As the preceding pages have shown, one can gain a deeper understanding of political behaviour and the strength and utility of political psychology by emphasising its diversity of perspectives. Of course, the global world of political psychology extends beyond the boundaries of Europe and North America. Issues, topics, innovations in political psychology are not limited to what European academics and their North American colleagues choose to study. Nor are they limited to psychological issues. Around the world, new and creative ways of understanding the different manifestations of political behaviour are being developed: some are simply borrowing the models and the tools of their more prestigious American colleagues; others proceed independently, developing critiques, finding new gaps and imagining new research tools and hypotheses more suited to researching local social and political contexts. One of the major challenges of political psychology rests with how best to promote alternative ways of doing political psychology.

In its search for integrated and integrative perspectives, contemporary political psychology (especially in North America) is preoccupied with devising new technologies of research that can potentially change or transform the i eld. There is nothing wrong with this approach. The conceptual tools of cognitive science, evolutionary science, genetics, or the tools of neuroscience are pushing political psychology in new exciting directions. But problems can arise when this approach is used to predict and prescribe the future of political psychology. There is a lot of truth in Helen Haste’s statement: ‘predicting the future is hazardous; prescribing the future is a doomed exercise’ (2012, p. 1). It remains to be seen whether the future of political psychology lies with a dialogue with cognitive science, evolutionary science, or the neurosciences, especially when these approaches are drawn upon uncritically. This dialogue can potentially turn political psychology into a system governed by the problems and priorities of other fields. What we can be sure of, nonetheless, is that, as political psychologists, we can always turn to the lives of ‘concrete’ human beings, to describing and interpreting their social practices, social interactions, motivations, representations, as they appear to them in their full contingency.