Political psychology aims to understand interdependent relationships between individuals and contexts that are influenced by beliefs, motivation, perception, cognition, information processing, learning strategies, socialization and attitude formation.
Political psychological theory and approaches have been applied in many contexts such as: leadership role; domestic and foreign policy making; behavior in ethnic violence, war and genocide; group dynamics and conflict; racist behavior; voting attitudes and motivation; voting and the role of the media; nationalism; and political extremism.
The philosopher Hippolyte Taine (1828–1893), a founder of the Ecole Libre de Sciences Politiques, applied Bastian's theories in his works The Origins of Contemporary France (1875–1893), to ideas on the founding and development of the Third Republic.
The head of Ecole Libre de Sciences Politiques, Émile Boutmy (1835–1906), was a famous explorer of social, political and geographical concepts of national interactions.
[9] In Germany, novice political alterations and fascist control during World War II spurred research into authoritarianism from Frankfurt School.
Philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) opened up issues concerning freedom and authority in his book, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (1941), where he suggested groups compromise on individual rights.
Nazi movements during World War II also spurred controversial psychologists such as Walther Poppelreuter (1932) to lecture and write about political psychology that identified with Hitler.
Motivated by social and political behavior during World War I, he deemed a new branch of historical science, "The Psychology of Men Acting in Masses".
Psychobiographies draw inferences from personal, social and political development, starting from childhood, to understand behavior patterns that can be implemented to predict decision-making motives and strategies.
The American Jewish Committee[22] subsidized research and publishing on the theory since it revolved around ideas developed from World War II events.
Adorno (1950) explained the authoritarian personality type from a psychoanalytic point of view suggesting it to be a result of highly controlled and conventional parenting.
Adorno (1950) explained that individuals with an authoritarian personality type had been stunted in terms of developing an ability to control the sexual and aggressive id impulses.
The authoritarian personality type is suggested to be: ethnocentric, ego-defensive, mentally rigid, conforming and conventional, adverse to the out of the ordinary, and as having conservative political views.
Trait-based frameworks, excluding the Freudian approach, were suggested by James Barber (1930–2004) in The Presidential Character (1972) who highlighted the importance of psychobiography in political personality analysis.
The Profiler-Plus is a computer system used to code spontaneous interview answers for seven major characteristics; need for power, cognitive complexity, task-interpersonal emphasis, self-confidence, locus of control, distrust of others, and ethnocentrism.
A Verbs in Context (VIC) coding system employed through the Profiler-Plus computer program once again allows substantial bodies of written and spoken speech, interviews and writings to be analyzed subjectively.
[26] A political party that provides; stability, clear information, offers power to individuals and satisfies a sense of affiliation, will gain popularity.
Controversial studies by George Marcus (2003) however imply that high levels of anxiety can actually cause an individual to analyze information more rationally and carefully, resulting in more well-informed and successful decisions.
[35] Groupthink refers to "a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members' striving for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.
Hirt and Markman (1995) claim that implementing an individual in a group to find faults and to critique will enable the members to establish alternative viewpoints.
Applied psychology theories to improve productivity of political groups include implementing "team development" techniques, "quality circles" and autonomous workgroups.
Developed through natural selection, the human brain functions to react appropriately to environmental challenges of coalitional conflict using psychological mechanisms and modifications.
Psychological mechanisms work to digest what is taken in from internal and external information regarding the current habitat and project it in the most suited form of action such as acts of aggression, retrieval, dominance, submission and so forth.
The effect of these influences on voting behavior is best understood through theories on the formation of attitudes, beliefs, schema, knowledge structures and the practice of information processing.
[38] Some prominent academics in the field include Dr. Chadly Daniel Stern, who currently works at the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign.
His research centers around answering social cognitive questions of how a person's political belief systems shape the way that they perceive the world and their everyday interactions.
However, an increasing amount of empirical work on children and their environment could be highly revealing of how their political awareness and attitudes develop very early on (Reifen‐Tagar & Cimpian, 2020).
Social identity theory explains that during the Holocaust of World War II political leaders used the Jews as an out-group in order to increase in-group cohesion.
A journal article by Anthony C. Lopez, Rose McDermott and Michael Bang Petersen uses this idea to give out a hypothesis to explain political events.
The strategic model, the dominant paradigm in terrorism studies, considers terrorists are rational actors who attack civilians for political ends.