The Psychological Assessment of Political Leaders(Crichlow 1998). The two leaders of the Labor party in Israel exhib-
ited different operational codes in the earlier decade and moved
toward convergence in the later decade.
In the early 19705 Rabin and Peres viewed the political universe
as definitely hostile but with different degrees of pessimism. While
Peres was not significantly more pessimistic than Rabin, he was
significantly less confident about the ability to control historical
development (Crichlow 1998). This difference in diagnostic propen-
sities located the two leaders in different quadrants of the political
universe for this time period. Moreover, a statistically significant self
difference in strategic choice propensities in the earlier decade
(Crichlow 1998) bolsters the different predictions for moves, tactics,
and strategies by the two leaders during the 19705. These differences
are summarized in table 9.4.
In contrast, the remaining data in table 9.4 indicate that the diag-
nostic propensities of the two leaders converged during the early
- They agreed that the nature of the political universe was a
mixture of friendly and hostile forces, shared a mixture of optimism
and pessimism about the realization of political goals, and were
highly confident in their ability to control historical development.
Their strategic and tactical choice propensities also converged in a
definitely cooperative orientation. While both leaders shifted their
views of the political universe, Peres shifted his strategic and tactical
orientations toward agreement with Rabin, who exhibited relatively
little change across the decades (Crichlow 1998).
How Do You Apply These Assessments to Interpreting Behavior?
The application of assessments from an operational code profile is at
once a relatively simple and a relatively complex task. No matter
which of the following levels of complexity is adopted in applying
assessments, it is necessary for the leadership analyst to supply the
subsequent observations of behavior and make the judgment about
whether the observed behavior matches the behavior that was fore-
cast in the assessment. While the following applications focus on for-
eign policy behavior by leaders, it is also possible to analyze interna-
tional interactions between leaders at different levels of decision (Leng
and Walker 1982; Brams 1994). However, this shift in focus
changes the objective of operational code analysis from assessing a