Putting Presidents to the Personality Test
Putting Presidents to the Personality Test
Aug. 5, 2000 -- He's a highly successful corporate lawyer, but a personality test shows him to be prone to depression, anxious, disorderly, and not very straightforward. He's had only a year or so of formal education and has read maybe five books in his entire life. On the plus side, he's open, competent, agreeable, and strives for achievement. Would you hire this man? The American people did, in 1860 and again in 1864.
Few responsible historians would quarrel with the notion that Abraham Lincoln was a great president -- "great" being an adjective generally reserved for a handful of the 41 men who have led the U.S. through periods of crisis and progress, but also through eras of smug complacency and inertia.
The best U.S. presidents -- those whom historians and political observers agree had fulfilled the highest goals of the nation's highest office -- were often stubborn, disagreeable cusses. But the great ones (Washington, Lincoln, the Roosevelts) were also most frequently ambitious, determined, and highly competent, say Steven Rubenzer, PhD, and fellow psychologists who attempted to study the inner psyches of U.S. commanders in chief in their "Personality and The President" project. They reported their findings at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association in Washington this week.
"It was about 1992 when we first started talking about this," says Rubenzer, with the Mental Health and Mental Retardation Authority of Harris County, Texas, in an interview with WebMD. "There was talk about Clinton and did he have the character to be president, and that was kind of intriguing to me, because character was a term that obviously had to do with personality."
Rubenzer and colleagues undertook the project as a means of examining "the personalities of all 41 presidents in greater detail and objectivity than ever before." They hoped to provide a personality portrait of each president, classify him, and compare him to average Americans. They wanted to determine the role of personality in presidential behaviors, like success and job performance.
They asked more than 100 presidential historians to assess the lives of the leaders they studied, looking only at the five-year period before each man assumed office for the first time. This limitation was to avoid potential biases or influences that life in the executive mansion may have had on the personalities of the resident president. ("The White House is a prison," Warren G. Harding reportedly said.)
Putting Presidents to the Personality Test
Aug. 5, 2000 -- He's a highly successful corporate lawyer, but a personality test shows him to be prone to depression, anxious, disorderly, and not very straightforward. He's had only a year or so of formal education and has read maybe five books in his entire life. On the plus side, he's open, competent, agreeable, and strives for achievement. Would you hire this man? The American people did, in 1860 and again in 1864.
Few responsible historians would quarrel with the notion that Abraham Lincoln was a great president -- "great" being an adjective generally reserved for a handful of the 41 men who have led the U.S. through periods of crisis and progress, but also through eras of smug complacency and inertia.
The best U.S. presidents -- those whom historians and political observers agree had fulfilled the highest goals of the nation's highest office -- were often stubborn, disagreeable cusses. But the great ones (Washington, Lincoln, the Roosevelts) were also most frequently ambitious, determined, and highly competent, say Steven Rubenzer, PhD, and fellow psychologists who attempted to study the inner psyches of U.S. commanders in chief in their "Personality and The President" project. They reported their findings at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association in Washington this week.
"It was about 1992 when we first started talking about this," says Rubenzer, with the Mental Health and Mental Retardation Authority of Harris County, Texas, in an interview with WebMD. "There was talk about Clinton and did he have the character to be president, and that was kind of intriguing to me, because character was a term that obviously had to do with personality."
Rubenzer and colleagues undertook the project as a means of examining "the personalities of all 41 presidents in greater detail and objectivity than ever before." They hoped to provide a personality portrait of each president, classify him, and compare him to average Americans. They wanted to determine the role of personality in presidential behaviors, like success and job performance.
They asked more than 100 presidential historians to assess the lives of the leaders they studied, looking only at the five-year period before each man assumed office for the first time. This limitation was to avoid potential biases or influences that life in the executive mansion may have had on the personalities of the resident president. ("The White House is a prison," Warren G. Harding reportedly said.)
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