I
was working on an article for a special issue on the psychology of power for a magazine
called The Greater Good. It is published out of the University of California at Berkeley. Check out the magazine online, they publish some
impressive stuff. Editor Jason Marsh pointed
me to an amazing study that provides additional – and quite scary – fodder to
support the huge body of research (see this
post) showing that simply putting people in positions of power turns them
into self-centered jerks.
Jason pointed me to a series
of recent studies by Northwestern’s Adam
Galinksy and
several other colleagues (including Stanford’s Deborah
Gruenfeld) that provides simple – but scary – evidence that just THINKING
about how powerful you are can cause you to disregard how others see the world. A description of this research can be
found, here at Live
Science and you can get a complete copy of the paper here
at Galinsky’s website.
In short, the researchers divided experimental subjects into two groups. People put in the “high power” group were asked
to remember and write about an incident when they had power over one or more people. People put in the "low power" group
were asked to remember and write about an incident where someone had power over them. People were randomly assigned to groups. Subjects in both
groups were then asked to write the letter E on their forehead.
Galinsky and his
colleagues inferred that if the letter
E was written so that it would seem correct to the research participant — but backwards to everyone else — this would suggest a failure to take other people’s perspective(see the picture on the left). Conversely,
if the letter was written so it would seem backwards to the participant, but
forwards to others, that was a sign that the person was taking others’ perspectives into account (see the picture on the right). These researchers hypothesized –- following a huge body of research
showing that power leads people to focus more on themselves and less on others –- that people
who had been “primed” to think about how powerful they were would be more likely
to draw the E “backwards” from other people’s perspective.
Not
only did the hypothesized effects occur, the effects were strong: People primed to feel powerful were nearly
three times as likely to draw the E so it seemed legible to themselves but
backwards to others.
Sure, this is just a little study done in the lab. But think about it. The subjects were college students, were randomly
assigned to conditions, and did a very brief experiment. This is a far weaker manipulation than what
happens in real life, where people are told that they deserve positions of
greater power and hold them for years. And –- although the “priming” had strong effects in the lab –-
remembering and writing about a single incident represents an intervention that is many, many
times weaker than what happens when people are given real power to hire and fire underlings, to move people into different jobs, to decide others’ pay, and on and
on.
Most of us believe that we are too
good and too ethical to turn into self-centered jerks just because we have a
little – or a lot – of power over others. Unfortunately, a vast body of evidence
suggests that most human-beings turn pretty ugly when they get power over others. The tendency to become a self-centered jerk
(and following other research) who acts as if “the rules don’t apply to me” is
something that everyone in power needs to fight against in every way, every
day.
Indeed, if you have ideas about how leaders can fight this unfortunate tendency, I would be most interested to hear your suggestions.
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