The paradox of power | Hacker News Reader

The paradox of power

online.wsj.com

67 pointsgrellas17 comments

This is such a one-dimensional piece of hoo-ha. I'm going to mostly skip the obvious reasons why a person with years of legal reasoning already 'on the books' might become less nuanced as they get older.

Looking in the wrong place

"Another study conducted by Mr. Keltner and Cameron Anderson, a professor at the Haas School of Business, measured "Machiavellian" tendencies, such as the willingness to spread malicious gossip, in a group of sorority sisters. It turned out that the Machiavellian sorority members were quickly identified by the group and isolated. Nobody liked them, and so they never became powerful."

This ignores, of course, what just about anyone has realized from the time people realized they were realizing things: the best devious people are able to be devious while being thought to be good. The gossip is quickly excluded because nobody likes a gossip. But beware the gossip that nobody even realizes is a gossip, who spreads their news by craft and artifice (perhaps without realizing it). They often spread gossip by rallying people to 'help' where their help isn't wanted and doesn't belong. Yet, because they're ostensibly being 'nice', it can be hard to object.

More practically in our domain: There are people who are good at noticing why things can fail. This isn't a particularly novel skill. Yet in some organizations, they're applauded from saving the group from disasters that were certainly around the corner! This is a devastatingly bad way to approach problems, and prevents progress. Yet it's easy to applaud because A) people like to be afraid; B) You only have to be right once to get to say 'I told you so' forever.

Much better is the person that can deliver. But of course, this is more risky: building new things risks mistakes, yet also can have opportunity. But note how quickly does the work of releasing several new products get ignored when one of them is a problem child.

Mini-tangent aside: You don't want to look at people who everyone thinks is devious and see if they succeed. You want to find people who are devious but hide it, and see if they succeed. My bet: they do. They just can't hide it forever.

Selection Bias

This article also fails to account for the selection bias at play. Are executives more likely to cheat, lie, or injure others? Or is word about their lying, cheating, and injurious behavior simply both more likely to be talked about and also more wide-reaching in impact? Sally in accounting cheating on her husband isn't likely to attract as much notice as Susan the CEO. And if Bob's stealing $100 in supplies a month, how does that compare to Barry stealing $100,000 as the COO?

The fact is that such corruptions are more interesting because they make for a better story, for some definition of 'better' including "fall from power" and "the powerful are like us".

(There may also be a factor at play where a person with power never gets told 'no'. I can think of celebrities where people 'latch on' for the ride, and won't ever say anything corrective or actually helpful to the person, because to do so risks the free lunch. The crash and burn can be painful.)

I'm slightly confused, but I saw your id being bored guy and sort of realised another thing people realise from the time they start realising, that talking from the top of your head is easier than getting the hard data and actually having something to say.

Sure the article has short falling, but you can not just dismiss it like that. It contained a lot of psychological studies, it was not just an opinion piece like your comment, and actually was cool headed.

I do not think the article was about devious people in any way. It was about power and the fact that power corrupts. That you might say is something we know, but the article offers details in how it corrupts. You might say those details we know also, but hey, that's mainstream scientific journalism.

Yes, it was "about" power corrupting, but it absolutely did not demonstrate it, and it certainly didn't detail how pure individuals came to be corrupted by the acquisition of power.

It can't possibly show that power corrupts. All the author does does is talk about how there are powerful, corrupt people. For instance, he writes, "This isn't just anecdotal: Surveys of organizations find that the vast majority of rude and inappropriate behaviors, such as the shouting of profanities, come from the offices of those with the most authority." Except it is anecdotal: that's what a survey is designed to show--a systematic study of anecdotes. And we already know anecdotes aren't systematic surveys. If you wanted to show that the 'vast majority of rude and inappropriate behavior' came from 'the top', you'd have to design a rubric for what constitutes rude and inappropriate behavior, record all social interactions, transcribe them and attribute them to an encoded number, send off the transcriptions to people without the ability to deduce the actors, tally rude and inappropriate behavior, and then convert back to the original actors and see where the inappropriate behavior came from.

There's literally zero evidence that supports the argument of this article, that being: "The very traits that helped leaders accumulate control in the first place all but disappear once they rise to power."

The "Machiavellian" study, for instance, says nothing about whether or not Machiavelli was right. It only says people who are perceived as being 'malicious gossips' are shunned. GROUNDBREAKING!? No. Nowhere does Machiavelli say, "The way to power is to be known as a malicious gossip."

Contrary to what seems to be increasingly popular belief, you don't need to cite studies to criticize an article like this. One can point out things like flaws in reasoning and logical fallacies, without having to cite any studies or research.

You don't need to cite a study but describing contrived and hypothetical counter-examples isn't the proper way to criticize empirical research either.

Unfortunately, this article is not empirical research. It points to empirical research to back up its claims, but I suspect the conclusions in the actual research articles aren't as clear as this summary.

"Machiavelli insisted that the leader should always go with fear. [...] That may not be the best advice."

Ummm... Just to make it clear, as anyone who has read his book knows, Machiavelli was talking Renaissance princes and the ambitious goal of unifying Italy (400 years before it was done). His argument was that, in the treacherous and volatile atmosphere of the day, love would evaporate soon, and the ruling prince might find his subjects turning against him unexpectedly - unless they feared him. It was advice meant to keep rebellions away, not to help his popularity. What exactly do college dorms and sororities have in common with this?!

The experiment with drawing the letter 'E' on their foreheads seems like a huge leap to me. Some people who don't do spatial reasoning on a daily basis might not be able to even determine which way the letter should be drawn so that others could read it. My first instinct was to draw the letter so it was backwards to other people, but it would appear correctly in a mirror - because, I think, anytime I do something to my face, I'm looking in a mirror.

I would strongly expect that for the experiment to have any validity at all, the people in the group primed with feelings of power would be selected randomly. I don't see the connection with a propensity for being selected randomly, and a lack of skill with spacial reasoning.

My point: I think I have pretty good spatial reasoning capabilities, and it took a few seconds of thinking to figure out which way I should draw the letter on my own head for other people to read it. If I had to use reasoning - that is, rational thought - then I doubt their claim that people who were subconsciously thinking of their own power would also subconsciously draw the letter so it was easier for them to read.

I'm not a psychologists (or anything related), but it seems to me that the article is based on flawed reasoning. First it presents studies that demonstrate how "people give authority to people that they genuinely like", then they wonder why "when you give people power, they basically start acting like fools."

The subtle flaw here is the assumption is that people are given power in the same democratic way as in those studies.

When we have any power to hand over directly -- and the inclination to hand it over -- we will tend to hand it over to someone we like, true. But people like the ex-CEO of Hewlett Packard didn't rise to power just because someone said "Oh, here's a likable fellow, give him more power."

Exactly; people in power, especially in large organizations, are very nearly a self-selecting group. In the military, for example, to make it to the upper levels, you have to make a conscious choice not to retire after 20 years and instead continue to play the game. The type of person who continues to work in those circumstances are the ones who do it to gain power or prestige.

That's an obvious choice in the military, but it exists in large organizations everywhere; do I work longer hours and play the office politics so I can rise to the top, or do I go home at 5?

Honestly, all these Psychological studies always seem amazingly irrelevant to me.

I'm no Psychologist, so I could be totally wrong, but I think comparing the actions of CEOs to the experiments described here done with College dorms and ranked popularity is a huge leap.

Not to mention that the experiment described with drawing an E on your forehead seemed absurd to me. It seems like the explanation for it (power going to your head) was totally ad-hoced in.

What amazes me is that this is presented as somehow novel. Quotes about power corrupting have been floating around for 100s of years. The most famous, "…absolute power corrupts absolutely", is from 1887 (see http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/288200.html), but similar quotes go back to at least 1770.

The best explanation in regards to why my boss, and everyone here's boss, is a jerk:

They attribute your failures to flaws and their own failures to circumstance or whatever life context they're in. So if they're tired or had a bad night at home, they know why they started yelling.

So basically it's basic solipsism or narcissism. They don't empathize with other people failures or mistakes and don't accept excuses for anyone but themselves.

The preceding was an anecdote.

Among the list of "improvements" that I would choose for the human cognitive architecture, very high up would be a little extra test before any thought is committed to belief or sentence is uttered aloud. Just a little addition to the mental flowchart... "is this thought a result of the fundamental attribution error? If no, proceed. If yes, rethink." [1]

We really, really need our stories and myths to teach this out of us more as children. Maybe a little rhyme or something.

[1] "actor-observer bias" to be more accurate and general, but I like the inclusion of the term "error".

We should probably also explain our existing child hood stories a little better. For example, when I heard "the boy who cried wolf" it was basically explained as "don't waste people's time". When I tell it to my kids I use it to explain credibility and how people react to it, and as an example of a logical fallacy (just because the boy was a liar doesn't mean what he says is always a lie).

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