Psychology Can’t Explain States

Psychology Can’t Explain States

29.We totally agree – it’s all about rhetoric.

This helps to draw out how conventional psychological approaches are largely inadequate in explaining the questions of discursive contestation posed here. While a conventional psychological approach is useful in explaining how the emotions or personalities of particular elites or even small groups of key leaders can affect policymaking, it is largely unable to explain how political discourses resonate with audiences more generally. Put differently, an individual level of analysis has trouble analyzing and explaining the mass-based effects of a discourse on a broader scale. A focus on individuals is therefore insufficient to explain how certain political discourses—and their meaningful effects on a populace’s understanding of the parameters of common sense or thinkable policy options—prevail over others in the public arena. Thus, while a psychological study of key individuals in post-9/11 American foreign policy—such as President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, among others—would be useful in tracing the internal debates over the crafting of the war on terror, it would be insufficient in explaining how broader audiences became attracted to this discourse rather than others. In short, psychological approaches lack an explanation of the effects of a discourse. Chapter 1, in contrast, develops a theoretical framework that bridges the individual and collective levels to address this question, for it is in this way that the empirical questions of discursive efficacy and resonance are better addressed. Audiences’ identifications work at both levels, for it is through individuals’ identifications with collective-level symbolic politics that we can begin to explain why some political discourses are better at eliciting those identifications than others, thus resonating more broadly.