Early political psychology attributed leader aggression to psychoanalytic, economic, or learning mechanisms

Evidence

A secondary unifying focus of these interdisciplinary researchers in the 1940s and 1950s was a shared subject-matter interest in personality as a mediating explanatory variable, how it is affected by the individual’s cultural experiences, and how it in turn affects the politically significant thoughts, feelings, and actions of the masses and their leaders. “Personality” was used broadly to include motivations and values, perceptions and stereotypes, cognitive and interpersonal styles, and characteristic modes of coping. Popular independent variables to account for these mediating personality variables were the culture’s early childhood socialization experiences, singled out by psychoanalytic theory as crucial. Other popular independent-variable determinants, reflecting the behavioristic and Marxist materialism of the era’s theorists, were the institutions of society in regard to the stimuli they presented, the response options they left available, the drives they aroused, and the schedules of reinforcement they administered. For example, the aggressive foreign policy of a national leader or the bellicosity of a population might be attributed: (a) to the culture’s displacement of oedipal ambivalence regarding one’s father to outgroup targets; or (b) to frustration caused by economic deprivation (absolute or relative to others’ or to one’s own rising expectations); or (c) to felt loss of control due to bureaucratization; or (d) to alienation of workers from the products of their labor; or (e) to social modeling and reinforcing of aggressive responses in childhood. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 335

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the frustration-aggression hypothesis literature and to Adorno’s authoritarian personality work, which Jost’s own scholarship later built on.