Undergraduate Module Descriptor

POL3136: Political Psychology

This module descriptor refers to the 2021/2 academic year.

Module Aims

Beliefs about how people think about politics have been at the core of theories of politics since the ancients. In this course, we will begin with a survey of important theories of political psychology from the past century. We will focus mainly on hypotheses about how people develop their political attitudes and on the methods used to test those hypotheses. Twentieth century researchers were constrained to observing behavior and relied on surveys, interviews, and simple experiments to make inferences about the political mind. The second half of the course will look at the future of political psychology. We will learn about cutting edge insights from fields like neuroscience, genetics, computational modeling, and evolutionary theory. And, we will ask how those insights should inform our understanding of political cognition, affect, and behavior.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)
This module's assessment will evaluate your achievement of the ILOs listed here – you will see reference to these ILO numbers in the details of the assessment for this module.
On successfully completing the programme you will be able to:
Module-Specific Skills	1. apply a wide variety of models of human decision-making, even in difficult contexts; 2. design and critically evaluate experiments testing hypotheses about human decision-making;
Discipline-Specific Skills	3. analyze a broad spectrum of research designs; 4. synthesize competing theories in order to apply them to novel social science problems;
Personal and Key Skills	5. understand the physiology of anxiety and how to manage it in order to improve their performance in challenging contexts; 6. employ an inductive writing method to facilitate more powerful communication; and 7. use the IRAC (Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion) method to more effectively respond to problems in both written and verbal contexts.

Module Content

Syllabus Plan

The course is roughly organized around “20^th Century” and “21^st Century” approaches to questions in Political Psychology:

20^th Century approaches

Psychoanalytic Approaches
Rational Choice Theory
Philip Converse and His Legacy
Schema Theory
The Online Model
Racial Attitudes
Zaller’s RAS Model

21^st Century approaches

Affective Intelligence
Neuropolitics
Evolution of Machiavellian Intelligence
Genopolitics
Race and Neuroscience
Physiological measures

Learning and Teaching

This table provides an overview of how your hours of study for this module are allocated:

Scheduled Learning and Teaching Activities	Guided independent study	Placement / study abroad
49	251	0

...and this table provides a more detailed breakdown of the hours allocated to various study activities:

Category	Hours of study time	Description
Scheduled Learning and Teaching Activities	44	22 x 2 hour seminars
Scheduled Learning and Teaching Activity	5	5 x 1 hour lab sessions
Guided independent study	163	Completing assessment tasks: Reading, research and writing
Guided independent study	88	Preparing for seminars: Reading and research

Online Resources

This module has online resources available via ELE (the Exeter Learning Environment).

ELE – http://vle.exeter.ac.uk/