Does having social power really mean you’re setting yourself up to go too far and abuse it? Couldn’t we instead consider that those who intensely crave power already fit the profile of a risk factor, due to certain personality traits such as narcissism, Machiavellianism, or psychopathy?
While we cannot rule it out, reducing the inappropriate exercise of power to a mere consequence of individual problems fails to account for the transformations it can bring about in any individual who comes to hold it. In fact, several studies show that anyone who experiences power adopts a particular mindset that could encourage more self-centered and less civil behavior. Identifying the risks of power is therefore not without value—for those who exercise it… or are subject to it.
Through an ingenious experiment, Adam Galinsky and his colleagues at Columbia University showed that people who were reminded of the concept of power had more difficulty putting themselves in someone else’s shoes and adopting another person’s perspective. Let’s see how.
Imagine that you are asked to write a text about a personal situation in which you had a certain amount of power over other people—for example, because of a difference in status. Immediately after this subtle introduction of the idea of power, you are given a test of spontaneous perceptual decentring.
To do this, you’ll be given a marker with which you must quickly carry out an instruction: write the capital letter E on your forehead. A remarkable phenomenon then occurs: compared to people who were asked to think of a situation in which they had little power, those who had just recalled a personal episode in which they had power over others were three times less likely to draw the letter E in the direction that others would read it. The letter thus appeared to be written backward to others (left face below).
At the end of the experiment, the content of the texts written by the participants was analyzed by outside evaluators. It turned out that those who had recalled a situation in which they had exercised a great deal of power were even less likely than the others to write the letter in the correct reading direction for others.
Another phenomenon influenced by power is the recognition of emotions visible on people’s faces. Michael Kraus, of the University of California, asked participants to think either of people who had more power, wealth, or prestige than they did, or of people who had less.
After this induction, participants were asked to mark an “X” on a drawing of a ladder to place themselves on a rung of the social hierarchy. Not surprisingly, those who had been asked to compare themselves to people with less power than themselves placed themselves higher on the ladder—choosing a higher rung—than those who thought of people with higher status. Next, participants were shown photographs in which they were asked to identify a series of emotional facial expressions.
It turned out that people in whom a state of higher self-efficacy had been temporarily induced had significantly lower emotional recognition abilities than others.
These results were confirmed by comparing individuals from high- and low-socioeconomic backgrounds on the same test: those from higher socioeconomic backgrounds scored lower on emotional recognition. Another study by Keely Muscatell of the University of California, Los Angeles, involved having participants from high- and low-socioeconomic backgrounds listen to a student’s account of the start of his academic semester. At the same time, the researchers measured the participants’ brain activity. They showed that the neural network involved in empathy was less active among students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds.
Yet another study showed that motor resonance (the activation of a homologous brain network when observing a behavior performed by another person) was weakened after inducing a mental state of power, as if the ability to share another person’s experience were diminished by power.
These findings suggest that the experience of having a figure of authority appears to weaken certain social and cognitive skills known to be critical in social relationships. This sometimes results in the adoption of antisocial behaviors.
On the road, an American study examined the rule-breaking behaviors of drivers based on the status (economic value) of the car they were driving.
Five types of vehicles were compared, listed in order of increasing estimated price. The results showed that drivers of more expensive cars committed more traffic violations on average.
For example, there were five times as many Mercedes drivers (a high-status car) as there were drivers of old Fords who didn't wait their turn when several vehicles were waiting at an intersection.
The same drivers of expensive cars were more likely to cut off pedestrians: owners of large cars showed the least consideration for others.
Power can also encourage uninhibited behavior. In one study, participants were asked to work in groups to draft rules for university operations. At the beginning of the session, the researcher randomly designated one of them as the supervisor, who would then be responsible for rewarding the others for their work by awarding them points. Thirty minutes into the session, a tray of appetizing cookies was brought to the participants. The number of cookies was limited, and only one person was allowed to have two. Observation of the participants’ behavior showed that those who held the status of supervisor were twice as likely as the others to take a second cookie for themselves.
Since the scene was discreetly filmed, the researchers also examined other aspects of the participants’ behavior, such as how wide they opened their mouths while eating the cookie, how often they licked their lips, or how often they dropped crumbs while eating. The results showed that participants assigned high status ate in a less restrained and less polite manner in front of others.
These studies suggest that power can hinder our understanding of others’ experiences and encourage uncivil or uninhibited behavior. Of course, these are limited experiments and studies that cannot be directly applied to the behavior of any particular political figure.
However, it is evident that political history is rife with examples of transformations that seem to have been triggered by the attainment of power (sometimes referred to as the “hubris syndrome”).
Whether in the laboratory or in the political and social arena, these facts echo, in a way, the theories of Montesquieu, part of whose work was devoted precisely to advocating a separation of powers in order to prevent its most harmful effects.
