1. Political Psychology: Introduction and Overview

2. Why study political psychology
Why do people behave the way they do in politics?
What causes conflicts such as those in Bosnia, Rwanda?
Is racism inevitable?
Why do presidents make the decisions they do?

3. People start wars who have lived together harmoniously: Yugoslavia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Syria
Barbaric violence one another
Groups commits act of terrorism

4. Without understanding the feeling of the people who make decisions to commit acts it is difficult to understand why those things occurred
Exploration of psychology, personality, thought process, emotions and motivations provide necessary basis for understanding that activity

5. Psychological patters that influence how individuals act in politics
Challenging rational actor model; lack of rationality and predictability of human behaviors
Psychology as common sense
Human beings operate based on the belief that behavior is rational

6. To the extend that behavior is rational two needs to fulfill: understand the world and predict consequences of behaviors
People act accordance with personality characteristics, values, beliefs and attachment to groups
People: imperfect information processors to understand the complex world, misperception, being unaware of the causes of their own behavior
Irrational behaviors

7. Social categorization: non-consciously categorize others into groups
Seems logical and rational but there are dangerous consequences of categorization
Outcomes of stereotyping: racial discrimination, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and genocide in Rwanda, political actions that cannot be understood through conventional political science explanations

8. If one wants to understand politically motivated atrocities committed during the “war” that cannot be explained unless the psychology of perpetrators is understood
Political psychology helps to explain political behavior, such as voting, to the most extraordinary kinds of behavior, such as mass terror and violence

9. What is political psychology
Both psychologists and political scientists interested in expanding their knowledge of issues and problems of common interests such as foreign and domestic policy decision making of elites, conflicts (war, genocide, terror), voting behavior
Understanding limitations of policy makers to process information, personality elements, motivations

10. Political psychologist aims to establish general laws of behaviors that can explain and predict events that occurred in different situations
Scientific method: approach to understand and predict behavior through 4 steps: (1) making observations, (2) formulating tentative explanations or hypothesis , (3) further observation and experiments, (4) refining and testing experiments

11. Political psychology explains what people do by adopting psychological concepts
Study decision making process employed by groups, decisions made by political groups (e.g. Bay of Pigs, the decision to enter the Vietnam War)
Psychologist study of group behavior might be irrelevant to study real world of politics

12. Importance of personality traits that are important in influencing political behavior: cognitive complexity
The political psychology field began in the 1920s, explosion in use of political psychology application to politics since 1970s
Focus on psychoanalytic studies of political leaders, personal characteristics such as motivation and traits

13. 1940s and 1950s: increasing interest in the systemic study of public opinion and voting behavior
1960s studies of Soviet-American perceptions of each other to understand nuclear deterrence, past wars (WWI and WWII), decision making in crisis, nationalism, ethnic conflicts

14. Explanatory tools: beliefs, schemas, images, personality, attitude, self-identity; evaluating environment through cognitive processes that produce images of other
Personality: central psychological factor influencing political behavior
Values and identity: beliefs about what is right and wrong and a deeply held sense of who a person is (identity) e.g. person have value that violence is wrong usually oppose to war refuse to go military service and go to prison if necessary to defend those values

15. Emotions: politics as emotion-evoking arena of life
Values, attitudes and identities are emotional
Final component of the mind of political being is cognitive processes: receiving and interpreting information from the outside (ability to process information)
Cognitive processes help to understand an environment that is too complex for any individual to interpret

16. Cognitive system of brain help to filter information that is consistent with our pre-existing ideas, beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions about the environment in which we live in
Political psychology involves not only individual but the individual’s interaction with his/her political environment: groups and social identity (membership in social groups)

17. Group themselves have particular dynamics that influence people's behavior
groups demand loyalty, obedience, for example perpetrators of genocide in the Holocaust who explained their behavior in terms of obedience of norms of the group (I did it because it was ordered to do so)
Social identity beyond group dynamics; people are influenced by groups but also personally driven to support groups that they are strongly attached

18. Political psychology is the question of whether, by understanding why people behave as they do in politics, prevent the worst of human behavior and promote the best
Without understanding the political psychology this is an impossible goal