Introduction: Defining African-American Political Psychology

Abstract

Recently, political science has experienced an upsurge in the number of volumes devoted to the study of political psychology. Bridging theories of cognition, personality, and intergroup relations with the study of the way individuals interact with the political world, this line of research has furthered our knowledge of the psychology of political decision-making, socialization, opinion formation, and behavior. Nevertheless, most of the findings yielded from extant studies are based on White Americans. Decades of research in both political science and psychology have demonstrated that external, environmental factors influence individuals’ mental processes, especially as they relate to politics. Inasmuch as such factors vary systematically across racial and ethnic groups, the political psychology of these groups warrants study. Thus, we begin the extension of the current literature by applying it to African Americans.