We’ve all heard the expression, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The common wisdom is that the more power a person accumulates, the more they feel justified in their actions and motivations. “I can do what I want, because after all, why else would I have this kind of power?”
But can research show a cause-and-effect relationship? Can an experiment demonstrate the slippery moral slope that people with power have also increases their moral hypocrisy (e.g., a failure to follow one’s own expressed moral rules and principles)?
Psychology to the rescue! Indeed it can. In a series of five experiments by Lammers et al. (2010), Dutch researchers tested the following hypothesis on college students…
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What is “powerful”?
I mean, does “powerful” mean being in a “position of power” (over other people) or does it mean having a quiet internal power? I think the two are often confused by the terminology.
This is very interesting research – thank you for writing about it. We definitely need to understand the nuts-and-bolts of just how power corrupts. Or is it those that are more easily corruptible that tend to pursue power?…but a random sampling of Dutch students would correct for that possibility I would think.
That is one of the things that interested me in your article: we’re all susceptible to this corrupting influence. It also made me wonder how the same corrupting dynamic may be happening in subtle ways in my own life when I’m in a position of greater responsibility or power.
It is too bad that access to the article itself is so expensive (30 bucks!) because I’d be interested in seeing how the researches defined power, how they set up the experiments.
Nick Parsons, LMFT
This is interesting but I can’t tell from the info here if the experiment used people already deemed to be in recogised positions of power or if the subjects were given power in the experiment.
The later might be better because it would rule out the sorts of personality types who go after power positions in the first place, narcissists are overly focused on their own needs for instance, this helps them to get into power (at least for a while) and I expect they are shocking hypocrits, I’d guess obsessive compulsive personality disorder is much the same.
Dominance heirachies are probably part of our crude primate genes, I often think this is the real reason there are power positions everywhere, not because power is useful, rational or practical.
Still I hoping I’m wrong.
I think it is more like gained authority is allowing corruption, be that democraticaly elected oficial or awarded positions. Power itself when naturally one has it, would not necessarily cause corruption. However I too doubt conclusiveness of the resut about the homegenous nature of one isolated group by location or age group revealing anything but certain tendencies of that group.