I personally think we need equally good rigour on front page posts to do with human nature and the nature of organisations. Both can be stalking horses for politics.
For falsifiable predictions, and testing of them, I agree I could have done better. In the model I hold implicitly I expect politicians to be less agreeable, in the big 5 sense, than the general population of the same age. I’d be curious to know if politicians in multi-party systems were more agreeable than 2 party system countries.
In order to prove the hypothesis, it would be necessary to track peoples agreeableness over time and see if it decreased if they became a politician. Otherwise it might be that agreeable people preferentially don’t become politicians.
It would be interesting to look at openness and concientiousness over time as well as the climb the political ladder. I expect I won’t find this longitudinal data though. There was some research I saw on psychopathy in presidents/ceos, but I don’t know how reliable it is and whether they looked at simple agreeableness.
I’ll have a look at some point, but I wasn’t planning on spending much effort on what was not going to be a front page post and just a cross submission from my own blog.
If you believe that there’s a significant amount of psychopaths in politics it becomes even more important to be able to distinguish a psychopath from someone who behaves like the characters in “Yes, Minister”.
Realpolitical pressures don’t bring someone into the mindstate that’s typical for psychopathy. I heard an interview with Jon Stewert where he made the point that Hilary Clinton is not smooth when she lies. She feel the normal kind of human anxiety that a psychopath doesn’t feel when lying.
She turned from a person who was idealistic and unwilling to compromize for realpolitikal reasons when she was first lady who pushed her healthcare agenda to a person who’s less idealistic and who has no problem with realpolitikal compromize and doing what needs to be done to be powerful but she still feel the kind of emotions when lying that a psychopath doesn’t.
Being a psychopath goes beyond ruthlessly playing the game.
There was some research I saw on psychopathy in presidents/ceos, but I don’t know how reliable it is and whether they looked at simple agreeableness.
To
believe that there’s a significant amount of psychopaths in politics
I was contrasting the two. I mentioned the pyschopathy study because it was the only one I heard about on the psychology of powerful people. They are distinct things, agreed.
Thanks for letting me know why you down voted.
I personally think we need equally good rigour on front page posts to do with human nature and the nature of organisations. Both can be stalking horses for politics.
For falsifiable predictions, and testing of them, I agree I could have done better. In the model I hold implicitly I expect politicians to be less agreeable, in the big 5 sense, than the general population of the same age. I’d be curious to know if politicians in multi-party systems were more agreeable than 2 party system countries.
In order to prove the hypothesis, it would be necessary to track peoples agreeableness over time and see if it decreased if they became a politician. Otherwise it might be that agreeable people preferentially don’t become politicians.
It would be interesting to look at openness and concientiousness over time as well as the climb the political ladder. I expect I won’t find this longitudinal data though. There was some research I saw on psychopathy in presidents/ceos, but I don’t know how reliable it is and whether they looked at simple agreeableness.
I’ll have a look at some point, but I wasn’t planning on spending much effort on what was not going to be a front page post and just a cross submission from my own blog.
If you believe that there’s a significant amount of psychopaths in politics it becomes even more important to be able to distinguish a psychopath from someone who behaves like the characters in “Yes, Minister”.
Realpolitical pressures don’t bring someone into the mindstate that’s typical for psychopathy.
I heard an interview with Jon Stewert where he made the point that Hilary Clinton is not smooth when she lies. She feel the normal kind of human anxiety that a psychopath doesn’t feel when lying.
She turned from a person who was idealistic and unwilling to compromize for realpolitikal reasons when she was first lady who pushed her healthcare agenda to a person who’s less idealistic and who has no problem with realpolitikal compromize and doing what needs to be done to be powerful but she still feel the kind of emotions when lying that a psychopath doesn’t.
Being a psychopath goes beyond ruthlessly playing the game.
How did you get from
To
I was contrasting the two. I mentioned the pyschopathy study because it was the only one I heard about on the psychology of powerful people. They are distinct things, agreed.