This week I read a very interesting article in The Economist entitled The Psychology of Power, which describes the results of a research study that investigated three things:
- Does power corrupt people, or does it attract the corruptible?
- Are people in power hypocrites?
- If people in power are in fact hypocrites, why do they act like that? Is everyone in power a hypocrite?
To investigate these questions, Joris Lammers and Adam Galinsky, two scientists from Tilburg University and Northwestern University respectively, conducted a series of experiments. They first classified the volunteers into two groups: Power-group and non-power group. They did this by asking the volunteers to write about a moment in their past when they felt powerful or powerless Previous research shows that this is an effective way to identify people who feel in power. Below is a summary of their findings, including some extracts from The Economist:
Does power corrupt people, or does it attract the corruptible?
- High power and low power groups were asked whether they thought over reporting travel expenses at work was immoral. They were also asked to privately roll two dice numerous times and report their results. The number they rolled would determine the number of lottery tickets that they would be given at the end of the study.
- In the dice game, the high-power participants reported, on average, higher values than low-power individuals. This evidences that high-power people were “undoubtedly cheating—perhaps taking the term “high roller” rather too literally.”(Economist)
- The high-power group also “beat” the low-power individuals in that they thought that over-reporting expenses was more immoral.
- To me, the results show that high-power people tend to cheat more (are more corrupt) and are more hypocrites, since they think it is immoral for other people to do bad things such over reporting business expenses, but it is acceptable for them to cheat as evidenced in the dice game. I don’t necessarily agree that these results indicate that power tends to corrupt, as the magazine states. I did not see the cause-effect relationship in those findings
Are people in power hypocrites?
- To answer this question, scientists asked members of each group “how acceptable it would be for someone else to break the speed limit when running late for an appointment and how acceptable it would be for the participant himself to do so. Others were asked similar questions about tax declarations.” (Economist)
- “The results showed that the powerful do, indeed, behave hypocritically. Low-power individuals, by contrast, saw everyone as equal.” (Economist)
- High-power people felt that it was immoral when others broke tax laws, but that it wasn’t so bad if they did so themselves. “In this case low-power individuals were actually easier on others and harsher on themselves.” (Economist)
- To me, these results made it clear that high-power people are hypocrites. The difference between this experiment and the one about over reporting business expenses is that in this one they were actually asked to give their perspective on their actions as opposed to other people’s actions. It seems to me though that this experiment ignited the scientist to investigate on high-power people’s behavior towards morality. “It is not just that they abuse the system; they also seem to feel entitled to abuse it.” (Economist)
If people in power are in fact hypocrites, why do they act like that? Is everyone in power a hypocrite?
- Individuals were first asked to write about past experiences when they felt that the power it was given to them was in fact legitimate. Others were asked to write about their feelings when they were in power and whether they felt they deserved to be in that position. This was done to further classify high-power and low-power people.
- “All of the volunteers were then asked to rate how immoral it would be for someone to take an abandoned bicycle rather than report the bicycle to the police. They were also asked, if they were in real need of a bicycle, how likely they would be to take it themselves and not report it.” (Economist)
- The results from these experiments were very similar to the aforementioned studies. It was clear that high-power groups believed that they deserved to be in power. “Sense of entitlement” (Economist)
- The interesting results came from high-power groups who felt they were not entitled to their power. “These people showed a similar tendency to that found in low-power individuals—to be harsh on themselves and less harsh on others—but the effect was considerably more dramatic. Dr Lammers and Dr Galinsky call this reversal “hypercrisy”.” (Economist)
- It was concluded that people with power “think is justified to break rules not only because they can get away with it, but also because they feel at some intuitive level that they are entitled to take what they want.” (Economist)
- “This sense of entitlement is crucial to understanding why people misbehave in high office. In its absence, abuses will be less likely. The word “privilege” translates as “private law”. If Dr Lammers and Dr Galinsky are right, the sense which some powerful people seem to have that different rules apply to them is not just a convenient smoke screen. They genuinely believe it.” (Economist)
- “What explains hypercrisy is less obvious. It is known, though, from experiments on other species that if those at the bottom of a dominance hierarchy show signs of getting uppity, those at the top react both quickly and aggressively. Hypercrisy might thus be a signal of submissiveness—one that is exaggerated in creatures that feel themselves to be in the wrong place in the hierarchy. By applying reverse privileges to themselves, they hope to escape punishment from the real dominants. Perhaps the lesson, then, is that corruption and hypocrisy are the price that societies pay for being led by alpha males (and, in some cases, alpha females).” (Economist)
- I agree with the inferences taken from the last experiment’s results. I can see how some powerful people really think that they have the right to take actions on things that they would consider to be immoral if others would do them. It is not uncommon for individuals in high morality positions such as judges and politicians to be involved in numerous corruption cases. Some of them take actions on issues that go against what they preach. Similarly, I think that the results of people in high-power positions that don’t have a sense of entitlement were very interesting. At least, however, they are less hypocrites than the ones that feel they have the right to act immorally.
Source: http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15328544