The Psychological Assessment of Political Leadersmaking an announcement speech, he did not. Was this an artif actual
or real difference?
Such a question could have several answers, each involving differ-
ent assumptions about the comparison and standardization
processes, (i) The apparent difference in Perot's scores could simply
be an artifact of the different comparison samples used; hence Perot's
"true" achievement motive imagery score would be either high (on
the basis of the interview comparison group) or low (on the basis of
the announcement statement comparison group). (2) The world
leaders are a political sample and therefore not a good comparison
group for Perot's interview-based scores. A sample of business lead-
ers would have been better; in comparison with such a sample,
Perot's raw achievement motive score might have been much lower.
(3) The apparent difference may be due to the fact that Perot's
announcement of candidacy was made as an opening statement in a
news conference rather than as a set speech, as were the other candi-
dates' announcements to which it was compared. (4) The difference
may be real, but it is the result of Perot's not adjusting his achieve-
ment imagery upward to the baseline typical of political announce-
ment speeches, which was a new genre for him. In other words, his
announcement was poorly matched to the demands of the occasion
and did not reflect his true high level of achievement motivation.
These four answers are essentially methodological hypotheses.
More interesting is another answer that involves a substantive expla-
nation: (5) the difference is real and reflects an actual decline or disen-
gagement of Perot's achievement motivation during the course of the
presidential campaign. Perhaps he did not "have his heart" in the
later, October campaign and was just going through the motions of
the announcement during the television debates. After all, his proba-
bility of success had dropped precipitously by then, and under such
circumstances achievement-motivated candidates tend to get out of
the race (Winter 1982). Perhaps he only reentered the presidential
race to avoid alienating his supporters and so preserve his base of sup-
port for future strategic purposes. Hence his announcement state-
ment had lower levels of achievement motivation than it would have
had if it had been composed and delivered several months earlier.