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