This module introduces students to the field of political psychology – an interdisciplinary approach to the study of politics that sits at the intersection of political science and psychology. Political psychologists tackle many important questions that cover a wide range of political subjects, such as:

• Are political preferences innate?
• Why are some people liberal whilst others are conservative?
• Why do people respond to the same political news in different ways?
• Why do political partisans hate each other?
• Are racism and discrimination inevitable?
• Why do people engage in political violence?
• Are political leaders normal people?

We will examine answers to these questions that draw on a wide range of theoretical and empirical approaches, from genetic inheritance and physiological predisposition, to the influence of social groups and motivated reasoning. We will meet thinkers as diverse as Sigmund Freud – who thought that humans are largely driven by hidden unconscious desires – and Daniel Kahneman, who thinks we are all trying to act rationally, but we’re not always very good at doing so.

In the first part of the course we will examine the major theoretical and empirical approaches to studying political psychology, drawing on genetics, physiology, and cognitive, social, and moral psychology. In the second part, we will apply the insights from these approaches to three important areas of politics: discrimination and inter-group conflict, terrorism and political violence, and the study of political elites.

We cannot separate our substantive knowledge of political psychology from the questions of how those conclusions were reached in the first place. We will examine a variety of methodological approaches in political psychology, with a particular focus on the use of experiments. We will learn to think critically about psychological – and non-psychological – research. Psychology is in the midst of a ‘replication crisis’, during which many cornerstone findings have been called into question. At the same time, political psychology has come under fire for what some see as a persistent anti-conservative bias. We will grapple with these issues throughout the course, before bringing them into sharp focus in our final week, when we will recap what we have learnt and debate the question of how much we can trust political psychology research.

The module assumes you have no previous familiarity with the field of psychology, though students who have previous studied psychology at some level are more than welcome.