Political psychology is an interdisciplinary academic field, dedicated to understanding politics, politicians and political behavior from a psychological perspective, and psychological processes using socio-political perspectives. The relationship between politics and psychology is considered bidirectional, with psychology being used as a lens for understanding politics and politics being used as a lens for understanding psychology. As an interdisciplinary field, political psychology borrows from a wide range of disciplines, including: anthropology, economics, history, international relations, journalism, media, philosophy, political science, psychology, and sociology. Political psychology aims to understand interdependent relationships between individuals and contexts that are influenced by beliefs, motivation, perception, cognition, information processing, learning strategies, socialization and attitude formation. Political psychological theory and approaches have been applied in many contexts such as: leadership role; domestic and foreign policy making; behavior in ethnic violence, war and genocide; group dynamics and conflict; racist behavior; voting attitudes and motivation; voting and the role of the media; nationalism; and political extremism. In essence political psychologists study the foundations, dynamics, and outcomes of political behavior using cognitive and social explanations. History and early influences France Political psychology originated from Western Europe, France, where it was closely tied to the emergence of new disciplines and paradigms as well as to the precise social and political context in various countries. The discipline political psychology was formally introduced during the Franco-Prussian war and the socialist revolution, stirred by the rise of the Paris Commune (1871). The term political psychology was first introduced by the ethnologist Adolf Bastian in his book Man in History (1860). The philosopher Hippolyte Taine (1828–1893), a founder of the Ecole Libre de Sciences Politiques, applied Bastian's theories in his works The Origins of Contemporary France (1875–1893), to ideas on the founding and development of the Third Republic. The head of Ecole Libre de Sciences Politiques, Émile Boutmy (1835–1906), was a famous explorer of social, political and geographical concepts of national interactions. He contributed various works on political psychology such as English People; A study of their Political Psychology (1901) and The American People; Elements of Their Political Psychology (1902). The contributor of crowd theory Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931) suggested that crowd activity subdued will and polluted rational thought which resulted in uncontrollable impulses and emotions. He suggested in his works Psychology of Socialism (1896) and Political Psychology and Social Defense (1910) that in the uncontrollable state of a crowd people were more vulnerable to submission