ABSTRACT
What brings us together here is the conviction that politics—the task of defining the goals of a community, of choosing and pursuing the means to reach them, and of selecting the leaders—cannot be understood except by reference to the intentions of the actors, and to the perceptions that shape their acts. 1 The term political psychology is a pleonasm: not all psychology is about politics, thank goodness, but politics is wholly psychological. Even those of my colleagues who study political behavior through quantitative techniques or formal theory operate from assumptions (far too often implicit only) about the motives and goals of human behavior.
