What would our leaders look like if they ALL had to take psychological exams? My cousin came to town yesterday...a "frustrated Republican" as he refers to himself. He's a small business owner, and when we began talking about the election, he noted that we don't choose a CEO by the same method we go about choosing the President.
There's no way in hell anyone would go for it.
Instead he proposed a simple add on. Instead of all this campaigning and sloganeering, have the candidates take a psychological exam.
I don't like comparing elected office to business positions. We don't HIRE folks, we ELECT them. Very different conceptions of accountability, and governance going on in these two ideas. But my cousin's idea really stuck with me.
On the positive side, I haven't ever taken a psychological profile for a job. I didn't need one to paint pipes in the late eighties. I didn't need one to be an Assistant Professor. But I'm thinking many professionals do (you ever taken one Mike?). Being a social scientist I can say that if the surveys are drawn up right, you can hit the nail on the head with a great degree of accuracy. Maybe you mess up 5 times out of 100.
And on the presidential level, we've only HAD 43 Presidents.
So this could work. Would you vote for someone who was typed as "prone to conflict?" Or someone who "had a preference for being secretive"? My cousin noted that most of us pin our choices on two or three hot button issues. I'd say that this is accurate, though I don't think most of us make choices based on concrete issues. The President (or even the local mayor) has to make decisions on a whole host of issues that are totally unrelated to those issues we care about. Why not base a choice on a holistic conception of how the President deals with crisis, and life, either opposed to (or for me, ALONG WITH) pure policy preferences?
There are some negatives...but it's something for me to think about. I'll kick it around some more and come back to it maybe.
Posted by at June 4, 2004 07:31 AM | TrackBackOh hell yes I've taken them. When the company I was working for in 92 was trying to get ISO 9000 certified (which was a basic requirement to do business in Europe - ISO 9000 certification is the fully documented expression of 'we say what we do and we do what we say') we went through a whole lot of introspection.
We had a professional psychologist come and administer a test to every employee and assess our fitness for different jobs. I know that I consciously skewed myself towards leadership characteristics. They allowed us to take the test twice if we felt that our first time wasn't quite right.
When I got my final results back, I found that it put in words a lot of things I truly believed about myself and, well quite frankly I showed it to my girlfriends.
I'm going to have to find that and scan it. It was a very important document for me in those days when everyone associated with computers was considered an irredeemable geek.
There are Enneagrams and MBTIs and all kinds of profiles. I even game my kids MBTIs last weekend. I think it would be very useful to know these things about elected officials.
I use the stuff at Similar Minds
http://similarminds.com/
BTW I'm a ESTJ and a 9w8
Posted by: Cobb at June 5, 2004 10:05 AM
one problem I see LKS;exam by nature are subjective,they can be skewed.In the industrial setting these exam historically have been use to eliminate certain groups and personalities.
Posted by: tootsie at June 4, 2004 09:37 AM