Political Psychology: Neuroscience, Genetics, and Politics

George Marcus is one of the doyens of the political science profession. This book sums up a lifetime of wisdom about politics. I'm trained as a historian. I found the book accessible and fascinating. It's like no textbook I ever encountered before. What Marcus has done is write a textbook that provides insights into how political scientists think. While he's eager to pass along knowledge, it's the emphasis on thinking like a political scientist that most strongly comes through. I strongly recommend it for anybody who is eager to understand how political scientists today approach their tasks. If, like me, you took your last poli sci class decades ago, you will find it eye-opening.As a founder of the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP), Marcus emphasizes the impact of psychology on politics. This entails revealing how recent studies involving the brain affect the way political scientists now understand politics. When I was in school back in the 1970s the emphasis was on political systems. Now it's all about the brain and human behavior: How people reach moral decisions, how they think, the sources of ideological polarization, and more. Marcus surveys the state of the field, providing readers with an up-to-date account of findings in neurology and other sciences that bear on politics.What makes this book unique is Marcus's employment of the Theory of Affective Intelligence (AI). If you haven't heard of this theory, reading this book will be particularly exciting. What AI explains are the circumstances under which humans are responsive to change. This is one of the fundamental questions of political science. Marcus shows how humans use a dual process system to digest information*. To oversimplify, the brain distinguishes between information that is familiar and information that is novel. Most of what we encounter in the world is familiar. The brain is able to quickly digest information of this sort by matching it with past experience. When the brain detects a mismatch between past experience and something new then the response is anxiety. Anxiety is critical to politics. It triggers fresh thinking.*Information is construed broadly to include emotions. Feelings=information, as far as the brain is concerned. We tend to make a distinction between reason and emotion. Scientists no longer do. They're all just neurons firing away.

So many grammatical errors that it was hard to read. Not just typos (there were plenty of them), but missing verbs, changes of tense mid sentence, poor word choices, poor punctuation. It was hard to take the author seriously. I expected much better in a book that cost nearly $100. I needed for a college course so I couldn’t return it.

George Marcus provides a solid introduction to the biological bases of political behavior in this well-written and comprehensive book.

Riddled with typos and stories that stray from the point, this book was hardly worth the read. The book should be more accurately titled "Political Philosophy: Teachings of Greek and Enlightenment ideologies with a few psychology references here and there." I thought a class combining Political Science and Psychology would be exciting, until I started reading this book. I'm sure the field of Political Psychology is a vibrant field of study, rich with excellent material, but this item does not do it any justice. I can't wait to part with this book when the class is over, however, I'm unsure whether to sell it, and knowingly put it back in the market, or just trash it.