President Bush: Low Integrative Complexity Score
Before and After 9/11
Understanding how an enemy's political leaders communicate is an important part of winning wars. The current game of cat-and-mouse being played by Bush and bin Laden offers a new kind of war, and the opportunity to examine leaders' communications in a new context. The war itself is not a conventional battle between two states, but between a state and a non-state, and communications technologies have amplified the importance of communications as an element of war. Still, the basic parameters of the game are as they always have been: both Bush and bin Laden would like to know what the other has in store for him next, and it would also be nice if the rest of us had an idea of what to expect.
Alas, no one has yet found a scientific way to predict a leader 's next actions. Indeed, saying that we might be able to predict what our own or others' leaders will do in an international crisis based on what they say in public sounds like an easy way to be laughed out of the room. But psychologists Peter Suedfeld and Dana C. Leighton have offered an intriguing, not laughable, suggestion there may one day be a way in the results of a study published in the September 2002 issue of Political Psychology. I ran into their study by accident while searching for another article, and insofar as anything called an "integrative complexity analysis" can be a pager turner, this is it. Read more …
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