Political Psychology's Uses and Abuses Posted by Heather Hurlburt

I'm a little ambivalent about Shadi's call for more political psychologists, for two reasons.  One is that a lot of work is being done on whether our political orientation is somehow genetic, which seems to remove from us as individuals the responsibility to think and make our own choices; and from us as progressives the responsibility to reach out to people who don't think like we do.

I'm also ambivalent because Democrats have a bad history of latching onto the analyst of the moment and using his/her insights to excess; and because political psychologists, like most armchair observers, are much better at describing the problem than fixing it.  Exhibit a) is George Lakoff; exhibit b) is the latter half of Drew Westen's book The Political Brain.

But the analysis sections of Westen's book are fascinating, and include this insight into Shadi's question about how we think:

In matters of morality, as in every other realm of life, what drives people are their emotions, and the moral emotions of the left tend to be very different from those of the far right.... "self-conscious" emotions -- shame, embarrassment and especially guilt -- often lead us to do the right thing even when we might want to do otherwise.  "Other-suffering" emotions, such as compassion and empathy, lead us to feel for others and try to help them.  Along with... "other-praising" emotions, such as admiration for those who behave in ways we consider morally courageous or worthy of our respect or exaltation, these are the primary emotions that define the morality of the left.

But there is another class of moral emotions that can be a source of good or evil... "other-condemning" emotions:  anger, indignation, contempt, disgust and loathing.  These are the emotions to which those on the far right are most vulnerable. ...

What makes this last class of moral emotions so dangerous is that those on the left tend to be afraid of them, both in others and in themselves. (pp. 381-2)

The Westen book, which close readers will recall I promised to read over the summer, is a good example of the possibilities and limitations of applying psychology to politics.  It does a good job of rounding up current thinking in neuroscience for the layperson.  It comes from another angle to explode the conviction of too many progressives that all that needs to happen is for everybody to understand our ideas.  It's also a useful rebuttal to those who claim that there is no political middle and we needn't bother appealing to it.  But the man is a scientist who works in controlled circumstances, not a politician who works in utterly uncontrolled circumstances.  And that shows in his proposals for how to conduct campaigns -- he seems completely unaware of how the media acts as a filter, for example.

One thing I have to add here:  Shadi, you have to remember that the vast majority of Americans were not smoking pot and experiencing free love in 1969.  Lots of them were very frightened and/or envious of those who were.  One could argue that at least some of the moralistic tendencies of today's GOP are still a response to all the shocks of the 1960s -- women getting jobs, having sex and liking it; African-Americans getting civil rights and "invading" the culture; young people refusing to fight in Vietnam; etc etc. 

Comments

[Zathras]

Jeez, Louise! Political psychology? More like politicized psychology.

I wonder what this Westen guy has to say about "self-praising" emotions, like the ones on display here. What part might they play in the political orientation of people who were raised in spectacular prosperity, told constantly throughout childhood how special they were, and advanced in life through connections and appearance? These are the kind of people we've elected President in the last twenty years; we appear likely to continue the practice. We've even adopted the requirement that Presidents establish their self-praising bona fides by attending the same school, just to make sure their sense of worth and personal entitlement is firmly established.

This can't be an accident. You don't get to admire your own virtue -- to even advertise how virtuous you think your vices are -- this much and consistently exercise influence in a republic, unless enough has changed in the republic to make it possible. Maybe what has changed is the very fact of long prosperity. Taking it for granted as Americans have come to do, we no longer view people who have had life handed to them on a plate with any particular suspicion. Why should we? By the first decade of the 21st century, most Americans have pretty much had life handed to them on a plate. People with this kind of experience might well believe that someone who doubts their values, let alone their good intentions, must suffer from some kind of undesirable psychological orientation.

[Dan Kervick]

I assumed Shadi's call for more psychologists was in part a joke, along with his feigned dawning of insight. Surely he has not just discovered that many human beings enjoy and seek conflict, are enamored of the drama of war and the martial virtues and sentiments that attend it, show proclivities for dualistic ideological thinking, idolize men of action, and are moved by emotions like shame, pride, loyalty and disgust. Don't political scientists read history and literature to supplement their idealized rational choice models of behavior?

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I would like to say there are so many unanswered questions about the political uses and abuses of fear, and the processes at work during times such as these, that call for discussion and reflection. What do our social sciences have to tell us about how we respond to fear, and how those responses can be manipulated?

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