Module Directory

Politics is about people. Everything – angry tweeting, constitutional design, environmental lobbying, states going to war – boils down to the opinions, decisions and behaviour of individuals, and understanding those is the territory of psychology.

Political psychology is a growing and thriving subfield, to which this module provides a wide-ranging introduction. We will apply both the theories and methods of psychology to the behaviour of a range of political actors – voters, leaders, protestors, even terrorists.

This is a practical as well as a theoretical module, with heavy emphasis on how we learn about the psychology of politics and a second assignment in which students both assess an existing piece of political psychology research and come up with an alternative design of their own.

The aims of this module are:

• To give students a grounding in the core concepts in social, cognitive and personality psychology


• To give students an Understanding of the drivers of and biases in human reasoning that shape political thinking


• To give students an Understanding of how that political thinking interacts with and is shaped by political institutions


• To give students an Accessible examples of empirical research that they can evaluate in terms of validity and usefulness


• To give students a feasible Capstone project option via the research design assignment


• To give students greater empathy with ‘the other side’ in political terms, via an understanding of the psychology underlying ideological differences, polarisation and skewed perceptions


• To give students recognition that, like much of political science, the psychology of politics has been researched and understood in a weird context, and that this inevitably shapes what the module is and does

By the end of this module, students will be expected to be able to:

1. Applicable knowledge of the core concepts in social, cognitive and personality psychology.


2. Ability to grasp the contribution of key readings in the field.


3. Recognition that our conclusions about the psychology of politics depend heavily on both definition and measurement of key concepts.


4. Experience of research design in practice via the second assignment.

Indicative Syllabus:

• Week 2: Politics and the brain


• Week 3: Personality and values


• Week 4: Authority and conformity


• Week 5: Emotions


• Week 6: Group identity


• Week 7: Polarisation


• Week 8: Post-truth? Fake news and conspiracies


• Week 9: Leaders and decisions


• Week 10: Conflict and peace


• Week 11: Mental health and politics

This module will be delivered via

• a weekly two-hour interactive seminar.
• Each session will consist of a blend of lecturing, Q&A, group and whole-class discussion – the precise blend to depend in part on student numbers.

There will be two Required Readings each week: one an academic article or chapter, another a topical piece – a blog post, newspaper article, Twitter thread, or some such – that illustrates the issues raised and provides a basis for class discussion. There will be longer lists of Useful Reading, helpful for detailed preparation and especially essay writing.