What Makes Them Tick

Why I Study Psychology & Political Violence

First, why Substack?

This is my first post. So I am obliged to at least explain why I’m starting a Substack. At a basic level writing forces you to provide clarity and structure to your ideas. And I like to work through new ideas or thoughts, but many of them are half-baked or half-formed. So part of this process is forcing myself to actually write stuff down in a semi-coherent way. Some of the best debates and most interesting academic ideas came from short-form blog posts, like The Monkey Cage or Political Violence at a Glance. Unfortunately, those don’t exist, and X/Twitter/Bluesky can’t replicate them. The goal of writing here is to share ideas with a community and get feedback. I love academia, but the feedback process can be painfully slow. Also, part of my duty as an academic is to share my knowledge with the public and this will be my small part. So Substack seems like a good place to hang my hat.

How I got here

I started my PhD at NYU in the fall of 2008. Originally, I came in wanting to study American bureaucratic politics. But in my first year, we had several seminar talks on what happened to conflicts when civilians or others became victims of violence. I was fascinated. I shifted my focus to studying international relations and comparative politics, and was immersed in rational choice theories of conflict. Politicians, rebels, and even civilians were utility-maximizers. Their actions could be best understood through the lens of whatever maximized their power, wealth, or guaranteed their security or political survival. But these studies of the effects of exposure and victimization raised several questions. What happens when people are victims of political violence, like ethnic violence or terrorism? Does it lead them to embrace more radical political actions? Or does it scare them away from further conflict? I felt that there had to be a micro-mechanism at play.

And that’s when my advisor, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, one of the godfathers of rational choice theory and conflict, introduced me to Rose McDermott. This introduction would change my academic career. Rose showed me a whole different side of political science, and introduced me to the world of political psychology. She encouraged me to take classes in the psychology department, which I did.

The promise

I came to see psychology as giving us tools to understand emotions (like anger and fear), sacred values, ideology—the kind of stuff that drives political behavior. Over the years, I’ve done fieldwork in Israel, Turkey, Mexico, Georgia, and Ukraine looking at these mechanisms and how they affect political violence.

In my new book, No Option But Sabotage, I explore the U.S. radical environmental movement. Two of the core questions of the book are how do activists decide which tactics they are willing to use in the face of repression? And given the threat from climate change, why haven’t more radical tactics emerged? To get at these questions, I interviewed more than 100 current and former activists, as well as experts on the movement. It became clear that cost-benefit analysis couldn’t explain why certain activists were willing to escalate tactics. Subcultures, personal ties, and deeply held beliefs about climate and the future were crucial to understanding these tactical choices.

The perils

But the psychological approach has taken a beating in recent years. First, opportunity still matters. There are a lot of aggrieved people out there—drive through any major city highway at rush hour. So, grievance isn’t enough, there still needs to be a spark, or opportunity for political violence.

The replication crisis has hit political psychology hard. Many of our underlying psychological theories are on shaky ground. Zimbardo’s prison experiment, while still important for the history of social psychology, was more of a cosplay, and wasn’t as academically rigorous as we all thought.

Cognitive dissonance, is it even still a thing? Because When Prophecy Fails, a core text of cognitive dissonance, has some serious problems. It turns out that, rather than disinterested observers, the researchers were actively involved in manipulating some of the events in the book. And, alternatives to cognitive dissonance currently hold more promise, like Bayesian updating or persuasion in parallel.

Even core psychological constructs, like emotions, are on tenuous ground. No longer are emotions viewed as universal and innate, but are seen as being partially socially constructed. Many of my slides in my Psychology of Political Violence and Terrorism Class now have a backup slide that says “Well actually…”

Why we need it anyway

Even with all these shortcomings, we need psychology.

For instance, how do we explain Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran, one of the most monumental decisions in recent international politics? Structural conditions and rational choice theory will only take us so far. Leader decision-making under uncertainty, status concerns, narcissism, and the role that advisors play—all of these psychological theories can help us make sense of how leaders make choices about political violence.

The advent of AI promises major changes to the economy and social interactions. And it’s already doing so. From teens developing parasocial relationships with chatbots, to structural changes in the labor market, it’s not surprising that people are leery of AI. There’s a long history of psychology and sociology research on anomie and alienation that can help us make sense of the effects of disruptive technology.

At a more basic level, how do people get radicalized? For example, how do they go from punk shows to arson campaigns (like I found with some eco activists)? Or from online forums to offline radical action? The effects of subcultures, group identities, and socialization into radical values—these are psychological processes.

The way forward

There’s no easy answer for researchers of political violence. But I do have a few thoughts and suggestions.

-Agency. Politics is fundamentally about how we choose to allocate limited resources and make choices under constraints. The key is that political actors have agency and they are making choices. Political violence is this with extreme constraints and stakes.

-Mixed methods. As scholars, we should systematically collect and analyze data (surveys, texts, databases) but we should also talk to people to help ground us. Interviews aren’t a panacea, people lie and shade the truth. Nevertheless, it’s incredibly helpful to talk to people involved in politics, and see how they think about and justify their actions.

-Updated psychological theories. There are several promising new psychological theories of cognition. For example, Bayesian prediction error models and the brain-as-scientist framework treats the brain as a constantly evolving prediction engine that weighs past information with current information to make informed guesses. Based on how “accurate” a choice is, our brains update their model about the world. This could provide a new way to think about how we process political information, especially thinking about where priors come from, and the role that social inputs (identity, networks, etc.) play in cognition.

Psychology won’t explain everything. But without it, we’re building mindless models of political violence.