Compelling evidence exists that power corrupts. When people are placed in powerful positions, they tend to be more oblivious to what others think, more likely to pursue the satisfaction of their own appetites, poorer judges of other people’s reactions, more likely to hold stereotypes, be overly optimistic and more likely to take risks.
It was the tendency to be poorer judges of other people’s reactions that led Galinsky, Magee, Inesi & Gruenfeld (2006) in their paper, Power and Perspectives Not Taken, to examine if possessing power itself serves as an impediment to understanding the perspectives of others.
To study this relationship, Galinsky and colleagues used a unique method in which the participants were told to draw the letter E on their forehead. If the subject wrote the E in a self-oriented direction, backward to others, this indicated a lack of perspective-taking. On the other hand, when the E was written legible to others, this indicated that the person had thought about how others might perceive the letter.
The results showed that those who had previously been randomly assigned to a high power group were almost three times more likely to draw a self-oriented E than those who were assigned to the low power condition.
This corroborates other studies that show when people have power, they are more likely to egocentrically focus on themselves. It is not the person, but the position that generates the power. Putting the wrong type of person in power can have disastrous effects, as history tells us. If it was not for Hitler and the Second World War, Dr Josef Mengele may have turned out to be slightly sadistic General Practitioner, rather than the brutal murderer that he was.
“There are good components to power’s effects on a person, in that it helps lead people to action, but sometimes these actions are misguided because the powerful have not taken other perspectives into account,” Galinsky said. “It’s like having a gas pedal without a good steering wheel.”
While Galinsky’s work was conducted in a laboratory with students, future research could look into real work and political situations where people both have power and are good at seeing other points of view.
Reference:
Galinsky, A. D., Magee, J.C., Inesi, M.E. & Gruenfeld, D.H. (2006). Power and Perspectives Not Taken. Psychological Science, 17, 1068-1074.
