TOPIC:  POLICY: Why and How to Become Engaged as an International Policy Psychologist

Assigned Reading/s: CHAPTER 6, pp. 121 - 142 [Shealy, Bullock, & Kapadia (Eds.) (2023)]

Supplementary Materials:

ARTICLE: Steering global leadership
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2024/07/international-leadership-psychologists#:~:text=They%20are%20also%20consulting%20on,global%20lens%2C%E2%80%9D%20she%20said.
Expertise in human behavior and well-being shapes governance and policy-making on a global scale

ARTICLE: International psychological research that matters for policy and practice

https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0003-066X.64.8.825
After a brief history of the Committee on International Relations of the American Psychological Association, 3 points are made about international psychological research that matters. First, it matters when the definition of the research problem area and the findings can potentially be reflected in policy change, in the practice of educators or psychologists, or in the mindsets of a new generation of researchers. Person-centered analysis of adolescents' social and political attitudes has this potential and can complement variable-centered analysis. A cluster analysis of the IEA Civic Education Study's data in 5 Western European and 5 Eastern European countries illustrates this. The following 5 clusters of adolescents were identified: those supportive of social justice but not participative, those active in conventional politics and the community, those indifferent, those disaffected, and a problematic cluster of alienated adolescents. Second, research that matters is situated in a cultural context. It is proposed that publications using data from any single country be required to include information about the cultural context in which the research was conducted. Finally, it matters that attention be given to the dynamics of the collaborative international research process, not only to research results.

BLOG: The Role of Political Psychology in Diplomacy
https://online.maryville.edu/blog/the-role-of-political-psychology-in-diplomacy/

Fundamentally, psychology is focused on better understanding the human mind and human behavior. Political psychology seeks to apply the same principle to the world of politics, examining the interplay between how people think, feel, and act — and the impact that has on how they approach political considerations. Through political psychology, individuals can gain deeper insight into different political ideologies, personalities, and policies — both for the public and political figures.

BOOK: Psychology and Foreign Policy
https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199743292/obo-9780199743292-0252.xml
The use of psychological concepts to explain the behavior of individuals and groups that shape foreign policy is centuries old. Thucydides in his great History of the Peloponnesian War explored the impact of the fear of decline on leaders’ decisions to go to war. Barbara Tuchman in The Guns of August demonstrated how misperception and miscalculation by leaders in the summer of 1914 led to an accidental war that no leader wanted or expected. During and after World War II, political scientists began to draw systematically on psychological concepts to explain foreign policy behavior. Scholarship advanced when the International Society of Political Psychology was founded in 1978 along with a specialized journal, Political Psychology. Early scholarship focused on leaders’ personalities and their impact on the foreign policy choices they made, with special attention devoted to decisions to go to war or make peace. A second wave of scholarship drew on the work of cognitive psychologists who had identified heuristics and biases to explore the impact of the way leaders thought on the foreign policy decisions that they made and examined pairs of interacting leaders to explain spirals of escalation. Scholars mined cognitive psychology to explore decisions to cooperate or compete, the success and failure of deterrence and compellence, and bargaining and signaling behavior by leaders. A third wave of scholarship drew on psychological research on emotion and examined how the emotional states of leaders influenced foreign policy choices. Scholars moved beyond leaders to study elite and group attributes to explain foreign policy behavior. In doing so, they confronted the central problem of aggregation; cognition and emotion are embedded in the individual. When they move to explain group behavior, scholars deepened psychological concepts by adding a broader social dimension to the analysis. Research in the last decade situates feeling and thinking in a larger social and cultural context in a more contextualized explanation of foreign policy behavior. Research is increasingly multidisciplinary, drawing on neuroscience, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, and behavioral economics to explain foreign policy behavior.

BOOK: The Psychology of Foreign Policy
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-79887-1
This book focuses on foreign policy decision-making from the viewpoint of psychology. Psychology is always present in human decision-making, constituted by its structural determinants but also playing its own agency-level constitutive and causal roles, and therefore it should be taken into account in any analysis of foreign policy decisions. The book analyses a wide variety of prominent psychological approaches, such as bounded rationality, prospect theory, belief systems, cognitive biases, emotions, personality theories and trust to the study of foreign policy, identifying their achievements and added value as well as their limitations from a comparative perspective. Understanding how leaders in world politics act requires us to consider recent advances in neuroscience, psychology and behavioral economics. As a whole, the book aims at better integrating various psychological theories into the study of international relations and foreign policy analysis, as partial explanations themselves but also as facets of more comprehensive theories. It also discusses practical lessons that the psychological approaches offer since ignoring psychology can be costly: decision-makers need to be able reflect on their own decision-making process as well as the perspectives of the others. Paying attention to the psychological factors in international relations is necessary for better understanding the microfoundations upon  which such agency is based.

WEBPAGE: International Society of Political Psychology
https://ispp.org/