Political Psychology is actually the sub-field of political science that matters most to me. It was the subject of my dissertation, Undimensional Man, and provided the focus of the Political Behavior courses (Westminster College) and the Political Psychology courses (Portland State University) I have taught since the University of Oregon decided they could trust me with a doctoral degree. You could say that they should have been more careful, but actually they like what I am doing and I still feel good about that.
Political psychology was in its infancy in the 1970s, when I discovered it. It still has not acquired standard divisions. That's good for me because my interests range broadly from cognitive psychology to social psychology to American government, passing through some political theory on the way. The relative immaturity of the field still allows space for mavericks, of whom I am one.
I have two principal interests in this field. The first concerns what our institutions, the kinds of institutions that have become prominent in late capitalism, do the the people. It isn't very pretty, as I see it. The polity runs increasingly on special interests and widespread public anxiety. The economy runs increasingly on manipulative corporations and individual acquisitiveness. The society has moved away from the primary institutions and tried to compensate for the loss by layer after layer of secondary institutions.
In my view, we learn in these institutional setting, the kinds of attitudes that we need to do one of two things. The attitudes we acquire either help us to function successfully in this kind of system or to make it hurt less. Then we adapt ourselves to that environment and actually become, as persons, what were only adaptations at first. At that point, we can be given all the freedom from external control anyone could want because we know how to be the persons we "are" (by then) and don't remember how to reacquire the attitudes and abilities that would support the persons we were (should we want to).
It will not surprise you to learn that my second interest concerns what we might do about that. There are some major systemic things to be done, certainly, but they are not going to get done in my classes. My interest is in giving students the motive, the means, and the opportunity to reconsider the adaptations they have made. At the University of Oregon, I devised a recording system called a causal attribution journal (CAJ) and have been working on it in the thirty years since. It can help students walk around and see the backside of the adaptations, to see how they are constructed and, to some extent, why. They learn that many of the dilemmas they face, the formal term in the course is "problems," can be reconstrued. In this way, quite a few students come to see that they have, themselves, constructed the problems they complain about. To these students, I say, "When you are in a hole, stop digging." Other students are more ready to socialize the problems, to find colleagues, and to begin the task of putting their common problem on the public agenda..
I will say, to my own credit, that I did take the trouble to devise the social critique first. It was only afterward that I developed the system for beginning to un-do it. I don't produce many revolutionaries. This is, perhaps, not surprising because I am not a revolutionary. I do help a surprising variety of students to take a fresh look at what they are doing and to realize that if they want to, they can do it differently.
