There clearly are numerous epistemological dangers associated with any psychological assessment of political behavior. The search for truth is readily thwarted by not only analytic biases, but also siloed sources of information. The blind acceptance of specific social constructions of reality is all too prevalent in the field of psychology. Any study of human behavior is especially vulnerable to untested assumptions, for we are too close to the subject being studied (ourselves) to remain unbiased. Furthermore, there is reliance on specific disciplinary paradigms that are saturated with untested assumptions and the use of metaphors and models from other disciplines and glossy technologies that come with their own freighted perspectives. Thomas Kuhn stated many years ago that psychology is a “pre-paradigmatic” discipline. We are still fighting over basic epistemological structures and processes. There is not one dominant paradigm (though behaviorism did win the day for a brief period of time).
While it is certainly dangerous to touch the third rail of political psychology when analyzing human behavior, it would seem to be a particularly important enterprise to undertake at this point in the mid- 21st Century. Psychological analyses offered from many different political perspectives are particularly relevant today—given the troubling increase in not only political polarization, but also political pathology (to be found in many political parties and political fringe groups). The prospect of domestic violence as well as international violence is very real. In many cases this violence has already been dramatically displayed throughout the world. The increased anxiety arising from the COVID invasion had contributed to this increase in violence, as has the more generalized increase in levels of VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) along with an increase in societal and organizational turbulence and contradiction – what has recently been identified as VUCA-Plus.
The third rail can be approached from a somewhat different perspective – but this approach might be fraught with just as much epistemological danger. This approach to political psychology has come from those offering psychobiographies of major political leaders – ranging from Woodrow Wilson to Mahatma Gandhi, and more recently from Barack Obama to Donald Trump. These applications of psychological theory (particularly personality and developmental theory) have not been without their own political biases—often resulting in a specific political figure being either considered an evolved human being or someone with major psychological problems (often resulting from psychological trauma).
It is interesting to note that one of the authors, Erik Erikson, who extolled the virtues of a quasi-political figure (Mahatma Gandhi) paused in the middle of his psychobiography of this widely admired historical figure to ask an important and disturbing question of Gandhi (a hypothetical question given that Gandhi was assassinated many years earlier). Erikson asked Gandhi why he had been an abusive (or at least uncaring) husband and father. It would seem that Gandhi, like all of us, was a person of complexity with various behavior patterns that were not only complex but also contradictory. VUCA-Plus seems to be operating in not only our societies but also in our own personal psyches/souls. The third rail of political psychology must be touched gingerly—if at all.
