Transcript
Speaker: Thank you for joining us.
Speaker: I'm Jennifer Kohane.
Speaker: I'm one of the co-founders of the CARP Lab.
Speaker: I'm going to tell you a little bit about who we are and what we do before turning it over to our guest today.
Speaker: CARP is a loose collection of international and interdisciplinary scholars who study character assassination in all realms of human life from politics, science, entertainment,
Speaker: We host conferences dedicated to the subject, and we hope that one day soon we can host you all together in person to keep talking about these ideas.
Speaker: We publish scholarship and we teach courses, workshops, and seminars.
Speaker: We have some other collaborations coming up on the horizon, so follow us at carp underscore lab on Twitter to find out more about what we have upcoming.
Speaker: Today we are hosting Ekaterina Agorova, the president of Political Profiler, a US-based political consulting firm and the president of Nikola M Strategic Communications, a leading political consulting company in Russia.
Speaker: She's been a personal political consultant to Russian President Boris Yeltsin and three other heads of state, and she's advised political campaigns throughout the world.
Speaker: She's also an author of the Russian theory of political leadership and has published nine books and psychological profiles of dozens of world political leaders.
Speaker: So certainly she has a lot to teach us today.
Speaker: And I'm going to mute myself and hand it over to her and CARP co-founder Sergei Samalenko, who will get us started.
Speaker: Wonderful, thank you, Jennifer, for your wonderful introduction.
Speaker: And I'm pleased and humbled to have our wonderful speaker today, Ekaterina Yegorova, who will tell us all about political profiling, its purpose, and who will benefit from this knowledge.
Speaker: So, Ekaterina, I'm looking at your biography and it's very impressive.
Speaker: I'm really, really happy we have this conversation today because we don't really talk much about psychological profiling.
Speaker: This is something that political consultants keep kind of secret, right?
Speaker: So they don't share their secrets outside of their professional network.
Speaker: So we're just going to start with some basics.
Speaker: Maybe you can just educate us all and tell us about what is psychological profiling and who benefits from it and when did it start?
Speaker: Hi, everybody.
Speaker: Thank you for your invitation to speak here.
Speaker: I'm very grateful to you.
Speaker: Psychological profiling is the understanding of the personality of political leader or not political leader, military leader, somebody else, business people,
Speaker: And it is a tool not only for understanding the current state of the personality, but for understanding the future political behavior or business behavior, which can forecast this future state and future behavior using political profile.
Speaker: And it started in 19th century in Russia, in Russian Empire,
Speaker: Russian Empire has outstanding school of psychiatry.
Speaker: And in 1884, the first psychological profile was done by Russian psychiatrist, Vladimir Chish, who was born in the same year as Sigmund Freud.
Speaker: And he published psychological profiles of Russian writers and Russian emperors.
Speaker: Also in the end of 19th century, the other Russian psychiatrist, Pavel Kowalewski has published two volumes book with psychological profiles of huge amount of political leaders from Nebuchadnezzar, Mohammed, Napoleon, Peter the Great, and many, many, many others.
Speaker: And also in the beginning of Soviet Union era in 1927,
Speaker: Also, a Russian doctor published a book with psychological profiles of Russian emperors.
Speaker: I should stress that Freud's and Bullitt's book about Woodrow Wilson was done only in 1932, and it was published in 1967 after the death of Wilson's wife.
Speaker: That's why this genre was started in Russian Empire.
Speaker: You asked me for what purposes psychological profiling are used.
Speaker: If we talk about three sphere of application of psychological profiles,
Speaker: foreign policy, military conflict and election campaign.
Speaker: We can use psychological profiles of our allies, of our opponents or our enemies for better understanding their personality, their strengths and weaknesses, how they will behave as an ally or as an enemy, how revengeful they are.
Speaker: how painful will be their reaction toward manipulation or toward aggressive campaign.
Speaker: And the main sphere for application of psychological profiles is a foreign policy interaction because the history and military conflict, the history of applied psychological profiling is very serious in the United States, in the United Kingdom and Soviet Union and Russia.
Speaker: and foreign policy was the prime sphere for this application.
Speaker: First of all, people, executive people, such as presidents or military leaders, minister of defense, foreign affairs, were interested in behavior for caste.
Speaker: And I should say that I had the interesting experience in this field in Soviet Union in 1983,
Speaker: the former head of KGB, Yuri Andropov, became for a short period the head of Soviet Union, the head of state.
Speaker: And in 1983, he ordered to the Institute of the United States and Canadian Studies the psychological profile of Ronald Reagan because Andropov wanted to improve relations with the United States and especially with Reagan on personal level.
Speaker: And I worked the time in the Institute of United States and Canadian Studies and I did this ecological profile.
Speaker: It was the first experience in Soviet Union.
Speaker: And since that, I made a lot of profiles for Soviet government and then for Russian government and then for my clients.
Speaker: in Russia and abroad.
Speaker: Also, it is very important to understand well the psychology of foreign leader during negotiations and to forecast leaders' behavior in cooperation or confrontation and also in character assassination campaign.
Speaker: For example,
Speaker: When it was a serious conflict between Russia and Turkey in 2015, after the shutdown, shutting down the Russian plane by Turkish air force, Putin has started very effective and very tough character assassination campaign against Erdogan.
Speaker: That's why it was very important to know how could be, what could be his reaction, how painful is it?
Speaker: reaction, how a revenge response could be to the character assassination campaign.
Speaker: The same situation in military conflicts.
Speaker: It is very important to understand personality of the enemy, personality of the object of manipulation, object of negative campaign, of deception, negotiation, mediation,
Speaker: And I should stress that in the United States, the psychological profiling for applied spheres was started in 1943, when a group of scientists, psychologists, most of all psychoanalysts, they prepared for the Office of Strategic Services the psychological profiles, a few profiles of Hitler,
Speaker: And all of them, they made a unanimous conclusion that in case of failure, Hitler will suicide.
Speaker: It was done in 1943, two years before the end of the Second World War.
Speaker: Also, there were psychological profiles of Japanese
Speaker: Emperor Hirohito and Prime Minister Togo and Roosevelt and people from Oasis, they had to understand who should be the main object of criticism in Japan and who will be the next main person who can rule Japan.
Speaker: And they decided that they should criticize Togo as a prime minister and to support Hirohito after the Second World War because he was only one guy who can rule Japan after the end of war.
Speaker: Also, psychological profile could be used in election campaign.
Speaker: We need to know the qualities and traits of our candidate, opponent of candidate, main influencers for positioning, and also how to protect candidate from character assassination campaign to understand how painful reaction could be.
Speaker: How politicians could be tolerant or sensitive to character assassination campaign?
Speaker: Or if we plan negative campaign toward opponent?
Speaker: So these are the three main spheres for application of political fighting.
Speaker: Wonderful.
Speaker: Thank you, Ekaterina.
Speaker: It's fascinating.
Speaker: And I really see how some of those things overlap and how those things could be different.
Speaker: So you mentioned that it originated in the Russian Empire and then it was then developed in the Soviet Union.
Speaker: Maybe you can talk a little bit about those main differences between its application in the Soviet Union and in the United States.
Speaker: Because as I remember, you started working under Andropov, right?
Speaker: and you really, really saw how it's done in upper echelons of power, right?
Speaker: The main idea of application of psychological profiles in Soviet Union was how to adapt the general strategy to the real person, to the real political leader.
Speaker: And it's strange because Andropov was an extremely negative person in Soviet history, but he was a smart person.
Speaker: And he understood in his period of ruling the USSR that he needs to improve relations with the United States.
Speaker: And he stressed, I do not need ideological profile.
Speaker: I am a specialist in ideology.
Speaker: I need to know how I can improve relations, how not to disturb Ronald Reagan.
Speaker: And also the ministers of foreign affairs, such as or some other politicians, Gorbachev, they used these psychological profiles for better understanding what could be the common point with foreign leaders
Speaker: how they can improve the relations.
Speaker: Probably, probably somebody else in intelligence service or the military minister, I have no idea because I did not work with this department.
Speaker: Maybe they had other goals and I suppose that they had other goals using psychological profiles, how to disturb enemy or how to manipulate the enemy, but it was far from me, fortunately, that period.
Speaker: And in the United States, I know that also there are two main ideas, how to improve and how to attack.
Speaker: It's normal.
Speaker: It's absolutely logical.
Speaker: That's why Professor Gerald Post, who works in GW University, he was during a long period, the head of the Department of Political Psychology,
Speaker: or political profiling in CIA, and he made for American presidents a huge amount of psychological profiles and advised how to use this profile for better understanding foreign leaders.
Speaker: And especially he made a good, a very good job studying people with foreign leaders with narcissistic personality disorder and malignant narcissism, forecasting their behavior and how to use political strategy and how to develop political strategy and communication toward them.
Speaker: Wonderful.
Speaker: So let's talk about a couple of decades later and discuss 1996, because I know you were involved
Speaker: in the election campaign of the Russian president, Boris Yeltsin.
Speaker: And that's quite a legendary campaign.
Speaker: As far as I remember, there were lots of people involved.
Speaker: There is lots of myth created about also American influence.
Speaker: We all remember this movie, Spinning Boris, that basically lionized American specialists, political consultants who came to rescue Boris and
Speaker: And maybe you can just tell us firsthand what actually happened there and how did they use political profilers, psychological profiles and political consultants back during that campaign.
Speaker: Well, this campaign was extremely tough and interesting from the point of view of its development and content.
Speaker: My company, we provide sociological and psychological qualitative and quantitative sociological projects.
Speaker: study of electorate in the autumn of 1995 and elaborated strategy for this campaign.
Speaker: And since January of 96, we worked in personal contact with Boris Yeltsin.
Speaker: I should say that we use psychological profile to understand the behavior of our opponents, such as General Lebit or Zuganov, the chief of communist party and main candidate in this campaign, and other forces during this campaign, but not much.
Speaker: It was not the main accent in this election campaign.
Speaker: And talking about the influence of foreign consultants, I should say that the advertising was done by Russian company Video International.
Speaker: And for focus groups, there were
Speaker: invited American company who made focus groups to analyze the different kind of political sports in this advertising sports in this election campaign.
Speaker: This was the very important contribution to the election campaign of Boris Yeltsin.
Speaker: The content of movie is not
Speaker: appropriate to the real situation.
Speaker: To discuss, right?
Speaker: So it's obviously, it's a fiction.
Speaker: It's a movie.
Speaker: It's a movie.
Speaker: Wonderful.
Speaker: All right, so I'm going to ask you a question outside of the list, and then I'll just go back to the order of items in our interview.
Speaker: Ekaterina is not only the living legend of psychological profiling in Soviet Union and Russia, she's also the founder of the first public relations company, first public relations agency in Soviet Union at that time, Nikola M.,
Speaker: So maybe you can just tell us a few things about how it all started and what was the difference at that time between actually political consulting and public relations.
Speaker: And I know in Russia, they have a special term for people who do political consulting, election campaigning.
Speaker: They call them political technologists.
Speaker: That's the only term that is used in Russia.
Speaker: It doesn't exist anywhere else in the world.
Speaker: So maybe you can just elaborate more on that.
Speaker: So tell us more about the history, because the history of Russian public relations is fascinating.
Speaker: We discussed my previous article about this, and we both agreed that there's a lot of things to share about the history, its impact on the culture and the situation in Russia right now.
Speaker: We started to consult democratic political leaders in the end of Soviet Union where the first democratic election campaign has started there.
Speaker: And we established officially our firm only in Russian Federation, not in Soviet Union.
Speaker: But it was very interesting period because we can do whatever we wanted, no any limitations.
Speaker: It's only your own belief system.
Speaker: which can limit your behavior as a political consultant.
Speaker: I always was against the term of political technologist because political technologist is an effemism to political consulting.
Speaker: And it is less, how to say, less ethical because there was a great discussion among Russian professional community about the ethics of political consulting.
Speaker: Many firms, they thought that like a lawyer, political consultant can work with everybody.
Speaker: No difference.
Speaker: Is it communist?
Speaker: Today you can work with communists, tomorrow with democrats, day after tomorrow with nationalists.
Speaker: We thought that there is a sphere of ideology.
Speaker: a sector of ideology and only with this sector you should, it's honest to work with this sector.
Speaker: If you work with democratic people, you should not work with communists or nationalists.
Speaker: It was our opinion.
Speaker: And also there was a discussion about the very sensitive question, is it normal to work in the same campaign with two opponents?
Speaker: We thought that it is impossible, but many companies did it really because they said and they stressed, it's okay, we do not communicate with each other different commands who work with opponents.
Speaker: But our company stressed that it is impossible.
Speaker: That's why I think that discussion about ethics was very important
Speaker: think that we did this period.
Speaker: Also, we elaborated a few techniques, a few approaches that now are widespread in Russian election campaign.
Speaker: That's why probably we can organize some, maybe school in political consulting because many current political consultants they started is our colleagues in our company.
Speaker: It's fascinating.
Speaker: Thanks a lot.
Speaker: So I would like to speak a little bit about terminology and maybe talk about the word psychological profile.
Speaker: So what is a profile?
Speaker: How do you understand profile?
Speaker: Because in our CARP lab, we have a lot of people from other fields
Speaker: So we have sociologists, we have ethnographers, we have rhetoricians, communication study scholars, but not a lot of psychologists who actually understand the practical, you know, technicalities of your profession.
Speaker: So what is a profile?
Speaker: And do all psychological profilers attend to profile the same way?
Speaker: It's a very interesting question because there is a great discussion among profilers about what kind of characteristics should be considered in psychological profile, obligatory and...
Speaker: what traits are not so interesting.
Speaker: There is now the unique approach to profiling because it depends a lot on psychological paradigm or psychological school.
Speaker: Of course, for example, for psychoanalysis, they stress the childhood of political leader and they try to understand leaders' deepest complex.
Speaker: For example, it's very important accent in psychoanalysis, in other schools not.
Speaker: I think that this idea of Oedipus complex is not too useful in psychological profiling and understanding of all politicians, because some of politicians never met their fathers.
Speaker: For example, as Belarusian President Lukashenko or Saddam Hussein.
Speaker: That is why I do not criticize any school and I prefer to take all working ideas from different school and to mix it.
Speaker: And psychological profile is a description after studying, after analysis, the description of the personality of political leader in some structured way.
Speaker: And the structure depends on the taste of, scientific taste of a psychologist, of profiler.
Speaker: I use seven sets, seven blocks of personality characteristics in my profiles.
Speaker: These are politician self-concepts.
Speaker: The first, then motivational nucleus, belief system and values, style of interpersonal relations, communicative competence, resistant to stress, and specific neurotic or psychiatric particular traits.
Speaker: I will tell you a few more words about these blocks because this is important for understanding of psychological profile.
Speaker: Politician self-concept.
Speaker: It is very, very important.
Speaker: set of characteristics.
Speaker: If you know the self-concept, you can forecast many things in behavior or psychological or political personality.
Speaker: Self-concept consists of four main points.
Speaker: Self-image of political personality or political leader, self-esteem, social orientation, and ideal self.
Speaker: Ideal self is a standard
Speaker: And it is a psychological goal for political leader.
Speaker: It's an image of how political leader would like to be.
Speaker: It is very important to understand.
Speaker: And when we found some personality deficiency, because I do not use the word, the term inferiority complex, because all of us have personality deficiency.
Speaker: It could be the lack of support or a lack of love in our childhood, a lack of attention.
Speaker: It's normal.
Speaker: It's okay for everybody.
Speaker: And we need to understand what kind of personality deficiency caused low self-esteem because a lot of people, 90% of people have low self-esteem.
Speaker: And it's okay.
Speaker: It's good because only if we have low self-esteem, we have a mechanism to improve ourselves.
Speaker: People who have very high self-esteem, they never develop their personality because it's okay.
Speaker: I am good.
Speaker: I am so nice.
Speaker: I am so okay.
Speaker: What for do I need to do something with myself?
Speaker: And if personality has low self-esteem,
Speaker: A political leader in this case needs some compensation.
Speaker: Where could be this compensation?
Speaker: Usually, a low self-esteem provides in motivational nucleus,
Speaker: some compensatory motives.
Speaker: They could be compensatory or instrumental, but what are these needs?
Speaker: It's need for power, need for control, need for achievement, and need for affiliation.
Speaker: I should say that all these needs first are developed in the sandbox where a child plays with other children.
Speaker: And if a child has problems with other children, they humiliate the child, they take the toys from the child, this child would like to have in his adult years position where nobody will do the same.
Speaker: That is the example of compensatory need for power.
Speaker: And there are some laws of behavior if a person has the medium or low or high need for power, need for affiliation, need for control.
Speaker: According to these laws, we can forecast the behavior.
Speaker: I will tell a little bit later about it.
Speaker: But also there are some laws.
Speaker: If a person has high need for power, this person also has high need for control, but not vice versa.
Speaker: Somebody can have a high need for control and not high need for power.
Speaker: So there are some laws which help us to forecast the future behavior.
Speaker: And also, it is very important to understand belief system of political leader.
Speaker: There are strategic beliefs and tactical beliefs, ethical beliefs, pragmatical beliefs, different kind.
Speaker: And knowing of it helps us to understand the behavior during negotiations, during the war, during the political communication, election campaign.
Speaker: This block is extremely important.
Speaker: Also, it is important for public relations for politician or during election campaign to know politicians' communicative compass.
Speaker: What is comfort zone for a candidate or for the opponent?
Speaker: If the comfort zone is dialogue,
Speaker: That is why it is very good for this politician, very profitable, to have dialogue with one interlocutor or in debates, in negotiations.
Speaker: For the extrovert, politicians, extroverts, this is very profitable sphere of their political behavior.
Speaker: In case of introverts,
Speaker: monologue is preferable and they feel themselves very comfortable with mass audience or during public speeches, case of Nixon, for example, or Lyndon Johnson.
Speaker: That is why during election campaign we use psychological profiles and it is very important for us.
Speaker: And two other features resistant to stress, self-control and self-regulation in foreign policy crisis, war decisions.
Speaker: This feature is very important for politicians.
Speaker: That is why during foreign policy crisis and during the war, understanding the personality is extremely important.
Speaker: And the last one, the last block is special neurotic or psychiatric particular traits, such as form of autism.
Speaker: like Asperger syndrome in case of the goal, get general the goal.
Speaker: We know that children with autism have serious problem with communication and limitations of their professional life.
Speaker: But Asperger syndrome, it's a specific kind of autism.
Speaker: It helps the politician to be a real leader and to be successful, very successful.
Speaker: Also, we need to know if a leader has narcissistic personality disorder or histrionic disorder, borderline or other problems.
Speaker: And very important to know because they stresses, they increases vindictiveness of political leader.
Speaker: And in case of character assassination or in case of war, in foreign policy confrontation, to know some psychiatric particular traits or neurotic traits are necessary to plan the campaign, to plan military campaign, to plan character assassination campaign, to plan foreign policy toward this personality.
Speaker: Thank you, Ekaterina.
Speaker: It's fascinating.
Speaker: So now I would like to read some of the questions we have for you from our participants.
Speaker: And the first question I have is about the psychological profiling and character traits, whether those are fixed in time and stable characteristics or they change.
Speaker: So in this case, is it possible to even prognosticate the behavior of political leader all the time?
Speaker: Because, for example, if character traits are about to change, how can we be certain that person is not going to be someone else 10 years later?
Speaker: And also I'm gonna take a chance to ask you the second question, so maybe you can talk about yourself.
Speaker: So how do you become a psychological profiler?
Speaker: Where do you start?
Speaker: Where did you study?
Speaker: What is your background?
Speaker: The first question is very important because how political personality changes during the time.
Speaker: And we should divide psychological traits in political leaders' personality
Speaker: into two big classes.
Speaker: The first class are constant traits, the permanent traits, their core traits of personality.
Speaker: For example, if leader has high need for power, in some periods, it could be very high, but not low, never low.
Speaker: it could change a little.
Speaker: That is the same situation with the need for affiliation or with the need for achievement.
Speaker: But other characteristics such as tolerance to stress, they could change.
Speaker: Of course, there is a main tendency.
Speaker: Person is tolerant to stress or person is very sensitive to stress.
Speaker: But this characteristic depends on health and duration of stress.
Speaker: Some people can be tolerant to stress in general, but if this person feels stress during one week or during one month, of course, this person becomes not so tolerant.
Speaker: And I should say that there are people
Speaker: among politicians, they have very important quality or their personality or their physical state.
Speaker: They have initial level of serotonin hormone higher than average people like President Nixon or President Yeltsin.
Speaker: This kind of people, they feel extremely comfort and well during stress.
Speaker: They feel euphoria.
Speaker: They think that they can win any war and decide any problem.
Speaker: And it is very interesting description of these feelings was done by President Nixon in his book, Six Crises.
Speaker: He wrote very important words.
Speaker: The easiest period in a crisis situation is actually the battle itself, easiest period.
Speaker: The most difficult is the period of indecision, whether to fight or run away.
Speaker: And the most dangerous period is the aftermath.
Speaker: It is then with all his resources spent and his guard down that an individual must watch out for doubt, reaction and 40 judgments.
Speaker: After stress, Boris Yeltsin felt himself as an empty figure.
Speaker: And he said that it was a very bad feeling without any energy, any resources, nothing to do.
Speaker: But during this crisis, during the serious situation, he was absolutely strong, absolutely attentive, and very, very decisive.
Speaker: And I was the person who had a very bad opportunity to tell Boris Yeltsin that his rating rates in January in 96 was 3%.
Speaker: Three, near zero.
Speaker: And his reaction was very interesting and strange.
Speaker: He said, hmm, Likudz Irina, okay, we should win.
Speaker: He did not think about failure.
Speaker: It was impossible for him because his need for achievement was great.
Speaker: One of the greatest I met.
Speaker: Not the need for power, such as in case of Putin, but the need for achievement.
Speaker: That is why for him only success was the goal, never losing.
Speaker: You asked me how I started.
Speaker: I studied in the Moscow State University psychological department, and I would like to study political psychology.
Speaker: And when I proposed my coursework in political psychology, I was told by the head of department,
Speaker: that there is no political psychology in Soviet Union, the first.
Speaker: The second, you never will advise the general secretary of Soviet Union.
Speaker: And the third, if you would like to study political psychology, you can go to Harvard University and do it there.
Speaker: In Soviet Union, it was impossible not only to go to Harvard University, but even to Bulgaria, to socialist countries.
Speaker: But I answered maybe not very polite, but I said, no, I will be political psychologist.
Speaker: I will advise to general secretary and I will give lectures in Harvard University.
Speaker: I did all three things.
Speaker: I entered to the PhD course to the Academy of Science of Soviet Union, the Institute of Psychology.
Speaker: And that time, hopefully I was proposed to do the first PhD dissertation
Speaker: in political psychology.
Speaker: It was their decision and their interest.
Speaker: And then I advised to the head of state and in 1991 I gave lectures in Harvard University.
Speaker: Wonderful, wonderful.
Speaker: So we have questions about the actual process of psychological profiling.
Speaker: Our participants wonder whether you use mostly qualitative or quantitative methods and how reliable are those methods.
Speaker: And basically, if you use those methods of psychological profiling for prognosticating the outcomes of character assassination attempts,
Speaker: Because in fact, you know, that's pretty much we wonder if it's possible to maybe predict some of the weaknesses we need to strengthen and inoculate our candidates against those future attacks and how, again, reliable those approaches are.
Speaker: There are two groups, two main groups of methods which we use for psychological profiling.
Speaker: The first group, personal methods, and the second, at a distance.
Speaker: Of course, if you have an opportunity to propose your client to participate in clinical interview,
Speaker: it's great opportunity for you as a psychologist because during clinical interview you can obtain information how politician felt himself or herself in childhood with parents, how he was or she was punished and what was the luckiest day in their life and what was the first success or first failure or personal deficiencies.
Speaker: And I had very funny situation when I had a client, it was a governor in Russia, and he was also the head of region during Soviet Union.
Speaker: That's why it was very experienced, very tough leader with great power.
Speaker: And it was a huge region, four times more than Germany.
Speaker: And when I asked this leader, what was the healthiest day, the luckiest day in his life?
Speaker: This guy, about 64 years old, he said the day when... Sergei, what is the remain?
Speaker: Belt.
Speaker: It was a day when the father's military belt was stolen by somebody.
Speaker: Because his father, he punished even adult guy, 20 years old, with his belt.
Speaker: That is why at 64, this very successful politician, he thinks that it was the happiest day in his life.
Speaker: It's an interesting fact.
Speaker: And also, there are a few projective methods very interesting for us and very informative for us.
Speaker: If you have an opportunity to propose your politician to draw some pictures, you have very important information.
Speaker: And for me, it is a picture of a family of a politician.
Speaker: One politician was a child.
Speaker: Very interesting information we have from it.
Speaker: It is a picture of one real politician who had no father.
Speaker: He had a grandmother and mother.
Speaker: And sometimes we can find the information from these pictures when you can see very small child or no child at all because there are only parents.
Speaker: who have good relations, but they did not pay any attention to the child.
Speaker: Or other also projective techniques which are interesting for us.
Speaker: We can use a set of techniques, because only a set can give us a real truthful information.
Speaker: Because in other cases, we can rely only one technique and the other.
Speaker: Probably it will not be too accurate, too proper for us.
Speaker: And there are techniques, many methods at a distance.
Speaker: Some of them are new.
Speaker: Some of them have 40 years history of using.
Speaker: Some of them are developed in the United States.
Speaker: Some of them in Europe.
Speaker: Some of them in Russia.
Speaker: And we study, we made psychological analysis of politicians interview, not speeches to eliminate the factor of speech writers, studying autobiographies.
Speaker: And it's extremely important to find in autobiography what a person has told about himself or herself and how it was told.
Speaker: And the main question, what was not told, what was hidden?
Speaker: It is interesting.
Speaker: For example, in autobiography and memoirs of President Carter, he stressed that he had extremely good relations with his parents, with mother and father.
Speaker: But many people around him stressed that his father always humiliated small katha because he had a specific teeth like a rabbit.
Speaker: And his father always humiliated him and he suffered because of it.
Speaker: And mother of Carter, she was very distant.
Speaker: She never paid her attention toward him.
Speaker: She never caressed him, never supported him.
Speaker: But Carter in his autobiography, hide this facts.
Speaker: We also studied expert evaluations and compared different opinions.
Speaker: It's important.
Speaker: We used qualitative content analysis of leaders' texts.
Speaker: And I'd like to tell you about two interesting Russian texts.
Speaker: techniques which were developed 15 years ago, probably, or 10 years ago in Russia.
Speaker: One is psycholinguistic analysis, VAL.
Speaker: We put in computer program the texts of a politician,
Speaker: first of all, spontaneous answers from interview.
Speaker: And in 30 seconds, we have 115 psychological characteristics in numbers.
Speaker: We can understand the dynamic of some characteristic during the time, and we can compare different politicians.
Speaker: These numbers are very comfortable for this task.
Speaker: That is why we can say that need for power in case of Lukashenko is two times or four times higher than in case of Putin, for example.
Speaker: And another technique is the computer analysis or vocal waves known as leader.
Speaker: The name is leader.
Speaker: Doesn't matter, the content doesn't matter.
Speaker: A leader can say to microphone,
Speaker: One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, it's enough.
Speaker: Or some text from Shakespeare or for other book.
Speaker: Content doesn't matter, only waves of voice give us very accurate analysis of personality.
Speaker: And also we analyze body language.
Speaker: You can see two different pictures.
Speaker: It were summits between President Medvedev and Obama and President Obama and Putin.
Speaker: And please look at the picture of Medvedev and Obama.
Speaker: You can see that both are smiling.
Speaker: And Obama, he closed his hands, Medvedev not, but look at their legs.
Speaker: Obama crossed his leg as well as Medvedev, but Obama crossed his leg limiting the intimate space between leaders.
Speaker: He is much more eager to have communication with Medvedev.
Speaker: Medvedev crossed from Obama,
Speaker: Both are smiling, but they are not sincere in their relations in this moment.
Speaker: It is only protocol behavior.
Speaker: In case of Putin and Obama became absolutely the same pose, the same state of their body.
Speaker: Both are negative toward each other.
Speaker: but they are sincere.
Speaker: They are sincere in their negative attitudes.
Speaker: So different kind of techniques could be used and it is important to know what are most helpful to you and what are less and what kind of information you could obtain at the moment.
Speaker: Concerning character assassination and how to protect the candidate, it is very important to know all his weaknesses and his or her painful reaction to criticism, especially in case of narcissism.
Speaker: Many politicians have narcissism.
Speaker: Now, of course, it's not norm, but it's near to norm.
Speaker: And in case of painful reaction, character assassination can knock out of the saddle this politician.
Speaker: This politician could be not very effective in meetings with people, with voters, in negotiations with allies and future allies.
Speaker: Vice President, for example.
Speaker: That is why political profile of candidates as well as opponent is helpful and important.
Speaker: And we used them in our election campaign very often.
Speaker: Thank you, Ekaterina.
Speaker: So we only have time for one question, but I would like to ask two very small questions.
Speaker: So the first question I have, so is it the same way you approach the historical profiles?
Speaker: Because I know you write a book about Bismarck, and in fact, it's actually interesting to see how do you assess the characteristics of people of the past, right?
Speaker: And the second one is, should candidates for presidency have their psychological profiles done ahead of time and for the acceptance into their race?
Speaker: Because I know in the United States, the members of American psychological and American psychiatric associations are prohibited from giving comments about the state of politicians.
Speaker: So maybe you can just elaborate on that.
Speaker: When we study historical people, such as Bismarck or Hitler or de Gaulle, it's important to understand well their biography and their texts, to study their texts and the same information as in case of modern politicians.
Speaker: But in each situation, sometimes important to find
Speaker: some facts which tell us a lot about this politician.
Speaker: In case of Hitler, his father was extremely cruel and he beat his children, his wife and his dog with whip from hippopotamus skin.
Speaker: When Hitler became a politician after the first world war, he obtained a few whips
Speaker: from hippopotamus skin, one from rhinoceros skin.
Speaker: How he used it?
Speaker: He used it for gesticulation in his public speeches and in communications with women.
Speaker: I mean, verbal communication, not sexual because he was masochist, not sadist with women.
Speaker: And this is important information for us because many psychologists thought that he had identified himself with his mole
Speaker: No, with his father.
Speaker: And he tried to behave himself as his father.
Speaker: In case of Erdogan, also, there are two important facts about his childhood.
Speaker: His father also was very cruel.
Speaker: And one Erdogan, Turkish president, was a child.
Speaker: He was six years old, it seems to me.
Speaker: He used four-letter word at home.
Speaker: And his father, he hand him for the arms to the ceiling.
Speaker: and he was hanged during a few hours.
Speaker: Could you imagine?
Speaker: And also for the obedience, his father forced him when Erdogan was a child to kiss father's shoes.
Speaker: And there is a very important law of Alfred Schutz, Austrian psychologist, that we behave toward the people who are above us, how we behave toward our parents when we were a child.
Speaker: And we behave to the people who are under, as our parents behave toward us when we were a child.
Speaker: That is why when we study current personality or historical personality, we need information about childhood, about failures, about their feelings, humiliation or their revenge or their relations with siblings and so on.
Speaker: And the second question was about...
Speaker: So the second question was, should candidates for presidency have their psychological profiles done and then should be used for their acceptance into their race?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: In other words, and then because I know, and again, in America, there are different views, whether psychologists, psychiatry should even speak in public about the current conditions.
Speaker: Yes, but psychiatrists and psychologists, they do not speak publicly with assessment of candidates.
Speaker: But I know that Trump had psychological profile of Hillary Clinton.
Speaker: How he used it, I do not know.
Speaker: And I also heard that she had psychological profile of Trump.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: During election campaign in the United States, people use it.
Speaker: And when there was the last election campaign four years ago, I also participated in a TV program in Falls Church.
Speaker: We assessed 10 political candidates during election, for my election campaign.
Speaker: It was an interview in television.
Speaker: That's why, in some sense, this information was used.
Speaker: Wonderful.
Speaker: Thank you so much, Ekaterina, for today's interview.
Speaker: We greatly benefited from your knowledge, from your expertise, from your wisdom.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Bye.
