We all know power corrupts, but now we have an idea of just what it is that gets corrupted; powerful people lose their empathy.
But new research in political science and psychology has provided a novel explanation for why leaders and managers regularly let their followers down and resort to the kind of "layoffs and pay cuts are good for you" talk that defines absurdity. These studies show that leaders often emerge from communities not because they are ruthless, but because they are skilled at managing social relationships.
Something happens to people once they acquire power, however, and the transformation appears to be psychological. Adam Galinsky, a social psychologist at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, recently had volunteers describe either a situation in which they had power over someone else or a situation in which they felt powerless. Those asked to remember a situation in which they felt powerful were made to feel even more powerful by being given control of the distribution of goodies, whereas the volunteers asked to remember a powerless situation were further reminded of their powerlessness when they were asked to estimate how many goodies they expected to receive.
When Galinsky and his colleagues asked all the volunteers to draw the letter E on their foreheads with a marker, those who had been made to feel powerless were three times more likely to draw the E so that it was legible to someone facing them. Those made to feel powerful, however, drew the letter so that it looked correct from their internal perspective but was a mirror image from the point of view of someone facing them.
Galinsky's point, which he noted in a study published in the journal Psychological Science, is that volunteers made to feel powerful, even in a trivial laboratory experiment, almost instantly lose the ability to see things from other people's points of view.
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But once socially gifted people rise to power, Keltner added, the paradox is that "power simplifies our thinking. We tend to see things in terms of our own self-interest, and it makes us more impulsive. We forget our audience in service of gratifying our own impulses."
Keltner and others have shown that power exacerbates many cognitive biases. People who lack power turn out to be more accurate in guessing the opinions of those around them, whereas those in power tend to be inaccurate. Because subordinates are also hesitant to tell superiors things they do not want to hear, the problem gets worse, with powerful people having even less input and perspective about how others think and feel.
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In some ways, the results should not be surprising: Not having power forces you to see things from other people's points of view and increases empathy and social behavior. Having power allows you to ignore other points of view -- depriving you of the social skills that led to power in the first place. When powerful people such as Musharraf say and do things that are absurd, in other words, it could be that they are simply unaware of how they appear to others.
I’m sure there could be many comments made about the “Bush Bubble” and the fact that the out-of-power liberals predictions being far more accurate then the in-power conservatives, but this study isn’t partisan, and its that fact that makes it most depressing.
Exactly like the old saw of power corrupting, it is saying that no matter how gifted, intelligent, and empathetic the person you put into power happens to be, having that power will turn them into selfish and impulsive tyrants, increasingly cut off from reality. You can see it happen to entire parties, who come to power to clean up the bloated corruption of the old, only to turn into bloated, corrupt bastards themselves, usually with surprising swiftness.
No wonder people who follow politics closely, (and don’t self-identify with any of the main actors), tend to be such pessimists.
