USPP
Unit for the Study of Personality in Politics
The Political
Personality of 2004
Democratic Presidential Candidate John Kerry
Aubrey Immelman and Adam Beatty
Department of Psychology
Saint John’s University
Unit for the Study of Personality in Politics
College of Saint Benedict
St. Joseph, MN 56374
Telephone: (320) 363-5481
Fax: (320) 363-5582
E-mail:
aimmelman@csbsju.edu
Paper presented at the Twenty-Eighth Annual Scientific
Meeting
of the International Society of Political Psychology
Toronto, ON
July 3–6, 2005
Abstract
The paper reports the results of an indirect assessment of the personality of Sen. John Kerry, Democratic Party nominee in the 2004 U.S. presidential election.
Sen. Kerry’s primary personality pattern is Ambitious/confident, with secondary features of the Dominant/asserting and Dauntless/venturesome patterns.
The amalgam of Ambitious and Dominant patterns in Sen. Kerry’s profile indicates an adaptive, nonpathological variant of the elitist narcissist syndrome.
People with an Ambitious–Dominant personality composite feel privileged and empowered by virtue of special childhood status, cultivate special status and advantages by association, are upwardly mobile, seek the good life, and tend to lay claim to greater accomplishment than is borne out by their actual achievements.
The major implication of the study is that it offers an empirically based personological framework for evaluating conflicting claims about John Kerry’s integrity and candor, thus providing a basis for inferring his character as a presidential candidate.
Page maintained by Aubrey Immelman
www.csbsju.edu/Research/Kerry profile.html
Last updated
January 13, 2006