The Dark Tetrad and Political Leadership 2500-EN-PS-EAc-26

The ‘Dark Tetrad’ in psychology is understood as a group of four personality components: Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism. According to a popular view, these personal characteristics are often associated with "successful" leadership.
The course is designed to use an intradisciplinary (within psychology) approach to help participants understand the Dark Tetrad personality traits, to recognize their symptoms among former or current political leaders and to predict the possible consequences of leading based on the Dark Tetrad components: both negative and positive.
Concepts, methods, and knowledge from several diverse areas of psychology will be used: social psychology, political psychology, forensic psychology, cognitive schema therapy, and perhaps research design.
After a theoretical introduction, students will be divided into groups and assigned projects. The task of each group will be to choose a former or current political leader, who, in the group's opinion, has exhibited one of the Dark Tetrad components, and to analyze her/his personality and leadership by in-depth analyses of all available sources: record of leaders’ political actions and decisions, memoirs and biographies, news and media reports, recorded interviews and speeches, etc., all providing information about personal qualities and public actions of particular leaders and allowing an analysis of psychological mechanisms and motivations using so called methodology “at distance”.