‘Absolutely no evidence’ that power leads to brain damage

power

An Atlantic article from July 2017 has been widely discussed on Twitter over the past few days. It’s called Power Causes Brain Damage.

The piece, by Jerry Useem, centers around research on ‘power priming‘. In power priming experiments, participants (usually students) perform a task which is supposed to create a, perhaps unconscious, ‘feeling of power’.

Power-primed people, according to several studies, are prone to antisocial and egocentric behavior. Subjects under the influence of power, [researcher Dacher Keltner] found in studies spanning two decades, acted as if they had suffered a traumatic brain injury – becoming more impulsive, less risk-aware, and, crucially, less adept at seeing things from other people’s point of view.

There is absolutely no evidence that power causes brain damage – all of the studies discussed in the article are about behavioral changes lasting minutes or an hour or so at most. Sure, we can speculate that these power-priming effects might become chronic in people with long-term power.

This aside, I’m not sure these power priming studies tell us much about the real world. Power priming is a psychology lab tool which is all about the feeling of power. In a lab context, that’s fine, but in the real world, the behavior of the powerful is influenced by something much harder to study in the lab: the reality of power.

Read full, original post: Power Doesn’t Cause Brain Damage

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