No, when I'm asking about using psychology to interpret history, I'm not talking about the "Stalin's dad beat him like a dog and now he's evil" type of Freudian psychohistory that guys like Lloyd DeMause uses. I'm asking rather of the propriety of using specific cognitive and social psychological concepts (ie cognitive heuristics and biases like availability heuristics; social psychology concepts like group belonging, peer pressure, bonding rituals, etc) to explain specific decisions, events, or phenomena in history. To give a few examples:
In a 2009 article, Kurt Weyland (admittedly a political scientist) argues that cognitive heuristics (particularly availability and representativeness heuristics) best explain the incredible speed and geographical spread of the 1848 revolutionary wave following Louis Philippe's overthrow.
Soldaten by Harald Welzer (psychologist) and Sönke Neitzel (historian) analyzes German POW surveillance transcripts to examine the social psychology of killing and dying in war (which I think continues a tradition in Holocaust scholarship going at least as far back as Christopher Browning drawing on Milgram's experiment in Ordinary Men, albeit this time with more empirical rigour with having a trained psychologist on board)
In Road to Disaster, Brian VanDeMark draws on cognitive biases like confirmation bias to explain why American policymakers like Robert McNamara made the mistakes they did in strategizing the Vietnam War.
At the risk of conflating different approaches under one cognitive science umbrella: on the more scientific end of this spectrum, I'm aware there's the Journal of Cognitive Historiography, which uses digital humanities techniques like large scale databases and large scale textual analyses to "mine" "data from dead minds". I haven't looked into it too much, but this lecture video by one of its contributors explains the assumptions going into to journals like JCH (to be clear, the lecturer had disavowed eliminative reductionism in an earlier video in the same lecture series and believes 100% that specific cultural content are contingent and not scientifically predictable).
To sum up: What do historians think about cognitive historiography (to borrow the journal's term)? Can/should cognitive science and social psychology concepts be used to explain the past, especially in conjunction with digital humanities techniques? If so, how can modern science be responsibly used for the past?
I mean, as a historian who has spent some time also reading around the literature on cognitive science (a very old interest), I will just say: we seem to have such a poor grasp, still, on minds that are alive right now and can be studied with fMRI machines and so on, that the idea that this science is in a place to study past minds, as represented only by whatever inscriptions history has left around for us to look at, seems, well, like hubris.
This is not to say that psychological or cognitive insights cannot be useful. I have found Robert Lifton's work helpful at times, and he is always very clear to make clear that he is not suggesting a 1-to-1 correspondence between psychological insight and historical insight, but that psychological theories can sometimes be used as a way of thinking about how historical actors have behaved, given descriptions of them from multiple observers over a long period of time. But in this style of work, the psychological arguments always take the back-seat to the historical ones, not the other way around: they are used to perhaps hold up an argument developed from historical argumentation, not to create a new historical argument.
So when I read about using large scale databases to "mine data from dead minds" I roll my eyes a bit. Show me an important and novel result that you can get from such an analysis, and then show me how you know if it was wrong, and I'll maybe think it's useful. But until then, I'm going to be pretty suspicious, and I'm a pretty open-minded historian, I think.
I would just note that your examples given other than that one are pretty wide-ranging in how they are using psychological or cognitive concepts. In your first one, you have someone arguing that some concept actually gives us a historical answer — the "hard" approach. In the second one, you have social psychology as a "lens" — far less "hard." And in the last one you have a very common and popularly-known psychological phenomena being applied to a situation where the policymakers themselves would probably admit to it (McNamara more or less acknowledges such biases at play in Fog of War). Of those, the only one the strikes me as even somewhat controversial would be the first instance, because it puts the cognitive argument at the front of the cart, not the back, and in that one, I'd still want to ask how you'd know if it was wrong and how much confidence one would have in such an argument.
Historians are methodologically very pluralistic and will happily borrow techniques, arguments, lenses, frameworks, insights, etc., from any field that can offer them (economics, anthropology, philosophy, sociology, what have you), and psychology and cognitive science can certainly be part of that, but again the key question is how central that part of it is to the argument, and how one can responsibly apply such approaches that tend to be directed clinically at living individuals to the long dead.
Separately, I would note that as a historian of science, psychology has historically been very poor at forming consistent and long-lasting models that are still respected scientifically over time. This is perhaps inherently a problem with something concerned with a concept as still-nebulous as the mind, where subjectivity and objectivity are necessarily intermingled (and perhaps inextricable). I am not harshing on the practitioners of said disciplines, or even their current theories. But I will say that it does not raise one's confidence that using whatever is currently cutting-edge will have lasting value. Would there be value in interpreting history through a Freudian, Jungian, Skinnerian, or Bettelheimian framework? Maybe, at times. But very few practicing scientists believe these once-prominent thinkers represent the cutting-edge, and many consider many (if not all of them) totally disproven. Will they think better on current work? I don't know. (The replication crisis in psychology doesn't make me think they will, though.) You mock (rightly) Lloyd DeMause, but I am not sure he (or Erik Erikson, or other "psychohistorians") represents a totally different situation than some of the other possible applications of psychology to history, except as much as they are using obviously out-of-date theories and the others are not.