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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Political Leaders at a Distance: Methods of Analyzing Personality

Political Leaders at a Distance: Methods of Analyzing Personality

Winter, David G.

Hardcover

Series: Political Psychology

General EducationGeneral Psychology

ISBN10: 019764872X
ISBN13: 9780197648728
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: Aug 26 2026
Pages: 336
Weight: 1.27
Height: 1.21 Width: 6.50 Depth: 9.32
Language: English
The personalities of political leaders often play an important role in domestic and international outcomes. However, leaders cannot be studied directly by the usual means of interviews or psychological tests. In consequence, psychologists have developed a variety of indirect methods to assess and measure personality at a distance. Many of these at-a-distance measures are based on content analysis of what leaders say or write.

Political Leaders at a Distance begins by describing several cases when leaders' personality played critical roles in important political outcomes, such as the outbreak of war in 1914. The book then reviews the history of at-a-distance studies and offers a conceptual framework for personality, consisting of four different elements: social contexts, traits, cognitions, and motives.

Subsequent chapters focus on the personality variables of each element: their theoretical bases, the validity credentials of existing at-a-distance measures, and additional measurement techniques that might be developed in the future. Each variable is discussed with case examples of particular leaders and historical figures, research results from previous at-a-distance studies of leaders, and links to instructions, procedures, and scoring systems for measuring that variable. The final chapter brings together theory and at-a-distance research from the four separate elements of personality, revisiting examples throughout the book to offer a complete assessment. The book concludes with a discussion of future directions for at-a-distance personality measurement and research such as exploring the personality characteristics of literary figures, and the work of artists and architects.

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