Personality and Politics: Problems of Evidence, Inference, and Conceptualization

246 Pages·1987·12.65 MB·English

by  Fred I. Greenstein

PERSONALITY
AND POLITICS

PERSONALITY AND POLITICS
Problems of Evidence, Inference,
and Conceptualization
With a new preface
FRED I. GREENSTEIN
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
To Amy, Jessica, and Michael
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton,
New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom Princeton University Press, Guildford, Surrey
Preface to New Edition copyright © 1987 by Princeton University Presb
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data will be found on the last
printed page of this book
First printing, 1969 by Markham Publishing Company
Norton edition, 1975
First Princeton Paperback printing, 1987
LCC 87-2427
ISBN 0-691-07731-2
ISBN 0-691-02260-7 (pbk )
Clothbound editions of Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-
free paper, and binding materials are chosen for strength and durability
Paperbacks, while satisfactory for personal collections, are not usually
suitable for library rebinding
Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press,
Princeton, New Jersey
Preface to New Edition
This book addresses a ubiquitous real-world phenomenon and a con
troversial scholarly specialization that bear the same name: personality
and politics. Because I find it compellingly evident that in some con
texts and at some times the phenomenon has been highly consequen
tial, I consider it vital that paths be cleared through the tangle of
intellectual underbrush that impedes more and better inquiry. The
underbrush consists of disagreements among scholars about whether
personality and politics warrants study and, if so, whether it is ame
nable to disciplined study. Fundamental questions about how to ex
plain human behavior in general and political behavior in particular
underly these controversies. What is appropriate evidence? What kinds
of inferences are plausible? What conceptual strategies are productive?
I first encountered the controversies that were to be the "data"
for this 1969 book in the 1950's, as I began to chart a personal path
of inquiry into political psychology. I sought perspective on the debates
in political science from other disciplines in which problems of linking
psychological functioning to social phenomena also arise—for exam
ple, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and history. I gained some
clarity, but also encountered much the same debates. Indeed, debate
seemed to be more extensive than research in some disciplines. In
Chapter Two I quote the 1960 observation of sociologists David Ries-
man and Nathan Glazer that the culture and personality literature (an
analogue to the personality and politics literature) has "more critics
than practitioners."1
There appears to be less contention now. But this is largely the
result of compartmentalization in the social sciences. Increasingly,
scholarly discourse takes place among specialists within narrow dis
ciplinary areas rather than throughout or across disciplines. At the
same time, the volume of work on political psychology, including issues
1 David Riesman and Nathan Glazer, "The Lonely Crowd: A Reconsideration in
1960," in Seymour M. Lipset and Leo Lowenthal, eds., Culture and Social Character
(New York: The Free Press, 1961), p. 437.
V
VI PREFACE TO NEW EDITION
related to personality and politics, has grown; and one kind of political
psychology—the cognitive psychology of perception and mispercep-
tion—has found a respected niche in a political science field, namely
international relations.2 But consensus on the overall importance of
such work has not substantially increased. The journal published by
the International Society of Political Psychology—a group that was
formed in the 1970's—has not become obligatory reading in the several
disciplines from which the society draws members, and in the official
journal of the American Political Science Association, articles ex­
plicitly addressed to personality and politics or political psychology
are still just as rare as they were throughout the six decades from the
appearance of the first issue of the journal to the publication of this
book in 1969.3
The claims and counter-claims that I addressed in the 1960's on
the merits of studying personality and politics still have not been
resolved. A historian's 1985 review of a richly documented, closely
argued psychobiography of Kemal Atatiirk, for example, taxed the
2 See for example, Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International
Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976); Richard Ned Lebow, Be­
tween Peace and War: The Nature of International Crisis (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1981); Deborah W. Larson, Origins of Containment: Λ Psychological
Explanation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985); and Robert Jervis,
Richard Ned Lebow, and Janice Gross Stein, eds., Psychology and Deterrence (Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). For a collection of papers addressed
generally to the role of cognition in political behavior, most of which report or discuss
survey research on voting and public opinion, see Richard R. Lau and David 0. Sears,
eds., Political Cognition (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986).
1 A listing of key words in the titles of articles in the six decades of the American
Political Science Review appears in Kenneth Janda, ed., Cumulative Index to the Amer­
ican Political Science Review, Volumes 1-62: 1906—1968 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Xerox/
Universitv Microfilms, 1969) During this period the journal published only 17 articles
that included the words "psychology" or "personality" in their titles. These references
were dwarfed by references to governmental institutions and political processes: "Con­
gress" appeared in 140 titles, "political party" in 164, and so on Since 1968, references
to "psychology" and "personality" have remained rare. It should be stressed that much
psychological evidence is reported in American Political Science Review articles, es­
pecially in articles that have appeared since survey research became a major political
science research procedure in the 1950's. Typically, when they refer to "personality,"
political scientists do not have in mind political attitudes and preferences of the sort
reported in most survey research. Much of my analysis, however, is as applicable to
attitudes and preferences as to any other kind of psychological disposition. In this I
follow Henry A. Murray's usage, treating "personality" as "the most comprehensive
term we have in psychology." Murray, "Personality: Contemporary Viewpoints: Com­
ponents of an Evolving Personological System," International Encyclopedia of the Social
Sciences, 12 (New York: Macmillan and The Free Press, 1968), p. 9.
PREFACE TO NEW EDITION Vll
book's authors for employing psychological explanations of their pro
tagonist. In the reviewer's opinion, a cultural explanation would have
been more appropriate.4 This criticism is based on a fallacy I discuss
in Chapter Two: that of treating sociocultural background as if it
competes with psychology in explaining behavior. As is often true of
disagreements about the study of personality and politics, the dispute
about the relative merits of explaining behavior in terms of actors'
backgrounds or their psychology can be constructively resolved. The
former shape the latter; both, therefore, need to be studied as parts
of causal chains.
One of the polemical issues about the worth of studying personality
and politics is of particular interest because it can be decided straight
forwardly in a way that directly advances strategies of inquiry. I refer
to the debate about whether actors' inner dispositions or their contem
porary environments are the better predictors of their actions. The
writings that emphasize the predictive power of psychology typically
introduce qualifications to identify the kinds of situations in which
individuals with different psychological proclivities are likely to behave
the same. Similarly, writings that stress the environmental or, as it is
often put, situational determinants of behavior commonly grant that
some situations do not constrain actors to behave uniformly and thus
permit differences in personal characteristics to affect behavior. Once
each side's qualifications are noted, it becomes clear that there is
substantial agreement among seeming disputants. In Chapter Two, I
distill from the debate propositions about the circumstances under
which political analysts will find it more or less necessary to take
account of psychological dispositions and environments in order to
explain political behavior. Moreover, an overarching insight emerges:
it is essential for students of politics to heed Kurt Lewin's admonition
that behavior must be analyzed in terms of the interaction of individual
and situation.5
The most illuminating inquiries into political psychology do pre
cisely this, identifying what in the terminology of research methods
has come to be called interaction effects—relationships in which an
4 Kemal H. Karpat, "The Personality of Ataturk," American Historical Review, 90
(1985), 896. The book under review is Vamik D. Volkan and Norman Itzkowitz, The
Immortal Ataturk: A Psychobwgraphy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
5 Kurt Lewin, Principles of Topological Psychology (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1936), pp. 11-12.
Vlll PREFACE TO NEW EDITION
intervening variable must be identified in order to establish the effect
of an independent variable on behavior. Thus, for example, Richard
Christie and Florence Geis, in their meticulously designed study of
individuals with personalities that predispose them to manipulate
others (Machiavellianism), find consistent relationships between the
disposition to be manipulative and action consistent with that dispo­
sition—but only under certain circumstances, such as in situations in
which the potential for manipulation is clearly perceivable.6
In a parallel program of research into the psychology of leader­
ship, Fred Fiedler finds that environmental differences—notably, dif­
ferent requirements for effectiveness in various roles—are key inter­
vening variables. Role A will elicit effective performance by
personality type X, while role Β suits personality type Y. In effect
echoing Gordon Allport's aphorism that "the same heat that melts the
butter hardens the egg,"7 Fiedler notes that specific leadership traits
do not in themselves predict leaders' performance. Because "one can
be an effective leader in some situations and not in others . . . a single
leadership trait or combination of traits will not enable prediction in
all situations." Thus leadership needs to be studied in terms of the
interaction of person and situation, since "a trait or combination of
traits may well predict performance in certain situations that can be
specified. . . ."8 Alexander and Juliette George provide a perfect il­
lustration in their observation (discussed in Chapter Three) that Wood-
row Wilson's intense need for power made him highly flexible when
he was seeking to gain power but obdurately rigid when he was seeking
to maintain it.
In the research of Christie and Geis and of Fiedler, environmental
variables intervene between psychological differences and behavior.
On the other hand, in his psycho-physiological studies of the anxiety
levels of soldiers in Vietnam combat, Peter Bourne finds that differ­
ences in environmental context (roles) produce different intervening
6 Richard Christie and Florence L. Geis, Studies in Machiavellianism (New York:
Academic Press, 1970).
7 Gordon W. Allport, Personality: Λ Psychological Interpretation (New York: Holt,
1937), p. 325.
8 Fred E. Fiedler, Leadership (New York General Learning Press, 1971), p. 15.
See also his "What Triggers the Person-Situation Interaction in Leadership," in David
Magnusson and Norman S. Endler, eds-, Personality at the Crossroads: Current Issues
in Interactional Psychology (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1977), pp.
151—63 and the sources there cited.
PREFACE TO NEW EDITION IX
psychological states and therefore may have different consequences
for the behavior of individuals who do not vary systematically in un­
derlying psychological makeup. Bourne was able to interview soldiers
at times when they were highly vulnerable to Viet Cong attack and to
obtain a medical measure of the adrenal levels in their body. Some
faced combat with anxious apprehension, others with fatalism, if not
equanimity. All of the officers fell into the first category and most of
the enlisted men into the second. But the differences in anxiety level
did not come from character traits that differentiated officers from
enlisted personnel. Rather, the officers were directly aware of how
tenuous their circumstances were, the bulk of enlisted men were not.
Among the enlisted men, however, the radio operators had the same
information as the officers and were just as anxious.9
A turning point in research on personality occurred in 1975,
when the first international symposium was convened on "person by
situation interaction" as a basic perspective for the analysis of behavior.
The resulting volume on "interactional psychology" and subsequent
work under the same heading provides an invaluable body of basic
research, conceptualization, and methodological innovation for applied
study of behavior in particular institutional arenas such as politics.10
An interactional perspective sensitizes the political analyst to assess
the effects on behavior not only of psychological predispositions and
environmental contexts but also of different kinds of psychological
predispositions.
There is a tradition in political psychology, going back at least
to Harold Lasswell's 1930 Psychopathology and Politics, of being
especially attentive to irrational political behavior that is deeply rooted
in the emotions and is most readily explicable in terms of the psy-
chodynamic theories of neurosis and ego defense that stem from the
work of Freud.11 In Chapter Four, I illustrate the problems of con-
9 Peter G. Bourne, "Altered Adrenal Function in Two Combat Situations in Viet
Nam," in Β. E. Elefthenou and J. P. Scott, eds., The Physiology of Aggression and
Defeat (New York: Plenum, 1971), pp. 265-305. Bourne's work does not assess the
effect of emotional excitation on behavior. The extensive research on this topic is
instructively discussed in Irving L. Janis and Leon Mann, Decision Making: A Psycho­
logical Analysis of Conflict, Choice and Commitment (New York: The Free Press, 1977).
10 Magnusson and Endler, eds., Personality at the Crossroads. For further contri­
butions to this literature, see Lawrence A. Pervin and Michael Lewis, eds.. Perspectives
in Interactional Psychology (New York: Plenum, 1978).
" Harold D. Lasswell, Psychopathology and Politics (1930; rpt. Chicago: Univer­
sity of Chicago Press, 1977).