Houghton David. Political Psychology: Situations, Individuals, and Cases

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Though it had no course in political psychology per se, the Department of

Politics at Shefﬁeld nevertheless provided me with an excellent undergraduate

education. The consistently fascinating political theorist Anthony Arblaster

introduced me to Stanley Milgram’s electric shock experiments and to Hannah

Arendt’s book on the banality of evil, Eichmann in Jerusalem, both works which

are discussed later in this book and which fascinate me to this day. At the same

time, in my ﬁrst year I took courses in the Psychology Department, but

whatever they tried to teach me didn’t really stick in my mind for long. They

seemed more interested in observing the learning behavior (or otherwise) of

laboratory rats, writing up endless research designs and talking about the

physiological makeup of the brain. Ironically, I would later see how important

these are to an understanding of political behavior, but at the time I came away

with the distinct but utterly mistaken impression that psychology and political

science were almost hermetically sealed disciplines with very little to say

to one another. In my second year I was required to pick either psychology or

politics, and politics, which I had realized is interested in the empirical study

of voting behavior, for instance, not just in assumptions about how people vote

or ought to do so, seemed the more promising route at the time.

It was not until I arrived in the United States for the ﬁrst time in my early

twenties that I gradually began to get the sense that the ﬁeld this book covers

actually existed. I had chosen another excellent place to study—the Depart-

ment of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh, a location grittily

similar to its post-industrial steel town cousin in England, Shefﬁeld. One of my

greatest regrets about my student years is that I never got a chance to take a

course with the late, great Herbert Simon of Carnegie Mellon University, for

if I had, all would have been revealed much earlier than it was. As a University

of Pittsburgh student, it was possible to cross-register for courses at Carnegie

Mellon (which is a matter of minutes away from Pitt on foot), but Simon was a

legend across a variety of academic ﬁelds, and his courses were always full. I

was lucky enough at Pitt to take Jon Hurwitz’s “Mass Politics” course, though,

which fuelled my interest in the psychology of mass behavior and balanced out

my primary interest in how elites think and act.

Ironically it was in one of the last courses I ever took as a student that I

ﬁnally found my calling and belatedly “discovered” the traditions which form

the backbone of this book. At that time, Brian Ripley—who would later

become a very good friend and co-author—used to teach a course at Pitts-

burgh called “Culture and Cognition in Foreign Policy.” I wasn’t at all sure

initially what this title meant, but after talking to Brian I decided to give it a

try. The best teacher I’ve ever known, Brian skillfully introduced me to the

topic of foreign policy decision-making, much of which—I found to my great

delight—actually used cognitive and social psychological theories to explain

x Preface

decision-making. As I got deeper and deeper into the topic, I realized that this

was the tradition I had been searching for on and off for years, the tradition not

just of Herbert Simon but of other greats in the ﬁeld such as Alexander

George, Robert Jervis, Ole Holsti, Ned Lebow, and others. I wrote a PhD

dissertation on the topic of analogical reasoning in domestic and foreign policy,

later wrote a book about decision-making during the Iran hostage crisis from

this perspective, and have been publishing articles on this subject and others

now for a decade or so. I have consciously tried, though, not to overload this

book with my own rather humble contributions.

While a couple of excellent textbooks introducing students to political

psychology have recently been published—after a long period in which virtu-

ally all of the existing texts had gone out of print—neither quite mirrors what I

like to teach my undergraduates closely enough. That is understandable: poli-

tical psychology is a highly idiosyncratic discipline, and different professors

teach it in different ways. I wrote this book for the same reason many academ-

ics write textbooks: I could not ﬁnd an existing work that covered in a single

volume all the things I wanted to talk about. In particular, I wanted to write a

book which (a) would deﬁne “political psychology” broadly to include work by

psychologists and researchers who—while writing about inherently political

topics—did or do not primarily identify themselves as “political” psychologists,

(b) would do equal justice to the situationist and dispositionist traditions within

psychology, and (c) included a general introduction that would have some sort

of explicit organizing device that would be useful for teaching purposes. So

here it is. Naturally, I hope it serves these purposes for others as well, or at

least that it will convince others who teach courses called “political psych-

ology” to include weeks on subjects dealt with here that they would not

normally have covered. I hope it will also serve as a useful introductory text

both for those who specialize in mass political behaviors such as electoral

choice and those who examine leaders and elites in the context of international

relations and foreign policy. All too often, these two “camps” within political

psychology proceed independently of one another, but I hope this book will

appeal to specialists within both.

Various people helped me during the writing of this book. I would especially

like to acknowledge the help of Anna Carroll, Michael Kerns, Sarah Phillips,

and Elizabeth Renner at Routledge: Michael in particular encouraged me to

pursue this project when it was just a sketchy idea on an email attachment, and

the expert editing of Anna and Elizabeth improved the manuscript immeasur-

ably. Various anonymous reviewers also provided helpful comments which

have been incorporated into the text. Marco Iacoboni of UCLA and Jeff

Bedwell of UCF both helped me considerably with ideas for Chapter 11 on

neuroscience, a topic which was mostly new to me since when I received my

Preface xi

PhD it was but a glint in the eye of most political psychologists (if that). Jeff

was also kind enough to read an earlier draft of that chapter, patiently correct-

ing some of my misconceptions. David Pearl of Washington State University

also stimulated my interest in the topic of neuroscience, and I thank him for

prompting me to catch up with some of the most cutting-edge methods that

today’s political psychology graduate students are being taught. Stephen

Dyson, a former student of mine from my time at Essex University and now an

assistant professor at the University of Connecticut, had a similar effect on me

with regard to the latest work that’s being done on operational code analysis,

and I thank him also.

During the writing of this book, I tried out the drafts of most of the chapters

on my students in POS4206 Political Psychology at UCF. My thanks are due to

everyone in those classes who served as guinea pigs for my ideas and rough ﬁrst

efforts. Special thanks are due to those class members who offered me com-

ments, advice, and encouragement along the way, even if it was sometimes just

pointing out typos and misnamed TV shows I had referenced! I would espe-

cially like to acknowledge (in alphabetical order) Dacia Anderson, Frederick

Ayer, Brendan Byrne, Michael Carrano, Travis Dawry, Lacey Fitzpatrick,

Maggie Fundora, Dale Greenstein, Patrick Hines, Kenny Klamper, Bennett

Lessmann, David Magovern, Genevieve Napolitano, and Kimberleigh Swift. I

know you will all go on to do great things in life.

This book, like its predecessors, would not have been possible were it not

for the constant love and encouragement of my parents. My time in further

education would also have been impossible without their ﬁnancial bail-outs of

my overdrawn bank accounts along the way, and I thank them for that too.

Finishing a book also allows you to spend a lot more time with your immediate

family as well, who always suffer from neglect when you are closed away in a

room tapping on the computer keys. I thank my wife Annabelle, daughter

Isabelle and son Carlos for their love and patience, especially Annabelle, who

dutifully entertained the kids at places like Disneyworld and Universal Studios

while Dad stayed home writing, napping between paragraphs, and having the

occasional Margarita for inspiration. Hopefully, my fathering techniques will

improve from now on.

Orlando, Florida

April 2008

xii Preface

Introduction

The Conceptual Scheme of

This Book

The photographs did not lie. American soldiers, male and female, grinning

and pointing at the genitals of naked, frightened Iraqi prisoners; an Iraqi

man, unclothed and leashed like a dog, groveling on the ﬂoor in front of his

female guard; a prisoner standing on a box with a sandbag over his head and

wires attached to his body beneath a poncho. These were not enemy

propaganda pictures; these showed real atrocities actually inﬂicted by

Americans.

In early 2004, The New Yorker and the CBS program 60 Minutes II shocked

America and the world by publishing revolting pictures of the torture and

humiliation of detainees by American soldiers at the now infamous Abu Ghraib

prison in Iraq. Ironically, the prison had been used for years to house anyone

whom Iraq’s former dictator Saddam Hussein considered a potential enemy or

threat to his power, and countless Iraqis had undergone agonizing torture and/

or summary execution there. And now here were the representatives of the

United States, supposedly Iraq’s liberator, engaging in human rights abuses,

and capturing it on ﬁlm. More than anything else, perhaps, the pictures did

most to undermine America’s legitimacy in Iraq early on. After numerous

investigations narrowly conﬁned to the lowest level of the chain of command,

seven individuals were eventually put on trial for the abuses committed at Abu

Ghraib.

In his marvelous book The Lucifer Effect, social psychologist Philip Zimbardo

argues that the scandal at Abu Ghraib—in which ordinary, psychologically

“normal” prison guards tortured and humiliated Iraqi prisoners—was in large

part a result not of the characteristics of the individuals themselves, but of

the strong situational forces they faced.

As Zimbardo puts it, he was “shocked

but not surprised” by the horrors of Abu Ghraib when the scandal erupted in

May 2004, as dramatic images of prisoner abuse spread around the world via

television and the internet:

Chapter 1

The media and the “person in the street” around the globe asked how such

evil deeds could be perpetrated by these seven men and women, whom

military leaders had labeled as “rogue soldiers” and “a few bad apples.”

Instead, I wondered what circumstances in that prison cell block could

have tipped the balance and led even good soldiers to do such bad things.

To be sure, advancing a situational analysis for such crimes does not excuse

them or make them morally acceptable; rather, I needed to ﬁnd the mean-

ing in this madness. I wanted to understand how it was possible for the

characters of these young people to be so transformed in such a short time

that they could do these unthinkable deeds.

Zimbardo’s handy distinction between “the apple” and “the barrel” provides

a useful way of explaining what we mean by the terms situationism and disposi-

tionism, a distinction that is going to be critical to this entire book. Were the

appalling events at Abu Ghraib caused by “bad apples,” or was the barrel itself

turning the apples inside it rotten? In this book, situationism is deﬁned as an

approach in which the environment or situation that surrounds the individual—

in Zimbardo’s terms, “the barrel”—is considered most important in shaping an

actor’s behavior; dispositionism, on the other hand, is deﬁned as an approach in

which the individual actor—his or her beliefs, values and personality, or “the

apple” in Zimbardo’s parlance—are considered most signiﬁcant in this respect.

We can think of behavior as driven by internal causes (dispositions) or external

causes (situations), or of course by some combination of both. Within the

situational camp there are various forms of external causes that are held to

shape behavior, from the position our country occupies within the international

system to the immediate social roles we play in our daily lives. Inside the

dispositionist approach, a diversity of approaches as to what causes the

behaviors of individuals—their knowledge structures, beliefs, personalities,

and so on—are present as well. We will use this simple distinction to explain

and contrast a variety of psychological theories of relevance to an understand-

ing of politics, and then show how these can be used to explain genocide,

voting behavior, racism, nationalism, conﬂict between states, and a variety of

other political behaviors.

The distinction between dispositional and situational factors as forces acting

on behavior has long been central to social psychology, and it continues to be

utilized by major scholars in that ﬁeld today.

Many social psychologists come

down on the situationist side of the debate. Most of us, on the other hand, are

instinctive dispositionists. We like to think that who we are—what we believe

about the world and the kind of personality we have—exerts a fundamental

impact on our behavior. Our political and legal systems largely just assume that

this is so, holding us primarily responsible for our actions.

We tend to recoil

4 Introduction

from the view presented by much research in social psychology, which suggests

that (for most people, at least) the character of the situation we are facing

—where we are—matters more than our own characters to a greater extent

than we could ever imagine. And we like to think that our political behaviors—

how we vote, what form our political participation takes, how tolerant we are

and so on—are shaped by who we are as well. But is this true? This is the

central question this book poses and the issue around which the organization of

the book revolves.

One interesting thing to note is that this kind of distinction between the

individual and his or her environment appears in practically every discipline

which analyzes social behavior. In political science and especially in the subﬁeld

of international relations, a distinction is drawn between “levels of analysis” or

“agents” and “structures.”

International relations theory reﬂects a division

between dispositionists (especially those who study the psychological aspects of

foreign policy decision-making) and situationists (including neorealists like

Kenneth Waltz and neoliberals like Robert Keohane). In the analysis of foreign

policy, situationist theories do exist, but have been drawn mostly from organ-

izational theory rather than social psychology.

In economics, there is a common

distinction made between macro– and microeconomics (the latter examining

the economics of the individual business or ﬁrm, the former the workings of

the whole economy). In sociology, history, and other disciplines, there has long

been a similar debate between those who believe that individuals drive events

and those who counter that situational forces are more critical.

Another thing that is interesting to note is that political psychology has drawn

overwhelmingly from the dispositionist side of the mother discipline of psych-

ology. As Rose McDermott notes, much political psychology—at least as con-

ventionally deﬁned as an academic “discipline”—operates at the individual level

of analysis,

or is dispositionist in the sense that it assumes that individual actors

“matter” and that their behavior can be traced to meaningful differences in our

beliefs and personalities. Nevertheless, a large body of work within social

psychology is far more hospitable to situationism than it is to dispositionism.

Research on the ways in which social situations can shape behavior has had less

impact on the development of political psychology than have Freudianisism and

modern cognitive psychology, each of which studies the human mind (though in

rather different ways). Moreover, it is not always acknowledged in literature on

political psychology that the ﬁndings of social psychologists like Stanley Milgram

and Philip Zimbardo among others—though profoundly political in their

implications—depart signiﬁcantly from the idea that individual attributes are

critical in shaping an individual’s behavior. The reasons for this are unclear, but

we shall spend a good half of this book looking at prominent situationist argu-

ments that attempt to explain some fundamental aspects of political behavior.

The Conceptual Scheme of This Book 5

What is Political Behavior?

This is a book about political behavior, so it makes sense to be very clear at the

outset what this term means. Broadly deﬁned, political behavior refers to

any type of activity designed to meet some political end. It encompasses the

full range of political activities in which human beings engage, from extreme

behaviors like terrorism and war to more “mundane” behaviors such as the

act of voting. It includes the study of decision-making—both by voters and

by elites in government—but is broader than this. It also encompasses ques-

tions as diverse as “why does racism occur?,” “why do human beings engage in

genocide?,” “what determines how people vote?,” and “why do states go to

war?” As you will see in what follows, there are different ways of answering

these questions. Some follow the logic of economics in assuming that human

beings are fundamentally rational, weighing up the costs and beneﬁts of various

actions available to them, while others are inspired by the social or group focus

of sociology. Political psychologists, therefore, offer only one set of answers

to questions like those posed above. Nevertheless, the purpose of this book is

to show how compelling such answers can be.

What Determines our Behavior?

As Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor (two prominent social psychologists) note, it

can be hard to tell in practice whether a person’s behavior is driven by the

external situation or by his or her internal dispositions. They provide a telling

example. “If Beth is a mean, aggressive person to others because her sister beat

her up as a kid,” they ask, “is the cause of her current behavior internal or

external?”

My most astute and thoughtful students eventually come to a realiz-

ation of this problem when the scheme we will use in this book is presented to

them: there is a sense in which nearly everything, one could argue, is ultimately

situational. In other words, our cognitive beliefs or schemas—the mental

categories we use to make sense of the world—are the product of experience.

Many if not all of our dispositions presumably result from the situations we

have been through. To employ Fiske and Taylor’s example, there is a sense in

which Beth’s behavior is situationist because her current behavior derives from

circumstances she faced in the past.

Situationism assumes, of course, that environment is everything. To offer

one defense of dispositionism, this argument leaves out the possibility that we

are genetically hard-wired—probably as the result of evolutionary mechanisms

which have allowed us to maximize the survival of our species—to behave in

certain ways. If this is so, we are born with certain dispositions already pre-

packaged within us, and it is our dispositions that drive our behavior. It would

6 Introduction

then be folly to deny human nature, treating individuals as if they were a “blank

slate.”

To offer another defense of a different kind for dispositionism, we

know that different individuals respond in different ways to the same external

situation, so what is it within us that shapes behavior? A situationist could

respond, of course, that these differing individuals were previously exposed to

different situations, and that it was the situations that shaped the differing

dispositions and hence the differing responses. And so on. We could go on and

on this way, tracing the story of causation further and further back. In social

science this is called “inﬁnite regression,” since we can keep on regressing

through history, tracing the causes of causes back through time.

This is a complexity we shall leave until the conclusion of this book to dis-

cuss fully, though for now what follows is a brief overview to provide context

for later content. For one thing, any good story has to start somewhere; we

cannot, for purely practical reasons, consider all of human history in explaining

an event. The Vietnam War was arguably caused in part from “overlearning”

the lessons of World War II, for instance; World War II, in turn, arose because

of the way European leaders had reacted to World War I. World War I, in turn,

was caused in part by misperceptions between the major powers of the time,

and so on and so on. In the comedy movie Airplane II, an oddball air trafﬁc

controller Jacobs is asked for a brieﬁng on the fate of a missing plane. “Jacobs, I

want to know absolutely everything that’s happened up till now!” his boss

Steven McCroskey demands. Jacobs gives a bizarre answer. “First the earth

cooled. Then the dinosaurs came but were too big and died and everything got

rotten and turned into oil and the Arabs bought Mercedes Benzes. . . .” And he

goes on in this vein.

In a sense, this is the “correct” answer—the coming and going of the dino-

saurs probably is relevant if one wanted to create a full causal history of

everything that has happened to that point in human history—but the reason

his response is humorous is that there is a lot that we take as “given” in

providing explanations; the character is violating the social norm that we

conventionally leave some things that are considered obvious out of a causal

explanation. We break into the causal chain, often without thinking about it,

and consider only the proximate or most recent causes of an event.

There is, however, an inherent “gray area” between the concepts of disposi-

tionism and situationism. As noted above, every theory can be characterized as

situationist, since our dispositions are partly shaped by the situations we hap-

pen to have experienced throughout our lives. But there are two important

points that must be made here: ﬁrst of all, the reader should note that when we

characterize a theory as “dispositionist,” we mean only that dispositions affect

behavior in a proximate or immediate sense. Although our partisan identiﬁca-

tions or our attitudes towards the use of military force may have been shaped

The Conceptual Scheme of This Book 7