ABSTRACT
This chapter takes a distinctive approach to political psychology, linking social structural change at the top with changes in modal personality types. Drawing heavily from the psychological theories of power, narcissism, and other traits, it presents elite respondents' personality test results. All social theories depend implicitly or explicitly on some notion of the psychological sources of human ideas and action. The need for power however was related to liberalism, separate from occupation. Comparative analysis was done between the new cultural elite and another traditional elite group, religious leaders, who are also in the cultural sector. The Rothman-Lichter studies on student radicals paint a different picture. The studies developed a design to test a theory of personality and social change, based on McClelland's theory of personality motives, through the use of the Thematic Apperception Tests, one of many types of projective psychological tests for measuring personality.
