The Influence of Personality on Presidential

Transcript:The Influence of Personality on Presidential:
The Influence of Personality on Presidential Leadership Style (with a Case Study of Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States) Annie Griebie April 2021 Introduction Political leadership is shaped by the individual leader’s personality Relationship between Theodore Millon’s (1990) evolutionary theory of personality and the stylistic elements of political leadership derived from it (Immelman, 2005) Primary goal: explore conceptual links between Trump’s personality profile and complementary models of political leadership Outline Survey of previous research linking personality and leadership Case study Personality assessment of Donald Trump (using the Millon Inventory of Diagnostic Criteria (MIDC; 2015) Analysis of hypothesized developmental background underlying Trump’s personality pattern and leadership style Update and elaborate conceptual links Existing Political Leadership Models Gaps in Pervious Theoretical Models Linking Personality Variables to Leadership Style Narrowness of scope and and failure to encapsulate true breadth of personality diversity Overall lack of generalizability Failure to acknowledge or incorporate the underlying biological sources of individual differences Taxonomy: Scales and Gradations Millon’s Eight Attribute Domains Millon Inventory of Diagnostic Criteria (MIDC) Current Issues in Political Psychology How do leadership style dynamics change within an individual over time? How do constituents or other followers influence an individual’s leadership style? MIDC Profile for Donald Trump Primary Personality Patterns Ambitious/self-serving–exploitative (Scale 2, level b–c) Dominant/controlling–aggressive (Scale 1A, level b–c) Outgoing/gregarious–impulsive (Scale 3, level b–c) Secondary Personality Pattern Dauntless/dissenting (Scale 1B, level b) Developmental Causal Analysis Summaries of the developmental background of personality patterns relevant to Trump, supplemented by documentation from Mary Trump’s biography of Donald Trump, Too Much and Never Enough (2020) Experiential history sets the stage for self-perpetuation processes Analysis served as a validity check on the theoretical coherence of Trump’s MIDC-derived profile Outgoing Pattern: Characteristic Experiential History Stimulus Enrichment and Diversity in the Sensory-Attachment Stage Highly outgoing individuals are likely to “have been exposed to a number of different sources that provide brief, highly charged, and irregular stimulus reinforcements. … Thus, the persistent yet erratic dependency behaviors of the histrionic personality may reflect a pathological form of intense stimulus seeking that can be traced to highly charged, varied and irregular stimulus reinforcements associated with early attachment learning. The shifting from one source of gratification to another so characteristic of histrionics, their search for new stimulus adventures, their penchant for creating excitement and their inability to tolerate boredom and routine, all may represent the consequences of these unusual early experiences” (Millon,