ABSTRACT
Recent years have brought considerable progress in understanding the implicit or unconscious personality. Psychology now has a better idea of the defensive cognitive processes that people use to create a sense of rationality for what, in truth, are desire-driven behaviors. This knowledge of defensive cognitive processes was used to design a new system for measuring the implicit personality. This new system of personality assessment is referred to as “conditional reasoning.” Conditional reasoning was introduced with a test for achievement motivation (James, 1998). A subse quent paper by James et al. (2005) described the development of a conditional-reasoning test for aggression. In this chapter, we introduce a third test for conditional reasoning developed by James and his associates. This test is designed to measure a person’s power motive, which we define below as a person’s desire to exert his or her will over others.
