David G Winter
Biographic Data
| ID | 154188 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David G Winter |
| GIVEN NAMES | David G |
| FAMILY NAME | Winter |
| SIGNATURE | WINTER D G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Michigan |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6490-7467 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 63 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 460 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 63 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1963 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Trust and tribulation
We examined how racial‐ethnic identity centrality, or the importance of race/ethnicity in people's self‐perceptions, affected peoples’ support for the Democratic and Republican candidates in the 2020 US election. We explored this association by examining the mediating role of trust in important social institutions. In Study 1, we examined these effects by comparing the pattern of relationships among people of color (POC) and white people, using a…
U.S. Senators’ power motivation and their votes for war versus peace
Discontents, Doctrines, and Disruptions
Peer Reviewed
A Motivational Analysis of Russian Presidents, 1994–2018
This article analyzes the motivations of the three presidents of Russia since the end of the Soviet Union: Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin, and Dmitry Medvedev. Imagery for the achievement, affiliation, and power motives was scored from the texts of annual presidential addresses to the Federal Assembly from 1994 through 2018. Although there were fluctuations from president to president, and from year to year within each term, the Russian presidents…
Introduction to symposium on “Themes of gender and identity in the 2016 US presidential election”
Themes of gender, gender roles and relations, and sex played major roles in the 2016 US presidential campaign and election. While Hillary Rodham Clinton’s status as the first woman presidential nom
Soviet and German implicit perceptions of mutual threat, 1939–1941
How Politics Become Personal
Major social and political events occurring in adolescence and young adulthood can create politicized identities in particular age cohorts, but within a generation, the experiences and results may differ as a function of different social identities based on (for example) race and gender. We explore the recollections in middle age of experiences in adolescence and young adulthood of four 1968 high school graduates, one from each intersection of ra…
Taming power
Power is a necessary dimension of all human enterprises. It can inspire and illuminate, but it can also corrupt, oppress, and destroy. Therefore, taming power has been a central moral and political question for most of human history. Writers, theorists, and researchers have suggested many methods and mechanisms for taming power: through affiliation and love, intellect and reason, responsibility, religion and values, democratic political structure…
Khrushchev visits the Bolshoi
Personality Profiles of Political Elites
Personality can be understood as including four distinct elements: demographic characteristics and other embodied social contexts, traits, cognitions and beliefs, and implicit motives. Because political leaders and elite groups are not available for direct assessment, measuring their personalities usually requires indirect methods. This chapter reviews a variety of such at-a-distance methods for measuring the elements of personality, citing landm…
PersonalityThe authors would like to thank William McKinley Runyan for his helpful suggestions on the first edition of this chapter.
This chapter considers the historical puzzle of personality psychologists' ambivalence toward case studies and life histories. Examining the formative period of personality research between 1900 and 1930, which has received scant attention in historical reviews of American personality psychology, the authors argue that early research in personality reveals a tension between two central tasks of personality psychology—the study of individual diffe…
Scoring motive imagery in documents from four Middle East opposition groups
Research with an enlarged dataset, containing additional documents to supplement the Smith, Suedfeld, Conway, & Winter. (2008 Smith, A. G., Suedfeld, P., Conway, L. G. and Winter, D. G. 2008. The language of violence: Distinguishing terrorist from non-terrorist groups using thematic content analysis. Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict, 1: 142–163. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]) study, confirms earlier findings that documents issued by…
Philosopher‐King or Polarizing Politician? A Personality Profile of Barack Obama
Although U.S. President Barack Obama received extensive media coverage during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign and later during the first two years of his presidency, many people still perceive him as elusive, or even contradictory. Using biographical facts and objective at‐a‐distance measures, this article presents a personality profile of Obama. The profile is organized around a fourfold conception of personality. Personality can be understo…
Why Achievement Motivation Predicts Success in Business but Failure in Politics
Several decades of research have established that implicit achievement motivation ( n Achievement) is associated with success in business, particularly in entrepreneurial or sales roles. However, several political psychology studies have shown that achievement motivation is not associated with success in politics; rather, implicit power motivation often predicts political success. Having versus lacking control may be a key difference between busi…
Thinking She Could be the Next President”
Researchers have demonstrated that Women's Studies courses can influence changes in beliefs about women, yet there is relatively little research on the impact of introducing material about women into mainstream curriculum. The current study examines the effects of introducing women exemplars into a course that is not identified as “Women's Studies.” Students enrolled in a political psychology course all attended the same lectures and were assigne…
Joseph Veroff (1929–2007)
Circulating Metaphors of Sexuality, Aggression, and Power
Measuring Implicit British Perceptions of German Intentions in 1938–1939
Implicit British perceptions of German leaders during the period September 30, 1938–September 1, 1939 (from the Munich Agreements to the German invasion of Poland) are studied with a “ratio of threat accentuation” measure. This ratio is calculated by comparing the densities of power motive imagery in two kinds of archival material: full texts of major Hitler speeches versus summaries in The Times of London, and British versus German accounts of m…
The language of violence
This study examined whether quantitative content analysis of the value references, motive imagery, and integrative complexity expressed in the documents of two terrorist groups and two nonterrorist comparison groups could distinguish the violent groups from their nonviolent counterparts. The two terrorist groups were Central al Qa'ida and al Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula. For each, a comparison group that operated in the same context and had a …
Sowing Patriotism, But Reaping Nationalism? Consequences of Exposure to the American Flag
The American flag is a frequently displayed national symbol in the United States. Given its high visibility and importance, the present research examines the consequences of exposure to the flag on Americans' sense of national attachment. We hypothesized that the flag would increase patriotism, defined as love and commitment to one's country, and nationalism, defined as a sense of superiority over others. Two experimental studies supported the id…
The role of motivation, responsibility, and integrative complexity in crisis escalation
Drawing on D. G. Winter's (1993) comparison of 1914 and the Cuban Missile Crisis, the author identified 8 paired crises (1 escalating to war, 1 peacefully resolved). Documents (diplomatic messages, speeches, official media commentary) from each crisis were scored for power, affiliation, and achievement motivation; text measures of responsibility and activity inhibition; and integrative complexity. Aggregated effect-size results show that war cris…
Authoritarianism?With or Without Threat
The Authoritarian Dynamic. By Karen Stenner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 392 pp., $75.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-521-82743-4), $29.99 paper (ISBN: 0-521-53478-X). Instead of inaugurating the prophesied “end of history” and the triumph of capitalist liberal democracy (Fukuyama 1992), the opening years of the twenty-first century have brought back some of the worst features of its predecessor. Internationally, genocide has ignited on severa…
Things I've Learned About Personality From Studying Political Leaders at a Distance 1
Studying the personalities of political leaders requires methods of measuring personality at a distance. One such method is content analysis of speeches, interviews, and other texts. This article reviews the author's research on achievement, affiliation, and power motives of U.S. presidents and other leaders and draws the following conclusions: (1) motivation and personality can be objectively and reliably measured at a distance; (2) personality …
Motivation and the Escalation of Conflict
Previous research with various kinds of documents has shown that high levels of power motive imagery are associated with conflict escalation and war, whereas affiliation imagery is associated with peaceful conflict resolution. This article extends this research to case studies of individual leaders: (a) passages from U.S. President James Polk's diary, inaugural address, and 1845 annual message relating to Mexico and the Oregon boundary issue; (b)…
Close Encounters With the Midwest
This study uses semi‐structured interviews to examine how 16 people of Latvian heritage negotiated their cultural identities in high school (retrospectively) and at midlife (concurrently). Participants’ high school and midlife cultural identity patterns were coded as marginalized, separated, assimilated, alternating integrated, or blended integrated. Although eleven participants were found to have had marginalized, separated, or alternating integ…
Threat and authoritarianism in the United States, 1978–1987
Sowing Patriotism, But Reaping Nationalism? Consequences of Exposure to the American Flag
The American flag is a frequently displayed national symbol in the United States. Given its high visibility and importance, the present research examines the consequences of exposure to the flag on Americans' sense of national attachment. We hypothesized that the flag would increase patriotism, defined as love and commitment to one's country, and nationalism, defined as a sense of superiority over others. Two experimental studies supported the id…
The Personalities of Bush and Gorbachev Measured at a Distance
We assessed the personalities of George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev at a distance, using methods and materials developed by each of the authors for measuring motives, cognitions, and traits. We discuss methodological and procedural issues. Results are presented in terms of quantitative scores, expressed in comparison with other political leaders. The integrated personality portraits developedfor each leader are discussed in relation to popular and…
Threat and authoritarianism in the United States, 1978-1987
Studies at both the individual and collective levels have implicated threat as an important factor in authoritarianism. As a follow-up to Sales's (1973) study relating behavioral indicators of authoritarianism to levels of social threat, the present research analyzed archival data from the United States for high-threat (1978-1982) and low-threat (1983-1987) periods. Societal measures of most attitude and behavioral components of the authoritarian…
An Exploratory Study of the Motives of Southern African Political Leaders Measured at a Distance
In recent years political psychologists have begun to use content analysis to assess the personalities of political leaders who are otherwise inaccessible. This paper describes such a study which examined the motives of five groups of leaders from southern Africa. in particular their needs for achievement, affiliation, and power. Content analysis motive scores are compared with experts' ratings of the motives of these leaders and experts' judgmen…
Leader appeal, leader performance, and the motive profiles of leaders and followers
Three leader trait and leader-follower interaction models of leader appeal and leader performance are evaluated with data about he motive profiles of American presidents and American society, in both cases measured at a distance. Presidential ppeal, defined in terms of electoral success, is significantly correlated with the congruence or match between the president's motive profile and that of his contemporary society. In contrast, presidential g…
Right‐Wing Authoritarianism, Party Identification, and Attitudes Toward Feminism in Student Evaluations of the Clinton‐Lewinsky Story
This study explored the relationship among undergraduates' right‐wing authoritarianism (as measured by the RWA scale), attitudes toward feminism, party identification, gender, and attitudes about the Clinton‐Lewinsky relationship. Factor analysis yielded three subscales, reflecting participants' evaluations of Clinton's morality, the affair, and Kenneth Starr (the independent counsel). Republican identification was related to each subscale and al…
Thinking She Could be the Next President”
Researchers have demonstrated that Women's Studies courses can influence changes in beliefs about women, yet there is relatively little research on the impact of introducing material about women into mainstream curriculum. The current study examines the effects of introducing women exemplars into a course that is not identified as “Women's Studies.” Students enrolled in a political psychology course all attended the same lectures and were assigne…
The language of violence
This study examined whether quantitative content analysis of the value references, motive imagery, and integrative complexity expressed in the documents of two terrorist groups and two nonterrorist comparison groups could distinguish the violent groups from their nonviolent counterparts. The two terrorist groups were Central al Qa'ida and al Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula. For each, a comparison group that operated in the same context and had a …
Power, affiliation, and war
From previous research, a model relating war outbreak to a pattern of high power motivation and low affiliation motivation is developed and tested by content analysis of (a) historical materials from over 300 years of British history, (b) British-German communications at the outbreak of World War I, and (c) United States-Soviet communications during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In all 3 studies, observed motive patterns in relation to war-versus-pea…
The power motive in women—and men
Une reanalyse des donnees sur la question etudie les differences selon le sexe dans l'aspiration au pouvoir (mode d'activation, niveau moyen et relation avec des comportements impulsifs et agressifs)
The role of motivation, responsibility, and integrative complexity in crisis escalation
Drawing on D. G. Winter's (1993) comparison of 1914 and the Cuban Missile Crisis, the author identified 8 paired crises (1 escalating to war, 1 peacefully resolved). Documents (diplomatic messages, speeches, official media commentary) from each crisis were scored for power, affiliation, and achievement motivation; text measures of responsibility and activity inhibition; and integrative complexity. Aggregated effect-size results show that war cris…
Husband's motives and wife's career level
The motivational basis of concessions and compromise
A content analysis system for measuring positive concessions (offering concessions) and negative concessions (rejecting offered concessions) was introduced and validated through an archival study of government-to-government documents from 4 crises, 2 of which escalated to war and 2 of which were peacefully resolved. In the archival documents, concession making was positively associated with affiliation motivation and negatively associated with po…
Toward a science of personality psychology
The Personalities of Bush and Gorbachev at a Distance
Earlier this year, we published in the pages of this journal an at-a-distance assessment of the personalities of United States President George Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, based on systematic content analysis of their speech and press conference transcripts (Winter et al., 1991). The data analyses were completed in July 1988 and March 1989, respectively; the paper itself was completed in June 1990. Since that time two crises-the …
A Motivational Analysis of Russian Presidents, 1994–2018
This article analyzes the motivations of the three presidents of Russia since the end of the Soviet Union: Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin, and Dmitry Medvedev. Imagery for the achievement, affiliation, and power motives was scored from the texts of annual presidential addresses to the Federal Assembly from 1994 through 2018. Although there were fluctuations from president to president, and from year to year within each term, the Russian presidents…
How Politics Become Personal
Major social and political events occurring in adolescence and young adulthood can create politicized identities in particular age cohorts, but within a generation, the experiences and results may differ as a function of different social identities based on (for example) race and gender. We explore the recollections in middle age of experiences in adolescence and young adulthood of four 1968 high school graduates, one from each intersection of ra…
Personality Profiles of Political Elites
Personality can be understood as including four distinct elements: demographic characteristics and other embodied social contexts, traits, cognitions and beliefs, and implicit motives. Because political leaders and elite groups are not available for direct assessment, measuring their personalities usually requires indirect methods. This chapter reviews a variety of such at-a-distance methods for measuring the elements of personality, citing landm…
Philosopher‐King or Polarizing Politician? A Personality Profile of Barack Obama
Although U.S. President Barack Obama received extensive media coverage during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign and later during the first two years of his presidency, many people still perceive him as elusive, or even contradictory. Using biographical facts and objective at‐a‐distance measures, this article presents a personality profile of Obama. The profile is organized around a fourfold conception of personality. Personality can be understo…
Motivation and the Escalation of Conflict
Previous research with various kinds of documents has shown that high levels of power motive imagery are associated with conflict escalation and war, whereas affiliation imagery is associated with peaceful conflict resolution. This article extends this research to case studies of individual leaders: (a) passages from U.S. President James Polk's diary, inaugural address, and 1845 annual message relating to Mexico and the Oregon boundary issue; (b)…
Power, Sex, and Violence
Power, sex, and violence are three themes that characterize a good deal of 20th‐century experience. Connections among these themes can be demonstrated through archival and field studies and by laboratory experiments, in the core disciplines of political psychology as well as in literature and art. Understanding and explaining this power‐sex‐violence fusion is an urgent theoretical and practical imperative. Two tasks are especially critical: under…
Laboratory Tests of a Motivational-Perceptual Model of Conflict Escalation
We present a model suggesting that international conflicts escalate to violence when countries (a) express higher levels of power motive imagery, (b) exaggerate levels of perceived power motive imagery in communications and statements from the “other” side, and (c) express still higher levels of power motive imagery as a result of such exaggerated perceptions. The model is supported by three studies. In the first two, participants wrote replies t…
Scoring motive imagery in documents from four Middle East opposition groups
Research with an enlarged dataset, containing additional documents to supplement the Smith, Suedfeld, Conway, & Winter. (2008 Smith, A. G., Suedfeld, P., Conway, L. G. and Winter, D. G. 2008. The language of violence: Distinguishing terrorist from non-terrorist groups using thematic content analysis. Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict, 1: 142–163. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]) study, confirms earlier findings that documents issued by…
Close Encounters With the Midwest
This study uses semi‐structured interviews to examine how 16 people of Latvian heritage negotiated their cultural identities in high school (retrospectively) and at midlife (concurrently). Participants’ high school and midlife cultural identity patterns were coded as marginalized, separated, assimilated, alternating integrated, or blended integrated. Although eleven participants were found to have had marginalized, separated, or alternating integ…
The classic personal style
Motivating Economic Achievement
Motives, involvements, and leadership among Black college students 1
S ummary Thematic Apperceptive measures of achievement, affiliation, and power motives, together with consensual judges’ ratings for several clusters of attitudes, beliefs, and actions, and objective data on office‐holding were obtained from thirty‐eight Black undergraduate university students Overall, need for Power was related to holding office, being rated as influential, and participating in the Black Repertory Theatre. Among Northern‐reared …
The power motive
Self-definition and social definition in women1
Socialization and themes in popular drama
A content analysis is reported of child‐rearing manuals published in sixteenth to nineteenth centuries and of the themes of the Don Juan plays in seventeenth to twentieth centuries. The relationship between the content of the manuals and the themes of the plays supports the thesis that child‐rearing patterns advocated in one century are reflected in the next in the attitudes expressed in popular cultural activities towards aggression, achievement…
Coding Categories for the Study of Child-Rearing from Historical Sources
Abigail J. Stewart, David G. Winter, A. David Jones, Coding Categories for the Study of Child-Rearing from Historical Sources, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 5, No. 4, The History of the Family, II (Spring, 1975), pp. 687-701
Husband's motives and wife's career level
The Nature and Causes of Female Suppression
Motivation and Maturity Patterns in Marital Success
Married couples rated their marital satisfaction and played an interpersonal competitive game which revealed the success with which they interacted. Younger husbands who score more mature on the Stewart measure of psychosocial maturity tend to belong to more successful marriages, as judged by both criteria, as do college educated wives who show less immaturity and more phallic adventurousness
Reply to Bald and Mukhopadhyay
An Exploratory Study of the Motives of Southern African Political Leaders Measured at a Distance
In recent years political psychologists have begun to use content analysis to assess the personalities of political leaders who are otherwise inaccessible. This paper describes such a study which examined the motives of five groups of leaders from southern Africa. in particular their needs for achievement, affiliation, and power. Content analysis motive scores are compared with experts' ratings of the motives of these leaders and experts' judgmen…
A New Case for the Liberal Arts
A New Case for the Liberal Arts
This book grew out of the intesection of our personal experience of liberal education with our professional orientation as behavioral scientists
Responsibility and the power motive in women and men
Previous research on the correlates of power motivation in women and men had shown no gender differences, when the presence of younger siblings (reflecting responsibility training) was used as a moderator variable This study reports development of an empirically derived direct TAT measure of responsibility as a moderator variable for the power motive The new measure includes mention of legal or moral standards, obligation concern about others, co…
Enhancement of an enemy's power motivation as a dynamic of conflict escalation
Leader appeal, leader performance, and the motive profiles of leaders and followers
Three leader trait and leader-follower interaction models of leader appeal and leader performance are evaluated with data about he motive profiles of American presidents and American society, in both cases measured at a distance. Presidential ppeal, defined in terms of electoral success, is significantly correlated with the congruence or match between the president's motive profile and that of his contemporary society. In contrast, presidential g…
Using Motive Scores in the Psychobiographical Study of an Individual
Content analysis measures of imagery for the achievement, affiliation‐intimacy, and power motives were applied to Richard Nixon's 1969 first inaugural address The resulting motive profile–high achievement, high affiliation‐intimacy, and average in power motivation–was validated through a systematic analysis of the course of Nixon's everyday behavior as reported in the memoirs of six aides, and was also used to explain several paradoxes of Nixon's…
The power motive in women--and men
The power motive in women—and men
Une reanalyse des donnees sur la question etudie les differences selon le sexe dans l'aspiration au pouvoir (mode d'activation, niveau moyen et relation avec des comportements impulsifs et agressifs)
Threat and authoritarianism in the United States, 1978-1987
Studies at both the individual and collective levels have implicated threat as an important factor in authoritarianism. As a follow-up to Sales's (1973) study relating behavioral indicators of authoritarianism to levels of social threat, the present research analyzed archival data from the United States for high-threat (1978-1982) and low-threat (1983-1987) periods. Societal measures of most attitude and behavioral components of the authoritarian…
The Personalities of Bush and Gorbachev at a Distance
Earlier this year, we published in the pages of this journal an at-a-distance assessment of the personalities of United States President George Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, based on systematic content analysis of their speech and press conference transcripts (Winter et al., 1991). The data analyses were completed in July 1988 and March 1989, respectively; the paper itself was completed in June 1990. Since that time two crises-the …
The Personalities of Bush and Gorbachev Measured at a Distance
We assessed the personalities of George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev at a distance, using methods and materials developed by each of the authors for measuring motives, cognitions, and traits. We discuss methodological and procedural issues. Results are presented in terms of quantitative scores, expressed in comparison with other political leaders. The integrated personality portraits developedfor each leader are discussed in relation to popular and…
Threat and authoritarianism in the United States, 1978–1987
Responsibility
In everyday language, responsibility has several related meanings, all involving the control of behavior by internal mechanisms. "Responsible" people feel an inner obligation to do what is right. They are dependable and can be "counted upon" (Barnard, 1938, chapter 17; Blasi, 1980, 1983). When parents exhort young people to "show a little responsibility," they are trying to instill self-control and awareness of the consequences of action. To a la…
Psychology (54 works) · Social Psychology (45 works) · Political science (42 works) · Law (30 works) · Social Psychology (26 works) · Politics (24 works) · Sociology (24 works) · Law (21 works) · Psychological Testing and Assessment (21 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (19 works)