I’m currently mainlining American political podcasts, looking for examples to assign to students in my political psychology class. Currently on rotation is The Bulwark Podcast, hosted by several recovered Republicans. A recent show was titled “vibe shift” and included a discussion of the role of “vibes” vs policies in politics. Do we vote based on feelings, or do we vote based on a calculation of which policies will work best for us?
This is a longstanding debate which took me back to the mid-1990s when I started my own research on why New Zealanders vote the way they do.
I didn’t set out to study politics. Sure, my father’s a journalist who spent more than 30 years covering Parliament, but that really is coincidental. I wanted to study self-regulation – very hot in the 1990s – but was rebuffed by the person I asked to supervise that nascent doctorate. Instead, they pointed me down the hall to the office of the American “new guy”, James Liu, recently arrived after a postdoctorate in Florida with a big name in social psychology, Bibb Latané. Before that, Jim had completed his doctorate at UCLA, which was a powerhouse for political psychology, with people like David Sears, a proponent of “symbolic politics”.
I knocked on Jim’s door, we had a chat and I left the room half an hour later with the general plan for a PhD in political psychology. Jim, as he did many times following that first interaction, inspired me. That inspiration became a vital part of the next few years as I wrestled with finishing a PhD as a sole parent. Jim had inspiration enough for the two of us.
Symbolic politics is a set of ideas that have at their heart the theory that we are not rational maximisers looking for the best deal from presidents, prime ministers and politicians. Instead, we operate on vibes that we may not be explicitly aware of.
Political actors and issues, the theory says, are imbued with symbolic and emotional content that has developed over a long time. When those actors or issues become salient, such as during an election, we react to them based on that symbolic content. Examples might include human values like equality or freedom, images like the massacre at Gallipoli that birthed part of our national identity, or Te Tiriti.
Along the way, I discovered the social representations theory ‒ the product of French Romanian/French social psychologist Serge Moscovici. Social representations are mental structures linking thoughts, memories, issues and evaluations of things. But social representation is also the process whereby we developed these cognitive structures through interacting with other people and the world around us. Some of Moscovici’s early adventures in this direction focused on how Freud’s idea of neurosis grew from nothing to a staple part of many people’s thinking about mental illness.
As I drew towards the end of my PhD, Jim recruited me to help with a problem. He’d written a paper about how identity and history are interlinked, which he’d tested with some of my PhD data, and some he’d collected in psychology and Māori studies classes. The problem was that the paper wasn’t really working. Could I have a look?
I said, “Hmm, maybe history is a social representation?” Jim asked for a starter pack of things to read about social representations and hopped on a plane to head to a conference. When he got back, he’d written the first paper on social representations of history.
All of these things are linked. How we think about history plays on our thinking and behaviour in the present, and that includes our response to things like Anzac Day, Waitangi Day and election day. And those things are then integrated back into our thoughts.
Jim died in August while snorkelling after a conference at which he was a keynote speaker. I’ll miss his inspiration.
