Question need to answer:

How scientific can political psychology be? Explain.

200 words, and include citations from the weekly readings (uploaded)

Two Responses to Peers:

100 words for each one

First one: How scientific can political psychology be?

I wasn’t aware that political psychology existed as a field until I enrolled in this class, but everything that I have read about the subject indicates that it is just as scientific as other fields of psychology. According to the Introduction to Political Psychology textbook, “The approach that political psychologists use to understand and predict behavior is the scientific method. This approach relies on four cyclical steps that a researcher repeatedly executes as he or she tries to understand and predict behavior” (Cottam, Mastors, Preston, & Dietz, 2016, p. 4). The steps are as follows: 1: making observations, 2: formulating tentative explanations, or hypotheses, 3: making further observations and experimenting, and 4: redefining and retesting explanations. Cottam goes on to describe how observational and experimental studies are important to our understanding of political psychology. 
 
In Chapter 7 of The Oxford Handbook, authors Sidanius and Kurzban provide many examples of this scientific rigor as it applies to evolutionary political psychology theory. They mention a large meta-analysis of observational studies about social dominance orientation (SDO) that included “118 independent reports of 206 independent samples, and employing 52,826 participants across 22 countries” (Huddy, Sears, & Levy, 2013, p. 222). They also cite experimental studies where researchers manipulate variables to make inferences about causes of behavior. Studies of the “out-group male target hypothesis” (OMTH) included experiments that found Swedish employers called back applicants with Arabic-sounding names (especially males) at a much lower rate than ones with Swedish-sounding names, and laboratory experiments finding that participants had higher fear responses to members of a different race. These are just a few examples of how political psychology is rooted in science. 

Works Cited

Cottam, M. L., Mastors, E., Preston, T., & Dietz-Uhler, B. (2016). Introduction to political psychology (3rd ed.). New York: Routledge.

Huddy, L., Sears, D. O., & Levy, J. S. (2013). The Oxford handbook of political psychology (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Second one:   Looking forward to the course, what topics are most interesting to you? Why?

              I am most interested in what we will be touching on towards the end of the term. The psychological dynamics terrorists, nationalists, and those who commit genocide. I’m of the volition you can’t combat a problem unless you understand it. We can make moral arguments till we are blue in the face about the immorality of such people. But if we want to an effort to combat the hearts and minds these people can corrupt, we must understand why they can corrupt in the first place.

How does ISIS convince a man to end his life via a suicide bomb to kill as many people as he can? How did Hitler, Stalin, and Mao rise to power to commit some of the greatest acts of murder this world has ever known? They must have had some appeal otherwise they would not have risen to those ranks. We can fight these people, but the battle is not done with just bullets and bombs, it is done with ideals and morality posturing means nothing unless we can truly empathize.

We have seen things like this play out here in the United States. Maybe we’ve never had a Mao or Hitler (yet), but our own citizens have supported corrupt leaders who have made false promises and have swayed a large chunk of voters to act against their own interest time and time again. Maybe this course will offer a few more pieces of the puzzle that my mind spins on constantly.

There is a dyadic relationship between the masses and the bodies that govern them. Political science has been woefully inadequate at understanding this dynamic in the past. Maybe with some of psychologies insights we can gain a better understanding of our past to manipulate our present to a better future.  The reason I care about this is that I do consider myself a patriot. I believe in the American ideal and I believe we can be a whole lot better the America we see today. But we cannot even get better unless we address the problems with the psychology of our country. Perhaps we will touch on that as well.

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