POS-4206 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Political Psychology, Behavior, Cognitive Neuroscience
14 Oct 2017
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Document Summary
Psychology: the personalities, though processes, emotions, and motivations of people. A more accurate picture of human beings as political actors is one that acknowledges that people are driven or motivated to act in accordance with personality characteristics, values, beliefs, and attachments to groups. Social categorization: a process wherein we non consciously categorize others into groups. Political psychology helps explain political behavior along the continuum from everyday political behavior, such as voting, to the most extraordinary kinds of behavior, such as mass terror and violence. One goal of political psychology is to establish general laws of behavior that can help explain and predict events that occur in a # of di erent situations. Scienti c method: the approach that political psychologists use to understand and predict behavior. 4 steps: making observations: making systematic and unsystematic observations of behavior and events. Variable: something that is thought to in uence, or be in uenced, by something else.
