An Election Fantasy

Putting candidates through the test. Should we use psychological tests to select government leaders?

By Robert Epstein, published on September 01, 2000 - last reviewed on October 21, 2008

What if we could sit the presidential candidates down at a table and have them complete a host of psychological tests: the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS), the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, Survey of Personal Values, along with tests of leadership, honesty, mood, and so on? What could we find?

Since these are validated tests, we'd know for sure where the candidates stand in these categories relative to the population at large and, of course, relative to each other. We'd know who was smarter, more impulsive, more honest, more creative. We'd even be able to predict future behavior, such as how each candidate might react in a crisis, or how vulnerable each one is to depression or faulty thinking.

There is precedent for using tests to select government leaders: In ancient China, administrators were selected using a battery of SAT-type exams. Shouldn't we use today's sophisticated tools to evaluate our candidates? Don't we deserve the best information we can get?

Unfortunately, the electorate generally shies away from detail—we're all too busy for that—and the image-makers would certainly want to keep their candidates far away from our testing table. Thomas Edison's first invention was a tabulation device that showed visitors to a state legislature exactly how lawmakers were voting on every bill. After only a few votes, the legislators disabled the device. Voters would get ornery, it seemed, when they knew the exact tally.

So we live in a world in which we don't want too much information about our leaders (unless it's steamy, of course) and in which our leaders are more than willing to accommodate us. But the tests exist, and I, for one, would love to see how our candidates truly measure up.