Taming Power: Development of a Psychological Measure from Leaders' Speeches.

Because of its dual nature, power needs to be tamed. Taming power is a central problem for all social sciences; many intrapersonal and structural mechanisms that have been proposed are not always successful and can be "hijacked" by power itself. To explore psychological dynamics of how power might be tamed, 25 pairs of speeches by political leaders were collected and compared. The pairs were matched for speakers' country, issue, and approximate historical era. In seven cases, both speeches were from the same leader. One speech of each pair expressed "untamed" or destructive power (calls for escalation of conflict, rejecting agreements, or punishment); the other speech expressed "tamed" power (calls for de-escalation of conflict, conciliation, cooperation). Speeches were scored for several content categories developed both from theory and also from an empirical comparison of a subsample of five pairs. Nine cross-validated categories constitute a measure of "generative historical consciousness," or GHC. As predicted, the tamed power speeches scored significantly higher in GHC than the untamed speeches. The GHC measure is proposed as important and useful in future political psychology research. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]