This is Part 5 of a series on how the next president's personality may influence the country and its direction...
Presidential leadership cannot be considered apart from the president's intelligence. Love it or hate it, intelligence predicts a number of key outcomes - including how highly a president's leadership is rated.
Presidential historians (and psychologists) often describe three aspects of a president's intellect: intelligence, intellectual brilliance (think of intelligence applied), and openness (an interest in different perspectives and possibilities). This group of cognitive abilities and styles appears predictive of how well a president does.
First, intelligence (IQ) concerns a person's capacity to engage in complex, abstract, reasoning and come up with valid answers. Given the complexities of the world today, it is little wonder that a person's higher IQ will relate to better leadership.
Next is openness to experience. Openness describes a cognitive style in which a person's intellect ranges over different possibilities and perspectives on a problem; it includes engagement in fantasy, imagination, and taking another's perspective. Openness correlates with almost all intelligences. That is, as openness rises, so does intelligence (although this is a fairly modest relationship).
Finally, "intellectual brilliance" is a concept created by those who study the psychological qualities of presidents. It reflects historians' perceptions of the overall wisdom, imagination, intelligence, and similar qualities of a president. Intellectual brilliance reflects, in part, how well the president succeeds in applying his or her mental abilities to on-the-job problems in an effective or even excellent manner. Examples of intellectual brilliance would likely include Lincoln's composition of the Gettysburg address on an envelope, or John F. Kennedy's "I am a Berliner" speech shortly after his visit to the recently-constructed Berlin Wall.
To some degree, openness, estimated IQ, and intellectual brilliance rise and fall together across US presidents (and people more generally). As a first approximation, presidents can be regarded as low, average, or high in all three.
An interesting curiosity regarding this triad is that most or all presidents are well above average in estimated IQ, but they also are generally below average in openness. So, although the triad go up and down together, presidents tend to be more closed and higher in intelligence than the average American. The difference may be that the relatively high power motive among US presidents tends to lower their openness.
To return to the presidents themselves... The higher this triad of intellectual traits, the better the president's leadership tends to be. For example, presidents Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, John Kennedy, and Bill Clinton all had very high estimated levels of the triad and some of them are highly regarded by presidential historians. By contrast, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and (in more recent years) Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had lower levels of the triad and were rated as somewhat less successful.
Let me hasten to add that even the presidents with lower IQs were far smarter (by roughly 20 IQ points) than the average US college graduate - at least according to the estimates from which I draw (see notes).
All things considered, in searching for the next president considerable weight should be placed on how smart and open the individual is, and how able the person has been to apply his or her own intelligence to solving problems.
Notes: Much of this description of presidential intelligence relies on the work of Dean Keith Simonton, a pioneer of historiometric methods in studying the psychology of presidents and other figures. I depended especially on his recent article: Simonton, D. K. (2006). Presidential IQ, openness, intellectual brilliance, and leadership: Estimates and correlations for 42 U.S. chief executives. Political Psychology, 27, 511-526. The original version of this post mistakenly stated that Kennedy's 1963 speech occured during the Soviet blockade of Berlin (5th paragraph). This revision corrects the innacuracy. My thanks to a reader for pointing out the error (see comments).
(c) Copyright John D. Mayer
