Political Psychology

Political Psychology

Three faculty figure most prominently in the Political Psychology concentration (David Easton, Kristen Monroe, and Shawn Rosenberg), although several other faculty have interests in this field as well.

The program draws from faculty outside of the Department, including Gabriela Schwab (former chair of UCI’s leading Critical Theory Institute), Salvador Maddi (Professor of Psychology), Elizabeth Loftus (new Distinguished Professor of Psychology), Peter Ditto (Associate Professor of Psychology), Joan Bissell (Senior Lecturer in Education), Janusz Reykowski (Professor of Political Science, Warsaw School of Social Psychology and President of the International Society of Political Psychology) and John Cash (Senior Lecturer in Social Theory, University of Melbourne). These associated faculty members cover the array of relevant fields in political psychology, notably psychoanalysis, personality, social cognition, and developmental psychology. The Political Psychology concentration has also served to attract leading scholars to lecture in political psychology, including most recently the Distinguished Visiting Chancellor’s Professor Janusz Reykowski, and two former Presidents of the International Society of Political Psychology, Hans-Dieter Klingemann (Berlin) and Richard Ned Lebow (Dartmouth) are recurring visitors to the Department and the concentration. The graduate program also maintains a lively colloquia series which brings in outside scholars to present their research. For additional information on the Graduate Program in Political Psychology: http://aris.ss.uci.edu/polpsych/polpsych.html

	David Easton is a Distinguished Research Professor in UCI's Department of Political Science, and a former Vice President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
	Kristen Monroe is the Director of the new Center for the Scientific Study of Ethics and Morality. Her work investigates rational accounts of human behavior and altruistic models, finding that altruistic actors view the political and social world very differently than other human actors. Both Monroe and Rosenberg are leading figures in national and international political psychology societies, having served on the governing council of the International Society of Political Psychology and as the Political Psychology Section chair of APSA.
	Shawn Rosenberg is the Director of the Political Psychology Concentration in the Department's Ph.D. program. His research engages questions of how political opinions are formed based on limitations imposed by human cognition as well as the basic social psychology of life (see his recent book, The Not So Common Sense: How People Judge Social and Political Life, Yale University Press, 2002). In 1988, he won the coveted Erik Erikson Award for Early Career Achievement by the International Society of Political Psychology. Rosenberg is currently working on the relationship between cognition and deliberative democracy.