ABSTRACT
In which we notice how approaches to politics are marginalised in psychology, a discipline that tries to forget its own past, and how this politics returns unbidden. Psychologists use the reductive notion of ‘cognition’ to describe memory and perception in order to frame human action, and these limited accounts of the way we think and feel operate in relation to deeper more threatening ideas, with connections between fascism, race and sexuality. I enter the test department in this chapter, and show how quickly and easily psychologists slide from description to prescription. They know well that an experiment is not a test, but something in the logic of the method they use leads them to assess how well their subjects have performed, and part of the problem is that their subjects also know this. You can see here how this works for undergraduate students, how subjectivity is avoided in the name of a concern with objective investigation. At the same time, psychologists try to avoid another domain, one in which passions seem to them to run riot over calm clear reason, politics. I discovered that however much psychologists try to steer clear of political controversy, the right has often found psychology to be a useful and dangerous tool for dividing people from each other and ruling over them.
