The Psychological Assessment of Political LeadersConclusionNo matter what assessment strategy is employed, it is important to
keep some cautions in mind about the validity of the results. These
injunctions take the form of several comparisons that are desirable to
make when it is feasible to do so. Some of them are possible within
the framework of operational code analysis while others require addi-
tional resources.
- Compare the VICS indices for a leader based on public
statements with VICS indices from private sources and
with assessments of the leader from other sources, for
example, forecasts from other personality profiling meth-
ods or qualitative interpretations based on biographical
analysis. - Compare the VICS indices for the leader with the same
indices for advisers and others in the government to see if
there is a consensus. This step is particularly important if
there is doubt about whether the sources for the original
analysis represent the views of a single leader or the pre-
vailing view within a government. - Compare the VICS indices from public and private sources
for different policy domains, issue areas, and targets in
order to refine the assessments. Use tests of statistical
significance as criteria for determining how likely differ-
ences in VICS indices could have occurred by chance. - Compare the assessments from an operational code analy-
sis against rival predictive models, for example, models of
foreign policy decision making that emphasize other
domestic or external variables than the ones captured by
the VICS indices. They could be forecasts from geographic
area experts or from other schools of international rela-
tions theory.
All of these comparisons are potentially useful in deciding
whether operational code assessments are consistent with other evi-
dence and reside within the mainstream of conventional wisdom.
When the forecasts are outside an existing consensus, or when there
is no consensus from the application of different kinds of forecasting