2. Assessing Leaders' Personalities:
A Historical Survey of Academic
Research Studies
David G. WinterThis chapter is a review of the main developments and landmarks in
the study of political leaders by academic and research psychologists,
setting the stage for the following chapters that illustrate several
modern techniques in their latest form.
As described in the next chapter, "Leader Personality Assessments
in Support of Goverment Policy," Langer, Wedge, and Post were
commissioned to profile living foreign leaders. Usually their work
was urgently required and drawn on as guides for government policy
in times of change, threats, conflicts, and opportunities.^1 In contrast,
academic political psychologists are driven more by intellectual
curiosity and questions of historical interest than by the require-
ments of government policy. They often have better access to a wider
range of information, as well as the leisure to speculate, discuss, and
rearrange their data and interpretations. This is especially true when
working on profiles of leaders from the past: historians and political
scientists are certainly interested in working out the puzzling per-
sonality dynamics of a Woodrow Wilson, an Adolf Hitler, or a
Nikita Khrushchev, but there are no longer pressing policy reasons
for rushing the job. And now, long after their deaths, we are likely to
have more information of all kinds available about these leaders than
we had when they were alive and in power. In the case of Hitler, for
example, we can now add to Langer's (1972) original wartime analy-
sis later studies by Binion (1976), Erikson (1942, [1950] 1963),
11