Political Psychology and Economic Psychology
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6336758 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Paul L Wachtel (0000-0002-7026-5106, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1991 |
| Volume | 12 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 747 |
| Publication date | 1991-12-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Political Psychology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0162-895X • E-ISSN: 1467-9221 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/3791555 |
| OpenAlex | W2323180048 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 10 |
In modern industrial societies, it is virtually impossible to separate economic concerns from political ones. Yet the field of political psychology has developed rather independently from the study of economic psychology. The examination of how people think about money and possessions; the factors influencing our expectations and calculations in this realm; the less conscious and realistic fantasies people harbor about money and possessions; the private meanings and socially shared organizing ideas in this domain that shape crucial decisions both in the personal sphere and the political-these and other considerations that are both eminently psychological and central to our political life tend to be far from the center of discourse in the field of political psychology. The virtual exclusion of such questions, indeed, is itself a phenomenon worthy of consideration by political psychologists, for it reflects ways in which dominant social and political values, and the assumptions about human affairs associated with them, silently but powerfully shape our consciousness, placing limits on the questions it even occurs to us to ask. It seems that notwithstanding the close connection between politics and economics, so evident in the pages of our newspapers every day, we engage in a kind of splitting that keeps the psychological analysis of each quite separate. What accounts for how rare it is for psychologists interested in political questions to examine and challenge the psychologically naive, overly rationalistic image of man that dominates economic discourse, an image whose influence is evident not only in the discipline of economics but is powerfully evident in the framework by which society as a whole considers social and political decisions? Are there ways in which the acontextual, individualistic, highly rationalistic assumptions that dominate our economic system feed back to shape and limit our psychological inquiries? Do these assumptions lead us unwittingly to attribute excessive autonomy to the economic sphere and to fail to integrate the economic dimension into psychological inquiries regarding our political life? (cf. Schwartz, 1986
Political psychology · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Social science · Sociology · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology · Cultural Differences and Values · Law · Psychology · Social and Intergroup Psychology · Social Psychology
| Highly cited | No |
|---|