The Psychological Assessment of Political Leadersand the operation of defense are likely to block their own awareness
of their true motives. In later years, psychologists have also added
social desirability, impression management, and simple inaccessibil-
ity of implicit mental processes (Greenwald and Banaji 1995; Nis-
bett and Wilson 1977) as factors that severely limit the validity of
self-reports about motives. To measure motives, therefore, many
psychologists have turned to indirect means. Many such methods are
based on the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), developed by Mor-
gan and Murray (1935; see also Murray 1938), in which people tell
stories to a series of vague or ambiguous pictures. (Apperception means
assigning meaning to a stimulus, in contrast to perception, which
refers to sensing and labeling the stimulus.)
TAT-Based Measures
Since the experimentally derived technique for scoring motives in
the TAT developed by McClelland and his associates (McClelland et
al. 1953; Smith 1992; Winter 1998a) has been the basis for most of
the objective measurement of motives at a distance in political psy-
chology, including chapters 7 (Winter) and 8 (Hermann) in this vol-
ume, its essential features can be briefly described here. To develop a
measure of any particular motive, that motive is first aroused, prefer-
ably through several different experimental procedures. For example,
the power motive has been aroused by testing candidates for student
government while votes were being counted, by showing a film of
President John F. Kennedy's inauguration, and by role-playing a
protest group about to confront the police (Winter 1973, chap. 3).
TAT stories written by people under these different motive-arousing
conditions are then compared to TAT stories written by people in a
neutral, nonaroused group. After considerable reworking and
refinement, the differences between the two groups of stories become
the basis of the scoring system. Experimentally derived scoring sys-
tems of this type have been developed for the two fundamental
dimensions of affiliation and power motivation, as well as a third
dimension of achievement motivation. Political psychology
researchers have adapted these TAT scoring systems to score motive
imagery in a wide variety of other kinds of verbal material, including
speeches, interviews, popular literature, diplomatic documents,
dream reports, folktales, and even television programs (Winter