Assessing Wartime Leaders' Motives: A Comparative Study of the Russo-Ukrainian War and the World War II

Abstract

McClelland's human motivation theory has been used to predict wars and conflicts since its inception. This article offers two novelties. First, the study contextualizes assessments of the imperial motivational pattern by comparing it across countries. Second, it uses an effect size metric, Cohen's d, instead of observed frequencies of power and affiliation words. The resulting assessment can indicate the prospects of negotiation or escalation in a conflict situation depending on the parties' motives. The analysis focuses on the Russo-Ukrainian War and covers five countries: Russia, Ukraine, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. The scope of comparisons includes war-related speeches of those countries' leaders, war coverage by selected mass media outlets, and speeches and news items produced during WWII. Text corpora containing more than 93 million words in four languages (English, Russian, Ukrainian, and French) were processed using a version of the motive lexicon (dictionary). Although the Russo-Ukrainian War did not reach WWII-level animosity, the study indicates that the prospects for finding a negotiated solution remain dim. A high “power-minus-affiliation” gap characterized the speeches of the belligerent countries' leaders and war coverage by the national media.