The Psychological Assessment of Political Leadersparty congress after their accession to power and related each leader's
score to his leadership style.
African Leaders
Winter (1980) scored interview transcripts from twenty-two politi-
cal leaders from various southern Africa countries, including heads of
state, cabinet ministers, and exiled nationalist guerilla leaders. As
expected from laboratory studies, power-motivated leaders were
rated by a panel of experts as more likely "to initiate, support, or con-
tinue armed conflict" (R = .~/i,p < .001). It is interesting to note
that these ratings of propensity for violence were unrelated (R = .14,
p - ns.) to ratings of power motivation made by these same expert
judges, although on grounds of shared method variance one might
have expected that they would be.
Hermann (1987^ scored interview transcripts from twelve sub-
Saharan Africa heads of government and related the results to their
foreign policy styles and role orientations, confirming her earlier
findings on world leaders (Hermann 198oa).
Studies of Individual Leaders
In recent years, several researchers have used motive imagery scoring
of historical materials to make inferences, as part of a systematic psy-
chobiography or personality portrait, about the motives of particular
individuals. Some of these studies were based on the scores of one
particular president, candidate, or other leader from a group study;
others were designed from the beginning as a study of a single leader.
Winter and Carlson (1988) explored how the motive imagery
scores of Richard Nixon's 1969 first inaugural address (high achieve-
ment and affiliation, average power) could be used to resolve some of
the paradoxes of Nixon's personal and political behavior. For exam-
ple, they suggest that Nixon's twists and changes of political
beliefs—from liberal populist in college to postwar "Redhunter" to
guest of Mao Zedong in 1972—can be understood as a manifestation
of the tendency for achievement-motivated people to modify actions
on the basis of results of previous actions. More systematically, they
validated Nixon's overall motive imagery profile by gathering
accounts of his motive-related behavior from the published memoirs
of his principal associates, as well as from Nixon's own autobiogra-