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Home , Political psychology, The Lucifer Effect

What is Political ?

Rajiv S. Jhangiani, Kwantlen Polytechnic University Peter Suedfeld, University of British Columbia

Reference: Suedfeld, S., & Jhangiani, R. (forthcoming). What is ? In O. Feldman & S. Zmerli (Eds.), Politische Psychologie: Handbuch für Studium und Wissenschaft [Political Psychology: Handbook for Study and Science]. Baden-Baden, Germany: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft.

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What is Political Psychology?

Politics permeates the world, and in the broad sense probably had done so even before human beings came on the stage. If has to do with such phenomena as power, access to resources, group cohesion, relations with other groups, and the like, then certainly pre-hominids too engaged in political behavior

(as most animals still do). As for Homo sapiens, we have engaged in political activities as far back as our records and even legends show, and much of our present time is devoted to them. In fact, although in times past people tried to draw a line between their private lives and their politics, some ideologically committed people go so far as to argue that even the personal is political. This is, obviously, an untestable assertion of belief, albeit one that shows the importance of politics in the minds of some. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that the issues mentioned above are relevant to every phase of human interaction from the family up through the global international community.

Philosophers appear to have considered the role of psychology in political behavior long before psychology emerged as a discipline, as indicated by perspectives ranging from Plato’s prescription for disinterested and justice-seeking philosopher-kings to Machiavelli’s pragmatic, amoral analysis of an early form of

Realpolitik -- advice prescribing how a leader can succeed by deceiving, manipulating, and when appropriate, destroying those who have challenged him or might do so in the future. What is often ignored is that Machiavelli, too, meant his advice to be taken in the pursuit of good . But although such topics are well within the concerns of today’s political , contemporary political 3 psychology is a much broader enterprise. As the interdisciplinary study of the psychological aspects of human political behavior, political psychology “explores the border that runs between the intellectual nations of and psychology” (Jost & Sidanius, 2004, p. 1). In doing so it encompasses such topics as electoral politics, the of public , , elite decision-making, , personality and political , political violence, and .

Political psychology addresses the political behaviors of the elite as well as the masses, in both cases exploring the reciprocal determinism between political behavior, individual psychology, and the political context. Thus Marx’s revolutionary , Freud’s notion of Thanatos, or death instinct, and the research of

Adorno and his colleagues on the development of authoritarianism can all be seen as products of their respective political contexts as much as they fueled political discourse for decades to come.

Political psychology considers personal and environmental factors as intertwined rather than as distinct influences, with the psychology of the individual nested within the many layers of their political context. We cannot presume to understand the political behavior of either a Chancellor or a terrorist without first studying his or her personality, situational constraints, prevailing social and cultural norms, and the wider economic, historical, and geopolitical context. Understanding political behavior in turn allows us to make predictions, including, for example, about the likely impending decisions and actions of individual political actors. Of 4 course, given the vagaries and multiple determinants of human behavior, those predictions are not necessarily correct.

Finally, as with all of science, with understanding and prediction comes the ability to influence, including, for example, through developing effective re- campaign strategies or de-radicalization programs.

Who are Political Psychologists?

Within the general discipline of psychology, political psychologists include a diverse group of social, personality, developmental, organizational, environmental, clinical, evolutionary, and more recently neuropsychologists. Their theoretical foundations come from all sources: , , , existential psychology, and others. However, although the field principally involves the application of psychological knowledge, not all political psychologists are psychologists. Many in the field identify themselves as political scientists, sociologists, economists, historians, literary critics, psychiatrists, media experts, legal scholars, policy analysts, or military strategists.

As a result, the methods employed by political psychologists vary as widely as their disciplinary affiliations and topics of study, running the gamut from quantitative and statistical to qualitative and narrative, and including laboratory and field experiments, , surveys, longitudinal studies, meta- analyses, interviews, and case studies. Although this may appear chaotic at first, the diversity within the field and the resultant ability to draw on insights from a multitude of disciplines and specialties is arguably one of the great strengths of political psychology. 5

The premier organization in the field is the International Society of Political

Psychology (ISPP). It was founded in 1978, and has reached a membership of more than 800 at the present time. Those members come from all of the disciplines enumerated earlier, and from all over the world. To enhance its multinational reach, the ISPP moves its annual meetings around the world, rotating around North

America (including the U.S., Canada, and Mexico), Europe, and locations outside both of those. This enables political psychologists and interested students living anywhere to attend conferences at least occasionally with relatively little cost or travel.

The diversity of the field and its outlets is also reflected in the wide patterns of origins of its adherents and their global concerns. For instance, an analysis of the last five years of issues of Political Psychology (January 2010 – December 2014) reveals that about half of the empirical articles published each year were written by researchers from outside the United States and Canada, including from countries in

Western and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, South America, Asia, Africa, and

Australasia. Topics addressed during this period included victimhood experiences in

Northern Ireland, competitive victimhood in Kosovo, anti-Semitism among

American Jews, Romaphobia among Serbian adolescents, religious bias in Côte d’Ivoire, hereditary rights in England, indigenous rights in Chile, political participation in South Korea, political trust in China, Palestinian autobiographical memories, social cohesion in the Israeli military, and an evolutionary account of

Kamikaze suicide attacks. The diversity of this list alone attests to the heterogeneity 6 and wide-ranging applications of the discipline, factors that also make it difficult to point to a common core.

If political psychology has any general theoretical foundation, it may be its acceptance of ’s famous formulation that behavior is a function of the interaction between the person and the environment [B = f (P x E)], or to put it another way, between internal and external factors. Relevant internal factors include personality traits, temperament, heredity, demographic characteristics, attitudes, beliefs, ideology, values, temporary states such as mood, emotional and physiological arousal, energy level, and health; external ones include the physical, social, political, and informational environment.

Thus, for example, voters’ level of conservatism vs. liberalism is a product of earlier learning, the opinions of their social circle, their gender, age, and socioeconomic class, stable personality components (e.g., , adventurousness, altruism, threat tolerance), philosophy of life, religious beliefs, and – according to some new data – genetic makeup. In turn, conservatism/liberalism interacts with economic conditions, international threat, the perceived personality of political leaders and media coverage to affect the person’s reaction to social and political programs and candidates.

This general interactive expression can fit a wide variety of specific theories and models, although the relative roles of the internal and external components are weighted differently from one theory to the next. For example, The Authoritarian

Personality (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswick, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950), a seminal work in political psychology, argues that child-rearing customs in families and 7 cultures are primarily responsible for people’s susceptibility to Fascist propaganda and that emphasize submissiveness to authority figures, hostility toward dissenters and “outsider” ethnic groups, and aversion to change and uncertainty.

Although external forces are paramount in shaping the individual’s outlook, the result is internalized. The now internal characteristic takes on a life of its own to produce not only a preference for an ethnocentric, orderly, unquestioning, top- down sociopolitical structure but for similar preferences in the workplace, in morality, entertainment, and in the next generation of the family.

Interestingly, a sketch of this interactionist perspective can be found alongside the first mention of the term “political psychology,” over 150 years ago in the title of Volume 3 of the magnum opus of Adolf Bastian (1860). Bastian was a

German pioneer of modern and ethnology, whose work in some ways foreshadowed some aspects of present-day political psychology. For example, he believed that a science of human beings was possible: he compared the role of psychology in the study of human thinking to those of chemistry and physics in the study of inanimate matter, and plant and animal physiology in the study of organic life. He argued that human groups, not individuals, were the proper level of analysis, and believed that there were universals in human psychology, but that local traditions and conditions affected the expression of those universals [B = f (P x E)].

What do Political Psychologists do?

It is no coincidence that the topics of study in political psychology tend to reflect the interests and accumulated expertise of its intellectual predecessor, (e.g., persuasion, decision-making, , prejudice, 8 aggression, etc.). However, the boundaries of political psychology are much further apart than those of its forebear; its subject matter too varied, chaotic, and without a firm consensual common core to clearly define its limits, other than to say that its proponents deal with some intersect between psychology and politics. As a result, perhaps the most truthful (if unhelpful) answer to the question “What is political psychology?” must simply be “What political psychologists do.”

One guide to the contents of the field may be to look at the topics covered in its three most inclusive published compendia: the Handbook of political psychology

(Knutson, 1973), its follow-up volume, Political psychology (Hermann, 1986), and the Oxford handbook of political psychology (Huddy, Sears, & Levy, 2013), as well as in the Table of Contents of this book.

Gleaning from the first three of the volumes, we find some topics represented in all three. All have some kind of summary of the of the field, and substantive reviews of the relevant aspects of , individual and and socialization, attitudes and beliefs, political ideology, leadership, decision-making, conflict (including political violence and war) and conflict resolution, and , and mass behavior.

Voter behavior and attitudes, which represent a very active area in the field, are discussed even where they do not have a chapter with that specific title.

The Hermann book has unique chapters on protest movements and terrorism and on how Americans judge their presidents, as well as an overview of political psychology in Latin America, Western Europe, and Asia. Interestingly, it does not include such an overview of Israeli political psychology, one of the liveliest 9 outside North America. Its chapter on biopolitics includes considerations of what we can learn from studying the behavior of other animals, possible biological influences on political behavior, and an early appreciation of physiological measurements such as changes in blood pressure and heart rate. These forecast the now growing use of more sophisticated measures, such as brain imaging, in the attempt to find underlying concomitants of attitudes, interests, and information processing.

The Oxford handbook reflects recent developments in science and in psychology as a whole, with separate chapters on evolutionary and genetic aspects of political behavior, communications, rhetoric, social justice, and migration and multicultural issues. Chapters on and/or appear in all three handbooks; Knutson’s, in addition, has a section devoted to research methodology, with chapters on the use of surveys, experiments, simulations, and projective techniques.

Comparing the contents of the current volume with its three predecessors, we see a great deal of overlap. Given that all of the books strive to give the reader an overview of the field, this is obviously unavoidable. But this collection not only presents a more comprehensive and up-to-date review, it is also much more international in its coverage. Carrying the global view further than their predecessors, these chapters pay considerable attention to work done outside North

America. In addition, the book includes a chapter specifically examining the relationship between political psychology and culture. As illustrated by our earlier analysis of articles published in Political Psychology, these features are very much in step with the current state of the field. 10

Political vs. Politicized Psychology

Can one “do” political psychology without the work itself becoming a political act? A major issue that roils many sciences, but perhaps political psychology more than most other branches of our mother disciplines, is the place of non-scientific values in scientific theory and research. Most scientists profess that science can explore what was and what is, and its discoveries can affect what will be; but it cannot establish what should be. After all, the question of what is “the good” is not one that research can answer; that is the realm of philosophy and religion, and of politics itself. For example, between Plato and Machiavelli, there is no scientific basis on which to choose. It all depends on whose goals the reader agrees with, whose methods the reader accepts as ethical or moral. In other words, it depends on one’s own political persuasion.

The relative security of this position is shaken, however, by suggestions that even the process of science is often infused with subjectivity and , whether by (politically driven) sources of funding constraining the choice of research topic, statistical analyses being influenced by subtle decisions concerning appropriateness and shadier ones that lead to “p hacking” (e.g., running additional participants until statistical significance is attained), the so-called “file drawer problem” (null results remaining unpublished), the choice of publication outlet influencing the final shape of the written report, and the biases of reviewers and editors who decide whether a piece of research ever sees the light of day. As Tetlock

(1994) noted, “it makes little sense to be claiming to be engaged in the scientific pursuit of causal understanding when the answers have been determined in 11 advance or when certain ways of even posing questions are proscribed. Science presupposes a degree of open-mindedness that strong political commitments preclude” (p. 515). Given the nature of their work, political psychologists should therefore be especially careful to minimize the impact of their political bias on their research designs and reasoning.

Of course, the potential effects of bias in all science are attenuated through self-regulation, methodological rigor, blind , and efforts to replicate findings. In political psychology, these efforts have been vindicated by the field’s sizeable body of reliable and valid findings. Nonetheless, the lack of political diversity represented in the field represents a significant potential source of bias.

Indeed, the social sciences in general, including the entire field of psychology, are arguably less politically diverse than ever (Duarte, Crawford, Stern, Haidt,

Jussim, & Tetlock, 2014). The most recent data to this effect come from a recent survey of social and personality psychologists, which found that only 6% described themselves as conservative “overall;” that conservatives feared revealing their political beliefs to their colleagues; and that the most liberal respondents were especially likely to indicate that they would discriminate against conservative colleagues in hiring and publication decisions (Inbar & Lammers, 2012). According to Duarte and his colleagues (2014), although the lack of diversity and associated political prejudice do not necessarily threaten the validity of specific studies, they do undermine the collective enterprise of scientific advancement by embedding liberal values and assumptions into theory and method, narrowing the focus of topics to those that validate a liberal worldview, and mischaracterizing the traits and 12 attributes of conservatives in . As Tetlock (1994) famously argued, “the road to scientific hell is paved with good moral intentions.”

Two Cautionary Tales

A good example of how research in political psychology can be distorted into a morality tale is that of a seminal book, The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al.,

1950). Adorno et al. pioneered what has become perhaps the field’s most widely accepted concept and terminology. “Authoritarianism,” “authoritarian personality,” and their variants are frequently used in the mass media and in public discourse. As one example, a Google search shows over 11 million references to the former and over one million to the latter.

Often, the terms are used pejoratively: calling a , a policy, or a government “authoritarian” frequently implies a dictatorial, closed-minded, stodgy, simplistic, and more often than not reactionary position. However, using

“authoritarian” this way shows that the user is overlooking the complicated nature of the original work. Adorno et al.’s book provided an exhaustive presentation (989 pages) of a multi-method personality theory, which collected data from four newly developed attitude scales, a projective test, and interviews of differing depth and intensity1. The nature of the subject population was also uniquely diverse, including

American university students of various majors and studying in various cities and institutions, professional women, service club men, psychiatric patients, convicts, merchant marine officer candidates, members of labor unions, office workers, volunteers of church groups, women’s clubs, and more.

1 See Suedfeld (2006) for a review. 13

The co-optation of the concept of authoritarianism has arguably been facilitated by the research and writings of Altemeyer (1981, 2006), who distilled and built on the earlier work of Adorno et al. before choosing to rebrand the concept of authoritarianism as “Right-Wing Authoritarianism” (RWA). Now understood as a constellation of three personality traits – a high degree of submission to established authorities, high levels of aggression as agents of those authorities, and a rigid adherence to conventional norms – RWA has more to do with cognitive rigidity than an individual’s specific political beliefs (Crowson, Thoma, & Hestevold, 2005;

Duncan & Peterson, 2014). As a result, where the traditional authorities are communist or socialist regimes, persons scoring high in “Right-Wing

Authoritarianism” would in fact be political left-wingers. At best, this is confusing; at worst, it is an attempt at redefining by naming. In either case, it has served the political agenda of perpetuating an association between a conservative worldview and intolerance, despite the fact that the data clearly show this to be an illusory correlation (e.g., Crawford & Pilanski, 2014).

A second prominent example of politically distorted reasoning concerns the frequently cited Stanford Prison study (Haney, Banks, & Zimbardo, 1973). As is well known, in the summer of 1971 and his students out to better understand the psychological dynamics of a prison environment, for both prisoners and guards. They set up a mock prison environment in the basement of the psychology department at Stanford University and placed an advertisement in a local newspaper to recruit male college students interested in participating in a

“psychological study of prison life” that would last up to two weeks. A variety of 14 psychological and other tests were administered to the 75 volunteers who applied to participate in the study. On the basis of their scores on these tests and a desire to obtain the most normal sample possible, 24 young men were invited to participate in the study. This group was then randomly assigned to play the role of either a prison guard or a prisoner. The prisoners were “arrested” by real police officers, booked, disrobed, deloused, and made to wear a degrading outfit. The guards, following an orientation session, ran the prison in shifts of three (eight hours per shift), with Zimbardo himself in the role of the prison superintendent.

Although it was planned to last for two weeks, the study was shut down after just six days, largely due to the physical and psychological abuse of the prisoners perpetrated by the guards, including grueling physical exercise drills (e.g., push- ups), sleep deprivation, and exposure to unsanitary conditions (e.g., being forced to eat food off the floor, or to clean toilet bowls with their bare hands).

In addition to serving as a grim reminder to the field of the importance of adhering to ethical guidelines when conducting research with humans, the Stanford

Prison study is also widely touted as an example of the “power of the situation” to overwhelm individual dispositions. In Zimbardo’s words, “it’s not that we put bad apples in a good barrel. We put good apples in a bad barrel. The barrel corrupts anything that it touches” (Schwartz, 2004). Indeed, this argument has been made repeatedly by Zimbardo, in journal articles, op-ed pieces, testimony before congressional committees, and even in defense of a military officer during court- martial proceedings following his abuse of Iraqi POWs at Abu Ghraib prison. In case there was any doubt concerning the nature of the political bias on display, in recent 15 years Zimbardo has gone on to describe the role of the “rotten barrel-maker” in producing the toxic environment that in turn breeds antisocial behavior, in the process identifying individuals such as former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald

Rumsfeld as ultimately responsible for the abuse of prisoners that occurred at Abu

Ghraib (Zimbardo, 2007).

Unfortunately, this tale, although a compelling one, does not stand up to empirical scrutiny, as evidence suggests that dispositional forces played a significant role in determining the behavior of participants in the Stanford Prison study. This includes the strong likelihood that self-selection played a role in determining who volunteered for the study (Carnahan & McFarland, 2007), that prisoners who were less authoritarian were far more likely to drop out early, and that the participants showed widely differing patterns of behavior within the simulated prison environment (Haney et al., 1973; Haslam & Reicher, 2012). As such, rather than being an exemplar case of the “power of the situation,” a more objective analysis of the study takes us right back to Lewin’s interactionism (Haslam & Reicher, 2007).

Looking to the Future

With its universal scope, diversity of perspectives, wide applicability, and growing recognition of its value, the future of political psychology looks bright. One area that holds especially great promise involves research into the evolutionary, behavioral genetic, neurological, and hormonal underpinnings of political behavior, as highlighted by a special issue of Political Psychology (Hatemi & McDermott,

2012). 16

For example, recent studies in the new field of political neuroscience have found that greater liberalism is associated with increased gray matter volume

(Kanai, Feilden, Firth, & Rees, 2011) and greater activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (Amodio, Jost, Master, & Yee, 2007) whereas greater conservatism is associated with increased volume of the right amygdala (Kanai et al., 2011) and heightened skin conductance responses in response to negative images (Oxley et al.,

2008). We have also learned that stronger bilateral amygdala activation occurs when people view the face of their preferred candidate (Rule et al., 2010), that individuals with a variant of the MAOA gene are significantly more likely to vote

(Fowler & Dawes, 2008), and that identical twins are far more similar in their political preferences than same-sex fraternal twins (Verhulst, Hatemi, & Martin,

2010).

A major strength of this kind of research is that it often involves the use of sophisticated techniques (e.g., fMRI, ERP) that result in precise, objective measurements that are less prone to self-presentational biases (Jost, Nam, Amodio,

& Van Bavel, 2014). When used in tandem with the more traditional methods of the field, these techniques allows for a deeper and multi-layered understanding of the correlates of political behavior.

On the other hand, one unintended negative effect of the neurobiological revolution has been the dismaying rise in loose talk about a variety of politically- relevant attitudes and behaviors being “hardwired,” including empathy (Olson,

2013), faith (Hamer, 2004), morality (Tancredi, 2005), intergroup bias (Ashburn-

Nardo, Voils, & Monteith, 2001), trust and economic behavior (Ebstein, Israel, Chew, 17

Zhong, & Knafo, 2010), and political ideology (Thomas, Loetscher, Clode, & Nicholls,

2012).

This simplistic and overly-reductionist view mistakes correlational for causal evidence (the “chicken-and-egg problem”; Jost et al., 2014), preys on the natural tendency of many to assume a dispositional cause for observable behavior (the

“correspondence bias; ”Gilbert & Malone, 1995), and ignores the wider social, cultural, economic, historical, and political contexts, leading to an impoverished and inaccurate of political behavior as inevitable.

In response, many prominent political neuroscientists (e.g., Haidt & Joseph,

2011; Jost et al., 2014; Miller & Keller, 2000; Verhulst et al., 2010) have taken great pains to point out that genes do not play a direct causal role in behavior. As

Hatemi, Eaves, and McDermott (2012) put it:

Genes provide the platform for the synthesis of proteins that then trigger

neurological, physiological, and hormonal processes that have cognitive and

emotional consequences that guide behavior. Thus genes do not ‘determine’

behavior. Rather, genes influence behavior indirectly, and behavior in turn

influences gene expression, which then instigates neurochemical processes

that interact with the environment in a reciprocal manner to continually

modify behaviors. (p. 351)

The relationship between brain activity and behavior is similarly complex and ill-understood. Even when specific political behaviors are found to be associated with elevated activity in specific regions of the brain, the complexity of such behavior necessarily involves coordination between multiple neural systems (Jost et 18 al., 2014). Moreover, the current state of the field does not permit any degree of certainty about whether a coordinated pattern of activity can be taken as evidence of the activation, inhibition, cause, mediation, or even the effect of political behavior.

Given the fledgling state of the field, the cautious approach would be to assume bidirectionality in the relationship between neural activity and behavior and to employ a multi-methods approach to cracking the chicken-and-egg problem (Jost,

Noorbaloochi, & Van Bavel, 2014).

Final Thoughts

Political psychology is a theoretically rich, methodologically diverse, geographically widespread, and widely applicable discipline that carries the potential to help understand and address some of our world’s most pressing challenges, including conflict escalation, political and religious radicalization, ethnocentrism, and genocide and other ethno-political violence.

Whereas the storied history of the discipline provides inspiration through the immense contributions of towering figures, the interdisciplinary nature of the field equips it well to test novel hypotheses using creative methods. In order to come close to achieving its potential, however, researchers must be careful to learn from and avoid the missteps of the past. In particular, political psychologists must remain vigilant of the encroachment of political bias into the various stages of the research process.

The late Professor Neal Miller of Yale University was fond of saying, “We must be bold in what we try, but cautious in what we claim” (Spellman, DeLoache, & 19

Bjork, 2007, p. 177). Future political psychologists would do well to follow this sage advice. 20

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