As newspapers struggle to save money and staff time, I’d like to suggest “Powerful Man Does Off-Colour Thing” as a handily recyclable headline. A few weeks ago, Jeremy Hunt’s only vice seemed to be that he danced the zouk lambada with a real enthusiasm. How could this man have risked his job sending texts to News International? Barack Obama once had a gentle, thoughtful image – voted in as a man of intellectual passion and well-articulated self-doubt. Does he really spend his Tuesdays shuffling through a deck of macabre “baseball cards”, confidently picking out a weekly kill roster? And why do “straitlaced” chief executives suddenly sleep with their secretaries?
These recurring “shock” headlines have a certain endearing innocence about them, like a toddler who always hides in the same cupboard during hide-and-seek and still expects us to be surprised.
We shouldn’t be. It does seem odd that a new desk placard and a few more emails to send every day can turn someone from Tim Canterbury into David Brent. But the trouble is that power is also a feeling, and feelings affect the way people think. When we take stock of someone’s perspective on the world and make them president of the United States, we forget that we are also going to make them feel like the president of the United States. And that’s a pretty perspective-skewing emotion.
According to neuroscientists, the main psychological effect of giving someone a load of power is that it makes them less empathetic. The further they climb, the smaller and fuzzier everyone looks below.
A recent experiment illustrates the point. A Northwestern University psychologist called Adam Galinsky asked a group of participants to recall past experiences where they had felt powerful, and a second group to remember feeling powerless. Primed with these feelings, they were asked to draw the letter E on their foreheads. The “powerful” group drew the letter from their own perspective – backwards when seen by someone else. The “less powerful” group tended to draw the letter from the point of view of an observer.
Judgement call
The researchers argued that this effect came from the lens-corrupting effects of power, which makes it harder to imagine the world from someone else’s perspective. If we’re in command we don’t care how other people see the letter E. Fuck it, let them see the letter E like we see it. It’s probably better backwards anyway. Look, the English language is an organic, continually evolving entity which… what’s that Gladys? Yep, nuke ‘em. And get me another latte.
Neuroscientists have even compared gaining a corner office to a dose of orbito-frontal lobe damage, which wipes out inhibition and self-judgement. Interestingly though, our judgement of others remains very much intact. An early, similar experiment by the same team showed that more powerful people tended to judge bad behaviour (like misreporting travel expenses) as much more “morally serious”. Yet playing a high stakes dice-rolling game 10 minutes later, they were also more likely to cheat, fudging the numbers to win lottery tickets. The “serious” rules just didn’t apply to them.
So power corrupts, eh? Yes, you bet it does. Absolutely.