21, 1954. She also prophesied (rather dramatically) that a flying saucer would pick up the “true believers” the day before, thus saving them from the devastation which would befall the “sinners” who remained.

Many members of the group had a lot to lose if Keech’s prediction was wrong; they had sold their houses and given up their jobs and their savings in preparation for the coming of the space ship. But for Festinger, this scenario represented a godsend. He knew that the prophecy would fail, and he was thus presented with a golden opportunity to observe how people react psychologically when a prediction in which they ardently believe turns out to be untrue. Unlike them, he knew that the flying saucer would never show up. How would they handle the news, though? What would they do? In the event, when the saucer failed to show, Keech (conveniently) had a new “vision from God” shortly before 5am on the 21st, saying that “everyone was saved.” The group members then rationalized away the evidence that they had been wrong all along, and for some the saucer’s non-appearance even strengthened their belief in the cult! While it would be easy to dismiss the members of the group as mad or unhinged, Festinger’s view was that this incident actually illustrates a very common and very normal psychological tendency.³ While Homo economicus suggests that we just update our beliefs when our theories are disconfirmed, Festinger argued that in reality we usually just find a way to ignore or discount dissonant information. We bring things back into balance, in other words, by coming up with some sort of psychologically comforting rationalization or excuse.

Homo economicus—often referred to simply as “rational choice” or the “rational actor” approach—constitutes a somewhat popular approach to the understanding of political behavior. However, it is not (at least in the author’s view) properly considered an approach to political psychology. Although there has long been talk of combining the psychological and economistic approaches somehow to construct a single unified theory, no one has so far succeeded in doing so. Certainly, there have been efforts by rational choice theorists in particular to make their assumptions more realistic, but the great strength of Homo economicus is arguably that it provides a way of simplifying human behavior in a way designed to make the latter more or less predictable. Many economists use it as a set of simplifying assumptions in the full knowledge that these assumptions are not realistic, but utilize them nevertheless in the expectation that they will generate powerful models and predictions. As soon as the complexity and greater realism of Homo psychologicus is conceded, however, it becomes clear that much of human behavior is idiosyncratic and unpredictable. In any case, the remainder of this book focuses on the latter model, and though Homo economicus will frequently be referred to in what follows, it will mainly be used as a foil to Homo psychologicus. Unlike the former, political psychology as a field is highly empirical: it is concerned with describing and explaining how political agents actually do behave, and not primarily with how they ought to, or with making simplifying assumptions about reality.⁴ As we shall see, however, there is a great deal of disagreement among political psychologists as to what that reality looks like.

It’s worth pointing out here that Homo economicus is even being challenged within economics itself, by a field of that discipline which its advocates call behavioral economics (and increasingly by advocates for “neuroeconomics” too). The term “behavioral” is significant here; it is a reference to the fact that some economists have become disenchanted with making unrealistic assumptions about how people might (or ought to) behave, wishing to focus instead on how they really do behave and drawing on Homo psychologicus in doing so. One pioneer of this subfield, Richard Thaler, often distinguishes between what he calls “Econs” and “Humans.”⁵ “Econs” are logical, consistent, and fully rational; their preferences do not change, and they act in selfish ways to obtain what they know they want. “Humans,” on the other hand, are far less rational, often act in selfless (rather than selfish) ways, and are not at all sure what they want or what they will do. Paradoxically, then, there is at least one branch of Economics nowadays which does not follow the teachings of Homo economicus.

“My Brain Made Me Do It”

Until very recently, the critique of Homo economicus has been inspired mostly by the perspective of the cognitive psychology of the 1970s and 1980s. In recent years, though, that critique has been much further developed—as we have already noted—by discoveries within neuroscience or the study of the human brain. Neuroscience has uncovered further ways in which individual decisionmakers depart from pure rationality. For instance, it has been discovered that much reasoning is undertaken by the unconscious brain, long before we are ever aware of “making” a decision. Some experiments have been conducted which suggest that a quarterback’s unconscious brain “knows” that he is going to throw the ball to the left (or right) side of the field before he does, or that the brain of a soccer player taking a penalty knows that he will kick the ball to (say) the right side of the goal, before he is consciously aware of having made that decision. It has also been found that we don’t necessarily know what our own preferences are before making a decision, and that those preferences can be altered by purely presentational factors.

These findings actually predate the widespread availability of MRI machines. In the 1980s, Benjamin Libet and his colleagues hooked his subjects up to an EEG machine—a device which measures brain activity—and asked them to simply raise their finger at a time of their own choosing. Using a timer, the subjects were asked to push a button at the exact moment they decided to move. Libet and his colleagues found that there was a slight delay between consci...