ABSTRACT
Social psychology and politics are intricately related. Ever since Plato’s Republic , written over two thousand years ago, one of the main concerns of social philosophy and later empirical social science was to understand how human beings manage power and how they govern themselves. Indeed, the role of politics in our lives has become ever more dominant since the emergence of complex mass societies in the last few hundred years. Whereas governance and the exercise of power were based on presumed divine rights and preordained notions of power and privilege throughout most of human history, the philosophy of the Enlightenment and the momentous changes in the eighteenth century resulted in a dramatically different view.
