‘Psychological Constructivism’: Comment on Iver Neumann’s ‘International Relations as a Social Science’

Abstract

Iver Neumann’s assessment of IR as a social science reaches a counter-intuitive conclusion: ‘The issue is not if we should engage biological and psychological thinking about our subject matter, but how we should do it.’ His conclusion is counter-intuitive because, following Weber, Neumann believes that ‘social facts should be explained by social factors’1 and IR is above all else, social. Yet biology is a natural science and psychology walks the line between the natural and the social. So how does one privilege the social yet incorporate the natural to explain phenomenon of interest to IR? I cannot say what Neumann has in mind, but a psychological constructivist approach to emotion captures his call to draw on (what Neumann terms) the competing disciplines of psychology and biology to create a better social science of international relations. What makes emotion (and psychology) interesting and challenging is that it is not real (as a discrete measurable entity), but it is real as an identifiable experience. Psychologists have tried and failed to match discrete emotions like ‘anger’ to the brain and body. Emotions are not ‘natural kinds’ – they are not observer-independent. Psychologist Lindquist observed that one hundred years of psychological research ‘has yet to identify the discrete bodily, facial, behavioral, or neural basis of English emotion categories such as “anger,” “disgust,” “fear,” “happiness,” and “sadness”’.2 Emotion depends on the body, as well as on culture and context. Had scientists paid more attention to social