Power corrupts

I would have to agree with the article. Through Tabletop games I've done a lot of RP'ing and more then one DM has turned the game from "Your mad crazy skilled killers" to "You need to convince the king, or his populous that a dragon is going to attack in a week." It gets SO much easier to RP out a character that is just making up stuff, And if you can't get away with it once, Whats to stop you from doing it a second time? After the second time, Maybe you can accomplish some challenge or another, but you probably know some one who can. How hard is it to pretend that your them and just make up stuff that sounds intelligent.

Then after that you start to want to change things, Feeling that it isn't as hard as you imagined originally. Before you know it you've been able to de-throne a king with only a handful (or two, or three, or fifty) little white lies about what you can do.

Man, Looking back on my Gaming experience, I think I might be falling into that pattern. But how to use it to my advantage...

Edited for corrections.

edited 14th Oct '10 11:06:51 AM by Voot

Power doesn't corrupt, itself. It facilitates corruption, it makes it easier for corruption to get a toehold, and it encourages the growth of corruption, but I don't believe that it's the power itself that does the corrupting. Think of it the same way as "water mildews fabrics" — It doesn't. It's not the water that's causing the mildew — it's the fungus. Water just makes it much much easier for the fungus to get busy.

^ Agreed. I think that power allows people to do things that they wouldn't and couldn't do otherwise. When you remove inhibitions and certain consequences from actions, what's to stop people from doing them?

Power is an enabler, that makes it easier for people to do things that they should and things that they shouldn't.

Some of the experiments indicate otherwise, though. Having authority over others does not give you opportunity to influence the outcome of dice rolls for instance, but it seems to at least subconsciously convey the impression that you can get better results by rolling dice than others.

Suppose you wanted to disconfirm the hypothesis that power corrupts, rather than simply providing greater opportunity for corrupt behavior. What sort of experiments, apart from those already discussed in the article, would you run, and how would you account for the results already covered?

I don't see how you could do an experiment to prove that, because you would have to have test subjects who had not the slightest tendency to take advantage of being in a position of power (otherwise you can't rule out the "facilitates rather than creates corruption" result) and had no particular moral stricture against taking advantage of being in a position of power (because if they have that, you aren't testing the ability of power to corrupt as much as you are testing the strength of that moral stricture.)

Going through the studies the article cites one by one: the first one — that supposedly proves that narcissistic people will assume the leadership roles in a leaderless group? Looking at the abstract, it was specifically about leaderless group discussion situations.

The second one, (the draw an "e" on your forehead) had no control group. They have nothing to compare the percentages of people who drew the "E" backwards or forwards following power-priming to the percentages without power-priming.

The "steal a $100 bill" one has some problems as well: what the test 'proved' is that people in a position of high power don't display the physical signs of lying. But they only looked for two specific tells: a "one-shoulder shrug" and a higher rate of aimless gesturing while lying. There are other tells they ignored. No control group.

The "Power and hypocrisy linked in the brain" one makes it sound like they were doing fMRIs, maybe, and actually studying the parts of the brian invlolved in both feelings of power and hypocrisy. Nope. It's the same sort of thing as the others — role play a bit then answer some questions, then get interviewed. And again, no control group.

The dice one is interesting. The control group rolled for themselves 69% of the time. The "low power" group rolled for themselves 58% (still more than half) of the time. The "high power" group rolled for themselves 100% of the time. The conclusion is that the "high power" group felt they could do a better job of rolling the dice. But they were placed in the high power group by being asked to recall a situation that they had been in control of — so was it a feeling of "I can do better than him" or simply "I can control my own actions" that they were acting on? Hard to say.

And roleplaying situations, like the second one from that particular study, have their own problems —namely that people will role-play. Tell me I'm supposed to role-play a subordinate, and I'm not going to try to take charge — I'm supposed to be playing a subordinate, dammit.

And the last one. Cracked makes it sound like the high powered people had no measurable response. What the report on the study in APS says is that "individuals with a higher sense of power experienced less compassion and distress when confronted with another’s suffering, compared to low-power individuals. In addition, high-power individuals’ RSA reactivity increased (as indicated by lower heart rate) as they listened to the painful stories; that is, high power participants showed more autonomic emotion regulation, which buffered against their partner’s distress. " In other words, there was a measurable response — the high powered people did a better of job of defending themselves from the stranger's distress.

In short, none of these studies are anywhere near as conclusive as Cracked makes them sound.

edited 14th Oct '10 7:28:58 PM by Madrugada

The second one, (the draw an "e" on your forehead) had no control group. They have nothing to compare the percentages of people who drew the "E" backwards or forwards following power-priming to the percentages without power-priming.

The link from the Cracked article doesn't give details, but the Cracked article claims that those in the powerful group were compared to those in the powerless group, which isn't as good a control as running the E test on people not involved in a power roleplay at all, but it did indicate a strong difference in awareness of the perceptions of others between those role playing the powerful and the powerless. Likewise for the experiment on lying behavior; those roleplaying the powerful lacked specific tells that those roleplaying the powerless demonstrated. There may be tells that they did continue to express, but they were limited compared to those in the other group.

In the hypocrisy study as well, levels of hypocritical behavior were compared in groups of people chosen at random to roleplay positions of various levels of power, after the roleplay was finished.

It's misleading to say that these experiments didn't have controls. They didn't measure the people involved in the power role plays against people who were involved in no role playing at all, and it would probably have been a good idea to include such people additionally, but they do test the behavior of people given the sensation of power against people not given the sensation of power, and also isolate the explanation from the oddball possibility that engaging in a role play at all causes people to become less aware of others' perceptions, better at lying, or more hypocritical.

I don't see how you could do an experiment to prove that, because you would have to have test subjects who had not the slightest tendency to take advantage of being in a position of power (otherwise you can't rule out the "facilitates rather than creates corruption" result) and had no particular moral stricture against taking advantage of being in a position of power (because if they have that, you aren't testing the ability of power to corrupt as much as you are testing the strength of that moral stricture.)

It seems to me that it would actually be fairly easy to test. Randomly select your participants, put some in a group simulating power, and the others in a control group that does not. Expose every member of each group to an identical situation where it benefits them to behave in a corrupt or duplicitous manner, independent of the opportunities afforded to the individuals in the "powerful" group. If the power only corrupts through the added opportunity to do wrong, then in the specific case where the members of both groups are all presented with the same opportunity, the members of the "powerful" group should be no more likely to take it.

I'm not in the psychology or business department, but I suppose I could write up an experimental procedure and see if I can get some professors on board with it, provided experiments of this description haven't been done already.

Isn't "corrupt" = "breaking apart one's moral stricture"?

Having authority over others does not give you opportunity to influence the outcome of dice rolls for instance, but it seems to at least subconsciously convey the impression that you can get better results by rolling dice than others.

Is this a factor in rich people's traditional fondness for hig-stakes gambling?

edited 15th Oct '10 6:09:57 AM by RawPower

I read the test papers themselves, where I could find them, as I was writing that post. And the Stanford "E" one was available online. There was no control group at all.

Is this the article you were referring to? It seems to be the one referenced in the Cracked article, but I'm unclear what gives you the impression that there was no control group. Each experiment compared randomly selected participants primed with high power simulations to those primed with low power simulations, to isolate the effect of being exposed to power from the effect of being involved in a simulation at all.

If you don't consider that to constitute a control at all, what would you regard as a meaningful control for those experiments?

The actual paper: here. There's no indication that they did anything to establish what the relative frequency forwards and backwards "e"-making was in an unprimed group. There's a comparison of high-primed to low-primed, but no baseline of unprimed. They took that to mean People who have power care less about the perspective of others, but it could just as easily be that people who feel powerless feel more need to pay attention to the perspective of others.

edited 15th Oct '10 12:16:43 PM by Madrugada

If they had only compared to the high power group to a group that was not engaged in any simulation at all, the results would be open to corruption by the effect of simply being involved in a simulation. They wouldn't be able to isolate "power limits people's ability to consider others' perspectives" from "being involved in a simulation limits people's ability to consider others' perspectives."

Having an intermediate power group would have provided more information, but the experimental setup does control for level of power. A control isn't a group you do nothing to, it's a group that you give treatment appropriate to isolate the effect you're looking for in the experimental group.

They say "Having power causes a person to show less concern about others' perspectives." My question is how can they be sure which one moved from the baseline? They didn't establish a baseline. It's just as legitimate to say "not having power causes a person to show more concern for others' perspectives." They didn't prove that the people with power wrote a readable-to-themselves "E" more often than normal, they just proved that they do it more often than people who feel themselves to be without power.

A control isn't a group you do nothing to, it's a group that you give treatment appropriate to isolate the effect you're looking for in the experimental group.

edited 15th Oct '10 12:50:38 PM by Madrugada

As for people in power being gamblers, remember that people who get to the top often take greater risks.

Which came first? The chicken or the egg? This article would suggest chicken.

avatar: Madrugada They say "Having power causes a person to show less concern about others' perspectives." My question is how can they be sure which one moved from the baseline? They didn't establish a baseline. It's just as legitimate to say "not having power causes a person to show more concern for others' perspectives." They didn't prove that the people with power wrote a readable-to-themselves "E" more often than normal, they just proved that they do it more often than people who feel themselves to be without power.

This is a fair point, and an intermediate group would definitely have helped resolve this. But if response to power is a spectrum, rather than a binary "Feel powerful, don't feel powerful," or "Feel powerless, don't feel powerless," or a ternary "Feel powerful, feel neutral, feel powerless," then the explanations become equivalent. "Feeling less powerful causes one to have more consideration for others' viewpoints" would have the same meaning as "Feeling more powerful causes one to have less consideration for others' viewpoints."

The experiments leave room for uncertainty, but I'm confused as to why you feel confident enough to make the statement that "Power doesn't corrupt, itself. It facilitates corruption, it makes it easier for corruption to get a toehold, and it encourages the growth of corruption, but I don't believe that it's the power itself that does the corrupting." The experiments give significant reason to suspect that power may indeed cause corruption, in a number of respects.

Hmm, that was actually quite interesting, Madrugada.

I have my own suspicions as to why many would rather not talk about the connection between power and being a total bastard.

Many people (often influenced by the ideas of Plato, through a few degrees of separation) believe the reason why people so consistently act like tyrants when given power is because the wrong people are given power. But if the right person was given power, everything would be great, because it'd be run by a good person.

A lovely idea, gives people hope that things could be better than they are now by a fairly neat and simple solution.

However, if giving someone power unbalances their own morality and causes their more sinister impulses to become dominant, then there is no right person we can give our power to, in order to make everything better.

And, of course, lots of people don't like that idea. Because then you have to really work hard at creating social systems which create incentives which spread power and minimise corruption, while still making it possible to get stuff done. And that means studying a whole bunch of political science and psychology and game theory and economics. And well, that shit is hard.

And people want to make the future better, but for the most part don't want to have to do hard, dreary book-learning stuff in order to make that happen. People would, for the most part, rather we just find a perfect, uncorruptable man and make him king.

I feel like my post up there was completely and utterly ignored. I think my questions are legitimate...

why you feel confident enough to make the statement that "Power doesn't corrupt, itself. It facilitates corruption, it makes it easier for corruption to get a toehold, and it encourages the growth of corruption, but I don't believe that it's the power itself that does the corrupting."

Because I believe that most people would be bastards, to some degree or other if they thought they could get away with it. Power provides one way of getting away with it. Anonymity is almost as effective, but I haven't heard anyone claim that "Anonymity Corrupts" —GIFT is explicitly the opposite claim: anonymity releases the inner fuckwad.

Raw Power, I'd be unsurprised to find that there's some connection, but how direct the connection is is wide open. I'd suspect that there is some measure of thrill for a powerful person in gambling because their power is useless against the cards or the dice — it's a perfectly safe way to temporarily experience risk. Looking at in terms of "rich" rather than "powerful", there's no sense of risk if the stakes are so small that losing effectively costs nothing.

edited 15th Oct '10 1:34:12 PM by Madrugada

Indeed, it's not so much the power corrupts, so much as power facilitates the expression of corruption already present.

Yes, that means you. And me. Nobody can resist temptation indefinitely, it's just a matter of time until a person with power finds a justification for abusing it.

^ Exactly. Precisely. On the nose. Nailed it.

Quite. I know perfectly well I'd enjoy having power, and abusing it if the correct circumstance comes up. Therefore I avoid positions of power.

Because I believe that most people would be bastards, to some degree or other if they thought they could get away with it. Power provides one way of getting away with it. Anonymity is almost as effective, but I haven't heard anyone claim that "Anonymity Corrupts" —GIFT is explicitly the opposite claim: anonymity releases the inner fuckwad.

In that case, why do you suppose that being put in a position of power negatively effects one's ability to see from others' perspectives, or that being put in a position of powerlessness positively affects that ability? People in a position of power or powerlessness both have the opportunity to consider others' perspectives.

Also, would you predict that in the hypothetical experiment I outlined, the people who are not induced to feel powerful would be equally likely to take the "corrupt" action when presented with the same opportunity? If it turns out that they are not, would you conclude that you were mistaken regarding whether power corrupts?

edited 15th Oct '10 2:49:53 PM by Desertopa

I don't think that "being put in a position of power negatively affects a person's inclination to try to see another viewpoint." is false. I just don't think that that experiment "proved" it.

Put another way: to say that "Power corrupts" implies that power introduces something new into the person that wasn't there before, or fundamentally changes what was there to something else. There are other things which can have the same result (corruption), but none of them are attributed the same "introduction of a whole new aspect"; that they change you. Instead, they're attributed with freeing what's already there.

Like Self Referential said, power is something that many people actively seek, and most people would accept if it was offered to them, but we also want to think that we're decent people who aren't corrupt. By attributing the corruption to the power, rather than admitting that it's part of us, we can pretend that the corruption isn't really ours.

edited 15th Oct '10 3:03:58 PM by Madrugada

I can understand the appeal of wanting to attribute corrupting influence to power, but if gaining power causes one to act in ways that benefit oneself at the expense of others outside the opportunities offered by the position of power, then I think one can meaningfully say that the power causes corruption, rather than simply providing opportunity to behave in a corrupt manner.

I'll ask again, if the hypothetical experiment I outlined turned up that result, would it convince you that power does in fact have a corrupting influence?

Thing is, power and authority are needed for society to function. And yes, they do corrupt those who wield it. That's why I'm wondering if anything could be done about it. Any way to prevent the corruption from setting.

Authority is necessary for society. Power is not.

Authority is the ability to lead others in one's area of expertise. It lends itself to voluntary interaction and positive relationships based upon mutual respect and mutual gain. It is a social force.

Power is the ability to do bad things to other people and get away with it. It is based on violence (or at least the threat of violence) against peaceful people, and it destroys positive relationships. It is inherently disrespectful, and any gain associated with it will be one-sided in favor of the power holder. It is a purely antisocial force. It adds nothing to society, and left unchecked and unchallenged, will destroy a society.

edited 15th Oct '10 8:07:53 PM by MacFall

Authority is the ability to lead others in one's area of expertise. It lends itself to voluntary interaction and positive relationships based upon mutual respect and mutual gain. It is a social force.

Power is the ability to do bad things to other people and get away with it. It is based on violence (or at least the threat of violence) against peaceful people, and it destroys positive relationships. It is inherently disrespectful, and any gain associated with it will be one-sided in favor of the power holder. It is a purely antisocial force. It adds nothing to society, and left unchecked and unchallenged, will destroy a society.

I think your definitions of power and authority are somewhat out of sync with the ones everyone else is using, including the people who conducted the studies mentioned in the OP.

Authority does not demand expertise beyond that of those under one's command. It simply means that you're in a position where others are required to do as you say, because you're in charge. It is far less often backed by threat of violence than by implicit threats such as loss of one's job.

Authority is a kind of power, power being the ability to exert one's will on one's environment and on other people.

edited 15th Oct '10 10:02:04 PM by Desertopa