Political psychology has cycled through internally-focused themes that are now shifting toward intergroup processes.

Evidence

Past trends allow projecting, at least through a glass darkly, a fourth flourishing of political science/ psychology collaboration that might follow the 1980s and 1990s political ideology era. The past three eras have focused largely on intrapersonal topics (personality, attitudes, ideology), albeit as they are affected by social factors and as they in turn affect society. The fourth era is likely to switch, not again simply to another intrapersonal topic, but to interpersonal (and even intergroup) processes. The shift is adumbrated in the current work on how stereotypical perceptions and selectiveinformation encoding affect international relations (Jervis, 1976), on jury decisionmaking (Hastie, Penrod, & Pennington, 1983), and on intergroup processes (Turner et al., 1987; Jervis, 1993; Sidanius, 1993). If interest does move to interpersonal and intergroup processes, the union local of the psychological participants is likely to shift again, this time to group dynamics and organizational psychology; and participants from within political science are likely to come more often from foreign-policy and international relations as well as politics (Tetlock, 1986); the third-party collaboration is likely to come from historians and area specialists. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 392

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that the field moves in eras of intrapersonal to interpersonal focus echoes Kuhn-style paradigm drift and connects to the intergroup work of Tajfel/Turner social identity theory.