Introduction to Political Psychology

This lecture introduces your instructor for this course.

Dr. Craig Harper is a social psychologist, who teaches and researches in the area of social psychology. His area of expertise is decision-making and attitudes towards controversial topics. You can make contact through the discussion board and Q&A streams at any time!

This lecture briefly introduces what is to follow in the following three lectures. In this section, we explore three key principles of moral psychology:

1. Morality binds and blinds

2. We make decisions intuitively and rationalise them afterwards

3. Morality is made up of five key moral foundations

We are tribal beings. We like to form teams, circle around sacred objects and views, and defend them from attack. This lecture explores the first tenet of moral psychology - morality binds and blinds.

We have a tendency to make snap judgements about moral issues, and then to justify these once the judgement is made. These intuitive decisions are symptomatic of the second tenet of moral psychology - think first, rationalise later.

This lecture starts to look at the idea that morality is multifaceted. We tend to think about something being 'moral' if it is good, fair, and doesn't cause anybody any harm. However, psychologically speaking, morality is much broader than this.

In this lecture, we'll introduce moral foundations theory. This is a psychological model that sees us as having five core areas of morality. We'll investigate what these are, and how they might manifest themselves in everyday life.

In this lecture, we will start to look at how the moral foundations differ across different groups. We will introduce the idea of morality as an audio-equaliser, which is tuned individually for each person. You will learn about how the moral foundations vary across the political spectrum, and hear how you can take the test and find out what your own moral foundations are!

Controversial 'hot button' topics dominate our political landscape. In this lecture, we'll look at three of the most debated topics in today's society - immigration, abortion, and the election of President Donald Trump - to unpack what the moral foundations have to say about arguments on all sides.

The confirmation bias is one of the most common cognitive biases that we fall prey to. In short, we are motivated to seek out information that supports our points of view, and reject those that contradict our opinions. In this lecture, we begin to understand what is going on psychologically in this process, and look at some easy ways to begin to break our reliance on this mental shortcut.

This bonus lecture looks at the emerging problem of 'fake news'. This term gained popularity in 2016 thanks to its use by then presidential hopeful, Donald Trump. This video was shot in 2017, and outlines what fake news is, what it isn't, and what role this label plays in promoting motivated reasoning in political debates.

What have you learned in this course? We will sum up the key take-home points in this lecture, and hopefully leave you prepared to understand how people make moral decisions in their everyday lives.