Geoffrey W. Sutton PhD, Psychology and Culture

Outside my house neighbors keep their political signs on their lawns or waving in the air as if they have not given up hope that their candidate who lost the election will find a way to show that the "win" granted to the opposition is false. So many in the US have identified with a political party and its leader. This identification is going to have a predictable effect on self-esteem (one's value or worth) and one's self-concept. The effect may be temporary as other life activities force other identities to become more salient--such as the demands family, work, and school as well as the time-distance since the election. This strong political identity illustrates the social context influencing the self and it also illustrates the limited stability of the self because every 2-4 years there may be a shift in party fortunes. Although some view the self as relatively stable, many studies show the impact of social contexts on our self-concept and those parts of the self-co...

Mexican arrested by border patrol, from capsweb On the Psychology of Politics “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” The forgoing quote is from John Ehrlichman in 1994. Dan Baum includes it in his April 2016  Harper's   article: "Legalize It All: How to win t...