Texts and Methods of Contemporary Political Psychology: A Literature Review
Author: Chih-Yu Shih
Abstract / Chinese PDF Download
This paper reviews English undergraduate textbooks for the course of political psychology. These texts do not share one common scope or research method, suggesting the embarrassment of declaring political psychology being a field of research. Early texts are generally related to authoritarian personality. Their quality is not balanced and sometimes even testifies to the dim prospect for political psychology as a professional subject of study. After the 1990, new texts began to introduce recent findings in cognitive psychology. In the past decade, two streams of text writing emerge, that is, psychoanalytical texts and cognitive texts, and they are more suitable for the undergraduate to read. This paper ends with the introduction of a number of methods commonly seen in political psychology research.