Ego development in politics - 1
Can ego development be reliably scored from political discourse?
Kevin Lanning
Wilkes Honors College
Florida Atlantic University
Jupiter, FL USA
[email protected]
Ego development in politics - 2
Abstract
Ego development is a parameter of social and cognitive maturity which consists of a series of
developmental stages, ranging from the impulsive and self-centered, through the conforming
and rule-following, to the conscientious, reflective, and self-guiding. Among political leaders,
lower levels of ego development may be expressed in corruption, intermediate levels in loyalty,
and higher levels in ideology. Typically, ego development is scored using the Washington
University Sentence Completion Test (SCT). In this study I scored ego development from 351
utterances found in transcripts of interviews and speeches, each of which was coded by two or
more blind raters. In an analysis of the last six US Presidents together with 2008 candidates
John McCain and Hillary Clinton, ratings were found to be reliable, and to statistically
discriminate among targets. In particular, George W. Bush was found to score significantly
lower than other leaders, including his father George H. W. Bush. Several competing
explanations for these results were examined.
Ego development in politics - 3
Can ego development be reliably scored from political discourse?
A number of methods have been used to assess the personality of political candidates
and office holders, including direct self-reports, psychobiographies, content analyses of
speeches, and ratings of leaders by biographers using standardized personality inventories. The
characteristics that investigators have looked at have been similarly diverse, including measures
of motives, cognitive characteristics such as complexity and intelligence, and measures of
leadership style such as Barber’s familiar typology. In the present study, I apply a variant of
content analysis to assess the construct of ego development from speeches, debates, and news
conferences of presidents and candidates. While this was intended as an exploratory study to
investigate the feasibility of the approach, the results were, I think, provocative. (Slides 2 and
3)
Loevinger’s construct of ego level has been called (by Loevinger) the "the master
trait...second only to intelligence in accounting for human variability" (1966, p. 205). If ego level
is indeed important, it is presumably represented in lay psychology as well. The closest concept
to ego level in everyday speech is the personality characteristic of ‘maturity.’ But the lay
concept of maturity is only a starting point for understanding ego development. One can also
understand ego development ‘developmentally,’ as an elaboration of Kohlberg’s construct of
moral development which, in turn, was drawn from Piaget. But Loevinger’s model is less
cognitive and more social than these other models. For Loevinger, ego development may
primarily be understood as an expanding sphere of consideration, from self to group to
humanity. (Slide 4)
Ego development in politics - 4
Like maturity, ego development has both a developmental and a differential aspect.
Also like maturity, ego development is a broad bandwidth construct, more akin to ‘extraversion’
than to ‘talkativeness.’ The breadth of the construct may be understood as a reflection of its
developmental nature, a result of the dynamic interplay and consequent covariation of social
breadth, conscious preoccupation, impulse control, moral reasoning, and cognitive complexity.
Like the models of Kohlberg and Piaget, ego development is a stage model, though
Loevinger’s conception of stages is a particularly ‘soft’ one. Stages are not discrete qualitative
achievements, but approaches to the world which sequentially rise, become regnant, and then
diminish in importance. Consequently, several stages may be manifest in the discourse and
behavior for a given individual and at a given time.
Finally, like those other models, Loevinger’s model is intrinsically value-laden. Although
individuals at higher stages are not necessarily happier or better adjusted than those at lower
stages, there is a clear sense in which their approach to the world is more sophisticated and
inclusive. (Slide 5)
As shown in Table 1, the stages of ego development may be conceived as a series of
milestones. The lowest (Impulsive) stage is rarely seen in adult samples, and the highest
(Integrated) is rarely achieved by anyone. The Self-protective stage is characterized by
exploitiveness, hedonism, and a lack of long-range planning. The Conformist is respectful of
rules and is appreciative of group loyalty. At the Self-aware stage there is more reflection, and
less cognitive and behavioral stereotypy. Most investigations of ego level, including survey
studies, find this to be the modal stage in samples of American adults (Holt, 1980). At the
Conscientious stage, responsibility is particularly salient, and standards are largely internalized.
Ego development in politics - 5
The Individualistic stage is characterized by increasing mutuality and complexity. The highest
stage typically encountered is the Autonomous stage, and is characterized by concerns with
fulfillment and an appreciation of emotional interdependence (Loevinger, 1993). At higher
levels of ego development, judgments are less based on reflex and more based in reflection, as
actions are guided by internalized rather than conventional norms and goals. Consequently,
there is or should be greater cognitive complexity at higher stages of ego development. (Slide
6)
A few empirical properties of ego level may be noted. The first is that, across ages, the
developmental course of gender differences is coherent, paralleling that found for other
consequential aspects of development, with females maturing first then men more or less
‘catching up.’ The second is that there is some evidence for curvilinear as well as linear
relationships with other measures of interest. For example, proneness to shame is largely
absent at the lowest levels of ego development – where a conception of ‘other’ is either not yet
well formed or not yet considered – but is also absent at the higher levels, when internal
standards finally trump concerns about what others might think. (Slide 7)
I want to make the case that ego development is potentially an important construct for
understanding personality and politics. The correspondence between latent traits and
individual actions is always complex, and this may be particularly true with constructs such as
ego development. But it is nonetheless instructive to consider examples of how the stages of
Loevinger’s model might be represented in political behavior or rather misbehavior.
Consider the recent case of Detroit City Councilwoman Monica Conyers, who appeared
to have been motivated by simple greed in her acceptance of bribes in a ‘pay to play’ scandal
Ego development in politics - 6
involving a sludge-hauling contract in that struggling American city. I should recognize our
hosts by pointing out that bribery occurs here as well. In Ireland a wide-ranging public inquiry
into corruption has been convening for over a decade; just a few weeks ago, former
Government press secretary Frank Dunlop was jailed for paying off a number of Dublin-area
councillors so that they would support zoning decisions that would enrich local developers.
Examples of corruption such as these can be understood as manifestations of simple
greed, and greed is suggestive of the lowest levels of ego development. But the psychological
roots of corruption may be more sophisticated. Corruption may be partly rooted in the cynical
belief or rationalization that ‘everyone does it.’ Corruption may therefore be perceived as
normative, sanctioned by the collective, and therefore subjectively conformist.
I think that the conformist stage of ego development is important in politics, not merely
because of cynical rationalizations such as these, but because of the role of interpersonal
loyalty in the Conformist stage. During her tenure as a Detroit city counselor, in addition to
accepting bribes, Monica Conyers put an aunt and her son on the city payroll, and had police
officers chauffeur her children to the private schools in which they were enrolled. While these
actions may have stemmed from a sense of entitlement, and/or may have been intended as a
display of power, it may be more parsimonious to understand that her sphere of concern
extended beyond herself to those immediately around her, that is, that she was simply helping
the people closest to her.
Conyers is hardly unique among politicians in “putting family first.” A little over one
hundred years ago, Lincoln Steffens revolutionized journalism with his insightful analyses of
political scandals in the American Midwest. Steffens maintained that political corruption was a
Ego development in politics - 7
systemic risk in capitalist societies, that is, that ‘good business’ necessarily led to ‘bad
government.’ But another conclusion from his work is that the problem was not capitalism per
se, but the conformist-level reasoning that characterized many of the big city mayors and
legislators who found themselves at the core of scandals, often without a sense of having done
anything wrong. Steffens, who by the way had studied with Wundt, the founder of
experimental psychology, insightfully described the targets of his reporting as ‘honest crooks,’
individuals whose crime was often to do a favor for a friend or relative in need but were,
unfortunately, unable to appreciate the damage done to their broader base of constituents.
While this concern for friendship and unwillingness to alienate suggests a possible link between
the Conformist stage and need for Affiliation, the present perspective suggests that the most
salient characteristic of the stage is the unwillingness to sacrifice interpersonal loyalty, and an
inability to escape the comfortable equilibrium of reciprocity that exists at the Conformist
stage.
At higher levels of ego development, individuals may show the courage, capacity, or
foolishness to cast aside simple loyalties in pursuit of a greater good. At these stages politicians
have the capacity to truly become ‘public servants’ rather than simply ‘loyal friends.’ Beyond
the Conformist stage, politicians are no longer motivated by selfish greed nor are they tightly
bound by interpersonal loyalties to an immediate circle. The broader sphere of concern that
characterizes individuals at these stages of ego development leaves room for them to be driven
instead by ideology. (Slide 8)
These arguments suggest that ego development may have particular relevance for
political psychology, if one could only measure it. Traditionally, ego development is assessed
Ego development in politics - 8
from completions of sentence stems such as "A man's job…" These stems make up the
Washington University Sentence Completion Test, which has been described as "…arguably the
most extensively validated projective technique" for assessing personality (Lilienfeld, Wood, &
Garb, 2000, p. 56). The success of the SCT is attributable in large part to the systematic, near
cookbook nature of its coding manual. While it is not feasible to ask national leaders to
“Complete the following sentences,” it is possible to search through samples of political
discourse for phrases which can be coded using the manual. (Slides 9 and 10)
In this initial study of ego development in politics, three questions were of interest. The
first is which items appear in political discourse, the second, whether responses to these items
can be reliably scored, that is, whether or not the ratings of independent, blind judges
converge, the third whether different individuals obtain significantly different scores. (Slide 11)
Method
In this study, I searched online databases for quotes from candidates which could be
coded as sentence completions. I began this study by looking at the Lexis/Nexis database for
quotes from candidates in the 2008 Presidential Campaign; unfortunately, I found that it
generated too many false alarms, that is, too many of the quotes were second-hand appraisals,
editorial assessments, etc. The Google quotes database proved more useful, but unfortunately
there were too many ‘misses’ here, that is, it provided only a few quotes for each candidate.
Finally, I found the American Presidency Project database at UC Santa Barbara
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php database; this provided the vast majority of the
quotes. (Slide 12)
Ego development in politics - 9
Despite the seeming comprehensiveness of the Presidency Project database, most SCT
responses could not be found in the discourse of leaders. Still, a few items could be found
verbatim for most candidates and recent presidents, including I am…, Rules are…, and My
father…. For several others, I found abbreviated versions of the stems that I felt could be coded
using the manual. For example, two standard SCT stems are A husband has a right to… and A
girl has a right to…; in the present study, I searched instead for … has a right to …
For these stems, I chose up to six responses from each speaker for each stem. I did not
choose statements which I judged to be too closely linked to policy, statements which were
very technical in nature, such as those embedded in many executive orders, or statements
which could easily give away the speaker, such as 'I am the son and grandson of admirals.' In
order to find utterances which were as close as possible to those found in the SCT manual, I
also avoided responses in which the stem was incidental to, rather than the subject of the
utterance, for example ‘I want to thank my mother.’
Two to four different coders rated each response. Coders were advanced
undergraduates and graduate students who were self-taught using the SCT manual (Hy &
Loevinger, 1996). Each coder was blind both to the source of the quote and also to the
judgments of other coders. Because the coding task was something of an extrapolation from
the usual approach to SCT coding, I also asked coders to rate their subjective confidence in the
accuracy of each rating (Hogansen & Lanning, 2001). (Slide 13)
Results
Table 2 lists utterances for which the average confidence score was highest at each ego
level. At the lowest level are Bill Clinton’s ‘My mother called me from Vegas’ and Barack
Ego development in politics - 10
Obama’s ‘He has a right to speak’; each of these is a simple descriptive utterance which, if it
were a written responses to the SCT, would likely indicate sarcasm, hostility, simplicity, or
defensiveness. At intermediate levels, expressions are richer. Carter’s cliché-like description of
rules as ‘silly’ is coded at the Conformist stage. Bill Clinton’s painful, but not particularly
revealing, description of his father’s death is seen as Self-Aware. Hillary Clinton’s quote from
the Declaration of Independence leads to a rating of Conscientious. (Slide 14)
Finally, at the highest stages of ego development are what might be described as
complex counterfactuals, each a statement of hope and aspiration. These include Carter’s
reflection on Armistice Day, Hillary Clinton’s abstract concern for righting prior injustice and
clumsiness, and, at the highest rated level, Bill Clinton’s reported aspiration to make diversity a
strength rather than a weakness. These items, again, are those for which judges were most
confident at each level. Many other phrases were quite difficult to code. Consider, for example
“I am not a great man, I am a failure, and you have made me one.” The speaker was Bill Clinton,
who was speaking with Yasser Arafat; two judges rated this near the bottom, at the SelfProtective (3) and Conformist (4) stages, while a third judge rated this at the Individualistic (7)
stage. (Slide 15)
The degree of inter-rater agreement was assessed using 328 utterances on which three
judges had provided ratings. In this sample of ratings, Kendall’s coefficient of concordance was
.49. Cronbach’s alpha provided similar results, as did analyses using all four judges but including
missing data. Of further interest is the relationship between rater agreement and rater
confidence: When one excludes the ratings on which the typical judge reported little
Ego development in politics - 11
confidence, inter-rater agreement increases. As can be seen in Figure 1, there was significant
inter-rater agreement, further, judgments of confidence were essentially sound. (Slide 16)
Finally, I examined the mean ego level ratings for each of the political targets. The first
analysis is shown in Figure 2. For seven of the eight targets, the average response was roughly
midway between the Self-aware and Conscientious stages. For the eighth, George W. Bush
(Bush 41), the typical response was lower, close to the Self-Aware stage. Bush 41 scored
significantly lower than the average of the other targets as well as three individuals: Jimmy
Carter, George H. W. Bush, and Hillary Clinton. (Slide 17)
In Figure 3 this analysis is repeated based only on those ratings for which individual
coders assigned confidence ratings at or above the midpoint of the seven-point scale. This
reduced the available number of ratings by about 40% (from 1142 down to 703), nonetheless,
the results were similar. Here, though the omnibus effect of speaker did not reach
conventional significance levels, differences between Bush 43 and the other targets remained
essentially the same as in the prior analysis, with the exceptions that Bill Clinton was, and
Hillary Clinton was not, significantly higher in ego level than Bush 43. (Slide 18)
I should acknowledge that from an experimental standpoint this study was something of
a challenge. Different raters coded different responses, consequently, apparent differences
between targets could have instead been due to rater. A second problem is that different
sentence stems were coded for each speaker, that is, for some stems and targets, only a few
utterances could be found. This latter effect might not be completely error – in other words,
the fact that one politician speaks of ‘conscience’ more than another might itself be related to
ego development. Still, it is possible that apparent differences between speakers might be due
Ego development in politics - 12
to these item effects rather than target effects. In short, rater and item effects are potential
confounds in this unbalanced design (Slide 19)
In Figure 4, I addressed both these possibilities by standardizing responses within (rater
X item) cells. The results are stronger here; both in the omnibus effect and in the fact that
John McCain, as well as Carter, Bush 41, and Clinton, score higher than George W. Bush. (Slide
20)
One last potential confound can be considered, and that is utterance length. Across the
eight targets, the correlation between ego level and the average utterance length was
substantial (.54). This is not surprising; in the standard SCT, response length (or verbosity) has
been found to be consistently related to ego level; in a meta-analysis, Cohn and Westenberg
(2004) reported that the average correlation between verbosity and ego level was precisely this
value (.54). In the standard SCT, this correlation reflects, at least in part, an inherent
relationship between response complexity and response length. Consequently, partialling
response length from ratings of ego level leads to a reduction in true (content) as well as error
(method) variance. In the present study, utterance length is particularly problematic, as the
utterances chosen might reflect selection biases on my part – that is, it is possible that I
unconsciously chose long, multi-sentence quotes for some targets while restricting myself to
bland, simple utterances for others. (Slide 21)
In Figure 5, I controlled for this additional potential confound. For each rater, I
computed the correlation between ego level and response length; these correlations ranged
from .08 to .41. I then partialled length from the standardized estimates of ego level used in the
Ego development in politics - 13
prior analysis. Here, the overall results are only slightly weaker, though the effect for George
W. Bush remains, particularly in comparison with Jimmy Carter, Bush 41, and John McCain.
Discussion
The construct of ego development, with its sequence of concerns with greed, loyalty,
and beyond, is arguably important in politics as well as in personality. The present results
indicate that utterances drawn from samples of political discourse can be reliably scored for
ego development by independent judges. These results further indicate that, in a comparison
of six recent US Presidents and two additional candidates from the 2008 campaign, only one
individual achieved scores that were consistently different from the remaining candidates. That
candidate was George W. Bush, who scored approximately ½ stage, and ½ standard deviation,
lower than the average of all other presidents and candidates. This effect remained largely
intact after controlling for several competing sources of error.
For several reasons, the average scores found in the present study cannot be presumed
to translate directly to estimates of ego level. The first reason is that, in computing ego level
from the sentence completion test, a weighted average is used which effectively assigns more
weight to high scores. The second is that the present methodology deviates substantially from
the standard approach to assessing ego level – including the use of a potentially biased sample
of items, the use of multiple responses to the same ‘stem,’ and, of course, the nature of the
response task. The statements coded here were neither written in response to the prime
‘Complete the following sentence,’ nor were they offered in the context of a psychological test.
Nonetheless, it is worthwhile to consider these results in the context of what we know
about ego development. The Self Aware stage is the modal stage in samples of American
Ego development in politics - 14
adults. While it includes aspects of evaluation and reflection, it remains “still basically a version
of Conformity” (Hy & Loevinger, 1996, p. 5). George W. Bush was the only one of the
individuals studied here whose average response was not significantly above this stage. Could it
be that the appeal of Bush 43 stemmed in part from his embrace of a frame of reference with
which the modal American was comfortable? Could it also be that Bush’s downfall, the
plummeting popularity that he experienced in his last years of office, might be attributable to
the costs of what critics on both Left and Right have called his ‘loyalty fetish,’ including his
longstanding but ultimately futile support for individuals such as Attorney General Alberto
Gonzalez, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and CIA director George Tenet (Warthen,
2006; Dickerson, 2007)? Without additional study, it is impossible to say.
The answer the question which is the title of my talk “Can ego development be reliably
scored from political discourse?” is ‘yes.’ But no measure is perfect. All measures, particularly
measures of psychological constructs include method or error variance, and the present
measure is imperfect to a still unknown degree. One uncontrolled source of variance in the
present study is the source of quotes. In the attempt to find as many codable utterances as
possible, I intentionally drew from a broad sample of speeches, but the effect of these contexts
on ego development scores needs to be assessed. Commencement speeches, campaign ads,
and State of the Union addresses each have their own demand characteristics; each is likely to
elicit a particular type of response. Psychometric refinements remain as well, as it is likely that
different items are differentially effective: One of the included items ‘I am’ led to an array of
responses which seemed, to my mind, too broad. A second stem, ‘worst,’ was subjectively
Ego development in politics - 15
deeply frustrating for my coders. I hope to examine these and other refinements of this
measurement approach in the years to come.
Ego development in politics - 16
References
Cohn, L. D., & Westenberg, P. M. (2004). Intelligence and Maturity: Meta-Analytic Evidence for
the Incremental and Discriminant Validity of Loevinger’s Measure of Ego Development.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 86, 760-772.
Dickerson, J. (2007) All the President's Flunkies: Why Bush stands by his incompetents.
http://www.slate.com/id/2172858/nav/tap1.
Hogansen, J. & Lanning, K. (2001) Five factors in Sentence Completion Test categories: Towards
rapprochement between trait and maturational approaches to personality. Journal of
Research in Personality, 35, 449-462.
Holt, R. R. (1980). Loevinger's measure of ego development: Reliability and national norms for
male and female short forms. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39, 909-920.
Hy, L. X. & Loevinger, J. (1996). Measuring ego development (2nd Ed). Mahwah, NJ: LEA
Lilienfeld, S. O., Wood, J. M., & Garb, H. N. (2000). The scientific status of projective techniques.
Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 1, 27-66 (Whole No. 2).
Loevinger, J. (1966). The meaning and measurement of ego development. American
Psychologist, 21, 205.
Loevinger, J. (1993). Measurement of personality: True or false. Psychological Inquiry, 4, 1-16.
Warthen, B. (2006). Rummy column A generals’ revolt may be ugly, but who else has the
credibility? http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/2006/04/rummy_column.html
Ego development in politics - 17
Tables
Ego development in politics - 18
Ego development in politics - 19
Ego development in politics - 20
Ego development in politics - 21
Ego development in politics - 22
Ego development in politics - 23
Ego development in politics - 24
Author Notes
Thanks to Rachel Borges Garcia, Courtney Claar, Samantha Montgomery, and Rachel
Pauletti for their uncomplaining and thoughtful work as coders, and to the American Presidency
Project at UC Santa Barbara, which proved to be extraordinarily helpful as a source for
utterances.