Political Psychology – Lecture 1 [UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM]

Political psychology explains what people do by adapting psychological concepts in order to make them useful and relevant to politics and then apply these concepts to the analysis of a political problem.

A narrative refers to a sensible organization of thought through language which serves to create a sense of personal coherence and collective solidarity and to legitimize collective beliefs, emotions and actions (i.e. a story). A narrative is the underlying process linking the individual to political contexts. They are the stories that bind us as an explanation of confusing or inexplicable events.

Narratives can occur at three levels:

1. Micro-level (i.e. personal level)
2. Meso level (i.e. group level)
3. Macro-level (i.e. societal level)

There are four principles underlying the conception of narrative:

1. Language, politics and thought
   A narrative consists of social structure (i.e. politics), includes concepts and metaphors (i.e. language) and is comprised of language.
2. Personal coherence (i.e. narrative serves as a method of sense-making)
   A narrative serves the fundamental need to develop a coherent sense of identity and to create sense and meaning out of a complex society.
3. Meaning in solidarity (i.e. narrative serves as a method of obtaining continuity)
   A narrative can explain or provide meaning to past events. This is done through collective memory which provides a sense of continuity, agency and meaning. Narratives are dependent on the current political moods in a country.
4. Mind in action
   A narrative links the mind (i.e. the individual) to the society.

The construction of social or national identity creates a sense of collective purpose and gives direction to future behaviour. The collective narrative is derived from collective memory.

Narrative provides access to the current structure of identity, revealing the ideological and experiential content of memory and the motivational anchor for a set of social practices. Narrative engagement refers to the fact that members of a society engage with collective stories of what it means to inhabit a particular political entity (e.g. Dutch), meaning that identity is rooted in texts that individuals construct to make sense out of their lives.

The discursive approach states that conversation is the mechanism through which individuals create reality and legitimize their positions within it. Political discourse analysis studies the way in which political leaders frame political issues to motivate adherence to a particular political agenda. However, this type of study does not link the narrative analyses to the individual mind. Social categories as rhetoric study how social categorization is a narrative process, involving the discursive aspects of social categories and its impact.

Narratives are intrinsically provocative as they evoke sentiments that correspond to the ideals individuals come to hold about a given social reality. This means that emotions are central to the narrative process.

The political being refers to a framework including different concepts to understand political behaviour. This consists of several aspects:

• Personality
  This may explain some political behaviour as some personality traits are related to specific political behaviour (e.g. narcissism; authoritarian personality; populist personality).
• Cognition
  This may explain channels through which the mind and the environment interact. This includes information processing and categorization.
• Emotion
  This may explain some political behaviour as positive affect leads to greater use of heuristics (1) and negative affect leads to a deeper processing of information (2).
• Values
  This may explain some political behaviour as values influence the behaviour that an individual demonstrates.
• Identity
  This may explain some political behaviour as identity influences behaviour shown in several political settings (e.g. voting).
• Attitudes
  This may explain some political behaviour as the positive or negative evaluation about a person, group or object can influence behaviour.

The dark triad of personality refers to narcissism (1), psychopathy (2) and Machiavellianism (3). Cognitive processes refer to channels through which the mind and the environment interact.

The image theory states that there is a relationship between the images of the out-group (1), emotions (2) and strategic preferences (3) (e.g. the image “enemy” might elicit the emotion “anger” which leads to the strategic preference of “containment”). The cognitive aspect of this theory includes the risk assessment of the outgroup.

Values refer to deeply held beliefs about what is right and wrong. It is strongly related to emotions and arises through socialization. The idea of ingroup superiority is based on values as outgroups may threaten the values of the ingroup.

Identity refers to deeply held beliefs about the self and the ingroup. It is related to self-esteem and is often constructed in conflict situations (e.g. meaning in solidarity, mind in action). Values and identity are related to voting (1), ethnic conflict (2), intractable conflict (3), nationalism (4), populism (5) and terrorism (6).

The tripartite model of attitudes states that attitudes are central to cognition (e.g. stereotyping), affect (e.g. prejudice) and behaviour. However, there often is an inconsistency between attitudes and behaviour. The causal attitude network (CAN) model states that an attitude is a system of evaluative reactions that influence each other. This means that attitudes can be seen as social networks.

The connectivity hypothesis states that people who have a strong attitude towards an attitude object also have a strongly connected attitude network. The CAN model states that strong connections in highly connected attitude networks pressure behaviour to align to beliefs and feelings towards the attitude object.

The impact of attitudes on behaviour depends on the connectivity of the attitude network with the central attitude elements having the highest impact on behaviour within an attitude network.