Are thrill-seeking presidents more likely to take the country to war?

When it comes to presidents, we’re all armchair psychologists, quick to attribute political stances and policy decisions to a leader’s deep-seated pathologies or personal grievances. But can an analysis of a president’s personality tell us anything about how he will use the power of the presidency, particularly on the monumentally difficult decisions about when to use force?

That’s the presmise of a recent paper in Foreign Policy Analysis coauthored by Maryann Gallagher of Depauw University and Susan Allen of the University of Mississippi. The authors hypothesize that presidents with more of a propensity for excitement seeking and openness to action will be more likely to use force in international relations than their less brash cohorts. 

The presidential personality data comes from a 2004 study which surveyed 115 presidential biographers to rank presidents on a variety of personality traits. There aren’t too many surprises in the research. Readers will not be shocked to learn, for instance, that Teddy Roosevelt and Bill Clinton score off the charts on extraversion while Calvin "Silent Cal" Coolidge was the most introverted. John Quincy Adams was our most neurotic president while Ronald Reagan was the least.

Gallagher and Allen looked at traits such as "excitement seeking" (John F. Kennedy, T.R. and Clinton score high, Coolidge and Millard Fillmore not so much) and "openness to action" (Thomas Jefferson, Clinton, and Kennedy vs. Coolidge, Harry Truman and William Howard Taft). Willingness to use force is measured in how often presidents took advantage of "opportunities to use force," ranging from 67.2 percent of the time for Reagan to 27.5 percent of the time for Truman. (This study only looked at post-war presidents.)

Here’s what they found:

Turning to the personality variables, all four of the risk-related traits are statistically significant. As expected, Excitement Seeking is positively related to the likelihood that a president capitalizes on the opportunity to use force. Holding all other variables constant, a president with the highest Excitement Seeking score (like John F. Kennedy) is nearly 50% more likely to use force than one with the lowest (like Harry Truman). The same pattern holds for leaders with high Deliberation scores. Highly deliberate leaders are 32% more likely to use force than less deliberate leaders. On the other hand, counter to our expecta- tions, the results suggest that being highly Open to Action weakly decreases the likelihood of using force. This negative relationship also holds for Altruism. Highly altruistic leaders are less likely to employ military force—about 20% less likely than their less altruistic counterparts.

The study only goes as far as Bill Clinton, though the last two presidents have been perhaps the most psychoanlyzed in terms of foreign policy, with George W. Bush’s penchant for unilateralism and decision to go to war in Iraq often attributed to "cowboy" aggressiveness and Barack Obama’s preference for "leading from behind" on conflicts like Syria attributed to a cautious and cerebral personality.

If nothing else, the research suggests that voters who choose candidates based on "personality" rather than policy, may actually be on to something.