Joe Biden Personality Profile and Leadership Style

The Personality Profile and Leadership Style
of 2024 Democratic Presidential Candidate
Joe Biden

July 2021

A psychological analysis of U.S. president Joe Biden by Anne Marie Griebie and Aubrey Immelman, PhD, at the Unit for the Study of Personality in Politics revealed that President Biden’s primary personality pattern is Outgoing/gregarious, complemented by a secondary Accommodating/cooperative pattern and subsidiary Ambitious/confident features. Typologically, Biden may be characterized as a conciliatory extravert with an interpersonal leadership style.

Click on image for larger view

Summary and Formulation

The poster presents the results of an indirect assessment of the personality of U.S. president Joe Biden, from the conceptual perspective of personologist Theodore Millon.

Psychodiagnostically relevant data about Biden were collected from biographical sources and media reports and synthesized into a personality profile using the Millon Inventory of Diagnostic Criteria (MIDC), which yields 34 normal and maladaptive personality classifications congruent with DSM-III-R, DSM-IV, and DSM-5.

The personality profile yielded by the MIDC was analyzed on the basis of interpretive guidelines provided in the MIDC and Millon Index of Personality Styles manuals. Biden’s primary personality pattern was found to be Outgoing/gregarious, complemented by a secondary Accommodating/cooperative pattern and subsidiary Ambitious/confident features.

The prominence of the Outgoing pattern, in conjunction with a distinctive Accommodating pattern in his overall personality configuration, is indicative of the conciliatory extravert subtype. This personality composite provides the personological substrate for a strong affiliation motive. These individuals are driven to seek approval; they want others to like them and view them as a friend or ally. To achieve that motivational goal, they often compliment, praise, or flatter others, presenting an image of goodwill. When disagreements occur, they attempt to smooth things over, sometimes at the cost of conceding.

Leaders with Biden’s personality profile are likely to exhibit an interpersonal leadership style, characterized by flexibility, compromise, and an emphasis on teamwork; they tend to be conflict-averse and risk-avoidant. In terms of Margaret Hermann’s leadership trait analysis framework, Biden is classified as a leader who respects constraints, is open to information, and is motivated primarily by a relationship focus — prompting a collegial, accommodative leadership style with a focus on reconciling differences and consensus building.

Based on his personality profile and associated leadership traits, the general tenor of the Biden presidency will likely be conciliatory, which could render the president vulnerable to manipulation by pressure groups and act as an impediment in negotiations or conflicts with foreign adversaries.

Research paper

The Personality Profile and Leadership Style of U.S. President Joe Biden. Paper presented at the 44th Annual Scientific Meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology, July 11-13, 2021. Abstract and link for full-text (27 pages; PDF) download at Digital Commons: https://digitalcommons.csbsju.edu/psychology_pubs/132/

Annie Griebie presents her paper, with Aubrey Immelman, on “The Personality Profile and Leadership Style of U.S. President Joe Biden” at the 44th Annual Scientific Meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology (virtual conference), July 12, 2021.

An Early Validity Check of Joe Biden’s Predicted Leadership Style as President

February 2, 2021

In examining the leadership implications of Joe Biden’s personality profile (August 2020), it was projected that, temperamentally, the character of his presidency would be passive–positive — relatively low in power motivation and not predisposed to investing an extraordinary amount of energy in the office of the presidency.

That assessment is inconsistent with the fact that President Biden signed more executive orders than Donald Trump and Barack Obama combined in the first 12 days of his presidency.

Although it’s too soon to draw firm conclusions, it was also projected that “President Biden is likely to be overly open to influence, which could render him unduly vulnerable to manipulation by pressure groups in his own party.”

Prior to his election, Joe Biden was classified as a conciliatory extravert. Time will tell whether the behavioral expression of his conciliatory tendencies is limited to factions within the Democratic Party or whether it also extends to congressional Republicans.

President Biden’s Fitness to Govern

May 26, 2021

President Joe Biden leaving the East Room of the White House after a press conference. (Photo: Evan Vucci / AP via Hamodia)

On May 24, 2021, Hamodia — the daily newspaper of Torah Jewry — published an article examining President Biden’s physical and mental capacity to lead (“Is the president fit to serve?” by Rafael Hoffman)

The article quotes Dr. Stuart Jay Olshansky, professor of public health at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who analyzes the longevity of presidents; Dr. Nir Barzilai, director of Albert Einstein College of Medicine’s Institute for Aging Research; Tobe Berkovitz, associate professor of advertising at Boston University, who has worked as a media consultant for Democratic candidates; Dr. John Martin-Joy, author of Diagnosing from a Distance — a study of the history and ethics of the Goldwater Rule — who teaches psychiatry at Beth Israel-Deaconess Medical Center and Mt. Auburn Hospital in the Boston area; and Aubrey Immelman of the Unit for the Study of Personality in Politics, whose commentary is excerpted below.

Aubrey Immelman, an associate professor of psychology at Saint John’s University in Minnesota, published a personality study of candidates in the 2020 election that identified President Biden as having a propensity toward “flexibility, compromise, and an emphasis on teamwork.” Yet it also noted that his tendency to be conciliatory leaves him “vulnerable to manipulation by pressure groups.”

Professor Immelman expressly avoided hypothesizing as to how his observations bear on the president’s mental health, but noted that his early actions were partially incongruous with the personality study.

“From my nonpartisan personality-in-politics perspective, the most puzzling aspect of President Biden’s first 100 days in office has been my observation that his political behavior has been more activist and less conciliatory than predicted by my personality profile, which is based on data collected since Mr. Biden’s run for president in 2007,” he said.

Read the full report

Presidential Electability Index (political impact) score

Joe Biden scores moderately high on the Millon Inventory of Diagnostic Criteria-based Presidential Electability Index (PEI), which employs publicly perceived candidate personality traits as the predictor variable and has accurately predicted — before Super Tuesday — the outcome of every presidential election from 1996 to 2016.

Joe Biden
Presidential Electability Index
Range: 21–33

PEI = 21–33 (27 ±6)

Scale:	1A	1B	2	3	4	5A	5B	6	7	8
Lower limit:	3	1	5	13	9	0	0	2	0	0
Upper limit:	6	4	8	19	11	1	0	4	0	0

Lower limit PEI: [Extraversion (scale 3) = 13] + [Narcissism (scale 2) = 5] + [Dominance (scale 1A) = 3] – [Introversion (scale 8) = 0] – [Conscientiousness (scale 6) = (2 – 2) = 0] = 21 – 0 = 21

Upper limit PEI: [Extraversion (scale 3) = 19] + [Narcissism (scale 2) = 8] + [Dominance (scale 1A) = 6] – [Introversion (scale 8) = 0] – [Conscientiousness (scale 6) = (4 – 4) = 0] = 33 – 0 = 33

Projecting the Winner of the 2024 Presidential Election: The Presidential Electability Index
August 12, 2023

Donald Trump
Presidential Electability Index
Range: 64-84 (74 ±10); dysfunctionality adjusted 45
Joe Biden
Presidential Electability Index
Range: 21-33 (27 ±6)