Power lends the power holder many benefits. Powerful people are more likely to take decisive action. In one simple experiment, it was shown that people made to feel powerful were more likely to turn off an annoying fan humming in the room. Power reduces awareness of constraints and causes people act more quickly. Powerful people also tend to think more abstractly, favoring the bigger picture over smaller consequences. Powerful people are less likely to remember the constraints to a goal. They downplay risks, and enjoy higher levels of testosterone (a dominance hormone), and lower levels of cortisol (a stress hormone).These experiments do not paint a very reassuring picture of humanity. First, they show that you can change people's behavior with very simple symbols of authority or submission; dress some subjects in lab coats and the rest in skimpy hospital gowns, and the lab coaters immediately dominate the room.
"People who are given more power in the lab, they see more choice," Magee says. "They see beyond what is objectively there, the amount of choice they have. More directions for what actions they can take. What it means to have power is to be free of the punishment that one could exert upon you for the thing you did." Which paves the way for another hallmark of the powerful--hypocrisy. Our guts are right about this one. On a survey, powerful study participants indicated that they were less tolerant of cheating than the less powerful. But then when given the opportunity to cheat and take more compensation for the experiment, the powerful caved in.
Second, they confirm every bad thing that cynics ever said about power. Make people feel powerful, and they start to think both that the rules don't apply to them and that they deserve whatever they can take.
The phenomena you describe lead to the part of our culture that encourages rhetorical prophylactics that blunt one's own power: thus folks are inclined to say, lest they be punished for being too self-important, that a given question is a mystery on which everyone is entitled to their opinion, etc. And then you give one person in the room a symbol of power--say, a book by a famous French Assyriologist--and bam! . . .
ReplyDeletegood comment.
ReplyDeleteTouché.
ReplyDeleteIn a serious vein, I would say your post about the number 13 shows the ambiguity of power rather than simply power's badness. Yes, you've exempted yourself from the rule of decorous politeness. But your power comes not only from your possession of a symbol, but from the energy of your understandable indignation at the excessive reliance on the rhetoric of "Whatever. Everyone has his own opinion" in our society. That rhetoric is, of course, its own tool of power, whose use is to silence engagement, inquiry and conversation, especially the intellectual or argumentative sort that "normal" people and unwilling students don't want to have to hear. A moderate amount of that rhetoric shows a becoming modesty and consideration, but it can rapidly become the polite equivalent of "Do we have to know this for the exam? If not, can we move on?"
ReplyDeleteMy serious response to this issue is to muse that science is of its nature anti-democratic; there is a right answer, majority opinion is irrelevant, and the votes of experts count more than the votes of outsiders. I remember one of Edmund Morgan's stories about American populism in the late 1700s: when some Connecticut legislators proposed giving state licenses to doctors, a counter-proposal was offered that certified doctors should be elected annually by the vote of the people in each county.
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