Politics is hardly a new topic for social psychologists. “In its early days, social psychology was deeply political, with early experiments like the Milgram shock experiment born from an interest in understanding war and the horrors of Nazi Germany,” says Stanford University political psychologist Jon Krosnick, PhD. “At the same time, political scientists were trying to understand political behavior, but not from a psychological perspective.”
As more researchers began to draw on psychology to understand politics and political behavior, a new subfield began to coalesce. The International Society of Political Psychology was founded in 1978, and today it has grown to more than 800 members from psychology and political science, as well as historians, economists, sociologists and others.
People trained in political psychology often work within academia, typically in psychology or political science departments. Others find careers with polling firms or the media, designing survey questions and analyzing polling data.
Today, fewer than 10 U.S. psychology doctoral programs offer concentrations in political psychology. But that’s not because politics isn’t a significant field of study. On the contrary, the study of political behavior is now so common that it’s often happening under the broader umbrella of social psychology, Krosnick says. “So many social psychologists are interested in politics that it’s become mainstream, and most social psychology journals publish articles about politics.”
People outside of psychology are noticing, says Howard Lavine, PhD, who directs the Center for the Study of Political Psychology at the University of Minnesota. “Leading figures in political science now realize that they can’t understand the way things are without psychological concepts,” he says. “They’re understanding their own questions and theories better by appealing to psychological theory.”
