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Political Psychology

Module description

Aristotle claimed that man was, by nature, a political animal. This course uses a broad range of tools and theories to evaluate such claims. We will explore methods from psychoanalysis all the way to more recent approaches such as genetic analysis and neuroimaging.  We will consider behavior in other species and ask if we are the only political animals. And, we will discuss what it means to be a political animal and how that informs the institutions that we can and should develop.

Module aims - intentions of the module

Beliefs about how people think about politics have been at the core of theories of politics since the ancients.  In this course, we will begin with a survey of important theories of political psychology from the past century.  We will focus mainly on hypotheses about how people develop their political attitudes and on the methods used to test those hypotheses.  Twentieth century researchers were constrained to observing behavior and relied on surveys, interviews, and simple experiments to make inferences about the political mind.  The second half of the course will look at the future of political psychology.  We will learn about cutting edge insights from fields like neuroscience, genetics, computational modeling, and evolutionary theory.  And, we will ask how those insights should inform our understanding of political cognition, affect, and behavior.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

ILO: Module-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 1. apply a wide variety of models of human decision-making, even in difficult contexts;
• 2. design and critically evaluate experiments testing hypotheses about human decision-making;

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 3. analyze a broad spectrum of research designs;
• 4. synthesize competing theories in order to apply them to novel social science problems;

ILO: Personal and key skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 5. understand the physiology of anxiety and how to manage it in order to improve their performance in challenging contexts;
• 6. employ an inductive writing method to facilitate more powerful communication; and
• 7. use the IRAC (Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion) method to more effectively respond to problems in both written and verbal contexts.

Syllabus plan

The course is roughly organized around “20^th Century” and “21^st Century” approaches to questions in Political Psychology:

20^th Century approaches

• Psychoanalytic Approaches
• Rational Choice Theory
• Philip Converse and His Legacy
• Schema Theory
• The Online Model
• Racial Attitudes
• Zaller’s RAS Model

21^st Century approaches

• Affective Intelligence
• Neuropolitics
• Evolution of Machiavellian Intelligence
• Genopolitics
• Race and Neuroscience
• Physiological measures

Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)

Details of learning activities and teaching methods

Formative assessment

Summative assessment (% of credit)

Details of summative assessment

Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)

Indicative learning resources - Basic reading

A General Theory of Love, Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, Richard Lannon (2000)  Vintage Press

The Nature and Origin of Mass Opinion John Zaller (1992) CambridgeUniversity Press

Your Brain is Built for Politics  Darren Schreiber (in review) Princeton University Press

Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences. John R. Hibbing, Kevin B. Smith, John R. Alford. (2013) Routledge Press.

Indicative learning resources - Web based and electronic resources

ELE – http://vle.exeter.ac.uk/

Key words search

Political Psychology; Comparative Politics