What Is Political Psychology? Key Concepts Explained

Reference · Understanding Psychology

In brief: Political psychology is an interdisciplinary field that uses the methods of psychology to explain political behavior: why people vote the way they do, how they judge leaders, why groups clash and why some beliefs resist correction. It draws on psychology, political science, sociology and communication research, and it studies both ordinary citizens and the leaders they follow.

What is political psychology?

Political psychology sits where two disciplines meet. Political science asks what people and governments do; psychology asks why individuals think, feel and act as they do. Political psychology combines the two to study the mental side of politics.

Researchers in the field study topics such as voting, party loyalty, prejudice, propaganda, protest, war and peace, and the personalities of presidents and prime ministers. Their tools include surveys, laboratory experiments, content analysis of speeches and, more recently, analysis of social media behavior.

The field is closely related to social psychology and to the broader history of the discipline covered in What Is Psychology?. Its central assumption is simple: politics is made by people, so understanding people helps explain politics.

Where did political psychology come from?

Political psychology has roots in the early 20th century, but a few milestones stand out.

1930 — Harold Lasswell. The American political scientist published Psychopathology and Politics, which applied Freudian psychoanalysis to political figures. According to the Norwegian encyclopedia Store norske leksikon, Lasswell argued that studying leaders’ inner lives could illuminate their political positions. Later critics faulted his heavy reliance on Freud, but his work helped define the field.
1950 — The Authoritarian Personality. Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson and R. Nevitt Sanford, working at the University of California, Berkeley, tried to explain why some people are drawn to fascism and prejudice. They introduced the “F-scale” to measure authoritarian tendencies. The study was hugely influential and also heavily criticized for its methods and its focus on the political right, as EBSCO’s research summary notes.
1978 — a professional home. The International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP) was founded in January 1978 by Jeanne N. Knutson of UCLA, and held its first meeting in New York City that September. The society publishes the journal Political Psychology.

For the wider timeline of the discipline, see the history of psychology and milestones in psychology.

What are the core concepts in political psychology?

The field covers dozens of ideas. The ones below come up most often in research and in public discussion of politics.

Partisanship as social identity. Social identity theory, developed by Henri Tajfel and John Turner in the 1970s, holds that part of a person’s self-image comes from the groups they belong to. In their “minimal group” experiments, people randomly sorted into meaningless groups still favored their own group when handing out money. As Tajfel and Turner wrote, the mere awareness of an out-group can be enough to provoke in-group favoritism. Political psychologists argue that party affiliation often works the same way: being a Democrat or Republican can feel less like a policy position and more like a team.

Motivated reasoning. People tend to process information in ways that protect conclusions they already hold. In a well-known experiment, Charles Taber and Milton Lodge (2006) gave students arguments on affirmative action and gun control. Even when asked to be evenhanded, participants with strong views rated arguments on their own side as stronger, spent more time picking apart the other side, and in some cases became more extreme after reading balanced material. The most politically knowledgeable participants showed the most bias.

Confirmation bias. Closely related, confirmation bias is the tendency to seek out information that agrees with what we already believe. In the same Taber and Lodge study, sophisticated participants who were free to choose what to read picked arguments from their own side roughly 70–75% of the time.

Authoritarianism. Building on the 1950 Berkeley work, Canadian psychologist Bob Altemeyer developed the concept of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) in his 1981 book Right-Wing Authoritarianism. Altemeyer’s measure has three parts: authoritarian submission (strong deference to established authorities), authoritarian aggression (hostility toward groups when authorities seem to approve), and conventionalism (strong commitment to traditional social norms).

The “rally ’round the flag” effect. Political scientist John Mueller described this pattern in 1970: a sudden, dramatic international event that directly involves the United States and the president tends to boost presidential approval, at least temporarily. The largest example in Gallup’s records came after the September 11, 2001 attacks. Gallup reports that George W. Bush’s approval rose from 51% just before the attacks to 90% in a September 21–22, 2001 poll, the highest presidential approval rating Gallup has recorded. Rallies typically fade; see presidential approval ratings history.

Affective polarization. Ideological polarization is about how far apart people’s policy views are. Affective polarization is about how much partisans dislike and distrust the other side. In an influential paper, Shanto Iyengar, Gaurav Sood and Yphtach Lelkes (2012) reported that in 1960, about 5% of Republicans and 4% of Democrats said they would be displeased if their child married someone from the other party. By 2010, 49% of Republicans and 33% of Democrats said they would be somewhat or very unhappy.

Fear and threat. Emotions shape political choices. A study by Leonie Huddy, Stanley Feldman, Charles Taber and Gallya Lahav (2005), based on a national survey after 9/11, found that perceived threat and anxiety pushed people in different directions. People who felt a high future threat but were not overly anxious tended to support aggressive antiterrorism policies, while a highly anxious minority was more cautious and less supportive of military action.

Conformity. In Solomon Asch’s line-judgment experiments of the early 1950s, participants sat with a group of actors who gave obviously wrong answers. According to Simply Psychology’s summary, participants went along with the wrong majority on roughly a third of the critical trials, and about 75% conformed at least once. Political psychologists use this work to understand how social pressure affects stated opinions, including in modern settings like group chats.

Leader personality and charisma. The field studies how a leader’s traits, such as need for power, self-confidence or distrust of others, shape decisions. It also studies charisma: the emotional bond between a leader and followers that can make loyalty to the person stronger than loyalty to a party or platform.

Moral foundations theory. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt and colleagues proposed that people’s moral intuitions rest on several foundations, including care/harm, fairness, loyalty, authority and purity/sanctity (liberty was added later). In a 2009 paper, Jesse Graham, Jonathan Haidt and Brian Nosek found across four studies that liberals weighted care and fairness most heavily, while conservatives weighted all five foundations more evenly.

Misinformation and the illusory truth effect. Repetition makes claims feel truer, a finding first documented in the late 1970s. Gordon Pennycook, Tyrone Cannon and David Rand (2018) showed that a single prior exposure to a real fake-news headline from the 2016 election made people rate it as more accurate, even a week later, even when it was tagged as disputed by fact-checkers, and even when it clashed with their own politics.

Key concepts at a glance

Concept	What it means	Example from research
Partisanship as social identity	Party loyalty works like group membership, not just policy preference	Tajfel and Turner’s minimal group experiments
Motivated reasoning	Judging evidence in ways that protect existing beliefs	Taber and Lodge (2006), gun control and affirmative action
Confirmation bias	Seeking out information that agrees with you	Participants chose like-minded arguments about 70–75% of the time
Right-wing authoritarianism	Submission to authority, aggression toward sanctioned targets, conventionalism	Altemeyer’s RWA scale (1981)
Rally ’round the flag	Approval jumps after a dramatic international crisis	George W. Bush: 51% to 90% after 9/11 (Gallup)
Affective polarization	Growing dislike of the other party, not just disagreement	Out-party marriage concerns rose sharply from 1960 to 2010
Fear and threat	Threat and anxiety shape support for security policies	Huddy et al. (2005) post-9/11 survey
Conformity	Going along with a group despite private doubts	Asch line experiments, early 1950s
Moral foundations	Different weighting of moral intuitions across ideologies	Graham, Haidt and Nosek (2009)
Illusory truth effect	Repeated claims feel more accurate	Pennycook, Cannon and Rand (2018)

How do political psychologists analyze leaders without diagnosing them?

Analyzing public figures raises an ethical question. In 1964, Fact magazine surveyed thousands of psychiatrists about whether presidential candidate Barry Goldwater was psychologically fit for office. In response, the American Psychiatric Association in 1973 adopted what became known as the Goldwater Rule, which says it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion about a public figure without conducting an examination and having proper authorization. The APA has reaffirmed the rule, including in 2017. For context, see milestones in psychology.

Political psychologists generally work around this by studying patterns rather than issuing diagnoses. One widely used method is “assessment at a distance.” Scholar Margaret Hermann’s Leadership Trait Analysis, described by Syracuse University’s Maxwell School, content-analyzes a leader’s speeches, interviews and writings to estimate traits such as belief in one’s ability to control events, need for power, conceptual complexity, self-confidence and distrust of others.

The key distinction is between describing observable behavior and communication style, which is open to anyone with a public record, and labeling someone with a clinical disorder, which requires a personal examination.

How is political psychology applied to current events?

Because the field studies real behavior, it is often used to make sense of elections, movements and media coverage. Commentary on this site applies these concepts to recent American politics, for example:

The psychology of Trump supporters, 2016–2026, which draws on social identity and loyalty research
Guilt by association in politics, which looks at how people judge leaders by the company they keep
Trump follower psychology 101, an introduction to the group dynamics behind political followership

These pieces are commentary; this page is the neutral background. More analysis is collected on the politics hub.

Why does political psychology matter?

Political psychology helps explain things that pure policy analysis cannot: why facts sometimes fail to change minds, why voters stay loyal to a party despite disagreeing with parts of its platform, and why national crises can briefly unite a divided public. Understanding these tendencies does not make anyone immune to them, but research suggests that awareness of biases is a useful starting point for evaluating political information more carefully.

Key takeaways

Political psychology is an interdisciplinary field that explains political behavior through the study of thoughts, emotions and group identity.
Its landmarks include Lasswell’s Psychopathology and Politics (1930), The Authoritarian Personality (1950) and the founding of the International Society of Political Psychology (1978).
Core concepts include partisan social identity, motivated reasoning, authoritarianism, the rally effect, affective polarization and the illusory truth effect.
Researchers analyze leaders through their public words and behavior rather than clinical diagnosis, in line with the Goldwater Rule tradition.

Sources

Part of the brossi.us reference library, written for readers of Dr. Bart Rossi, PhD. Last reviewed October 2026.

What Is Political Psychology? How the Mind Shapes Politics