Course Information

Darren Schreiber
Summer 2009
Social Science Building 367
(858) 534-1854
dmschreiber@ucsd.edu
Class Meets: Monday, Wednesday, 5 p.m. – 7:50 p.m. (HSS 2333A)
Office Hours: Tuesday, 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.

My Mission as a Teacher:

“To enable my students to learn joyfully, think clearly, read carefully, and write well.”

Abstract

Beliefs about how people think about politics have been at the core of theories of politics since the ancients. In this course, we will begin with a survey of important theories of political psychology from the past century. We will focus mainly on hypotheses about how people develop their political attitudes and on the methods used to test those hypotheses. Twentieth century researchers were constrained to observing behavior and relied on surveys, interviews, and simple experiments to make inferences about the political mind. The second half of the course will look at the future of political psychology. We will learn about cutting edge insights from fields like neuroscience, genetics, computational modeling, and evolutionary theory. And, we will ask how those insights should inform our understanding of political cognition, affect, and behavior.

Syllabus

You can download a copy of the syllabus by clicking here.