One day, Dacher Keltner was nearly run over by a black Mercedes in the street. It can happen to anyone, but Keltner is at the University of California at Berkeley and one of the foremost researchers on the psychological effects of power. Why do things like this always happen to expensive cars and not barrels, he wondered. Is that really the case, and if so, why?
Keltner devised an experiment. Two fellow researchers took a concealed position along a road, at a zebra crossing. One noted what kind of car was approaching, the other crossed the zebra crossing. But in such a way that the approaching car had to either stop or make a risky evasive maneuver in order to continue. The results were remarkable. All the cheap cars stopped neatly in front of the zebra crossing. With the more expensive cars, half of the drivers did not. Keltner was aware that these kinds of experiments often turn out not to be reproducible, so he arranged for other institutes to perform the same experiment. That produced the same result.
Not the nicest
The conclusion fitted seamlessly with what he had already learned from other experiments: the more powerful people feel, the less they care about what others think about them. Whoever gains power over others tends to ignore traffic rules, to lie, to cheat, to cheat. Power corrupts. It makes monsters of us. But Keltner also knows that there is more to it. Power attracts certain people. It’s not the nicest people that float to the surface.
The idea that every person becomes a monster as soon as he gains power over others dates back to the early 1960s. Then Nazi Adolf Eichmann, arrested in Argentina, was on trial in Jerusalem for his part in the Holocaust. Eichmann pretended to be a simple civil servant who had only followed orders. That was a blatant lie, but the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who partly attended the trial, saw in the measly suspect ‘the banality of evil’. Evil does not require driven demons or devils, everyone can do their part.
That troubling idea was reinforced two years later by the experiments of Stanley Milgram, in which subjects were allegedly prepared to give others severe electric shocks on the advice of a scientist, and later again by the Stanford Prison Experiment, which suggested that subjects could turn each other on. to perpetrate atrocities on so-called prisoners. The last experiment in particular was overloaded with criticism (ethical, but also methodological) but a possible repetition was soon impossible. The investigation into power came to a halt in one fell swoop.
Until Keltner picked up the thread again about twenty years ago. He mainly wondered what kind of people aspire to power and thus end up in positions of power – and which ones don’t. The same question is central to Power by British professor of international politics Brian Klaas. Klaas does not do any experiments himself. He prefers to visit managers, criminals, dictators (now good old people), their victims and their children. The latter to ask how their father treated them and whether they might have inherited his dictatorial tendencies. (Not really.) In addition, we learn how to recognize psychopaths in the workplace (these are often very efficient risers), we learn all about drug use by dominant bull monkeys and about the parking behavior of UN diplomats in New York.
Prius drivers
With regard to the latter: when diplomats could leave their cars everywhere with impunity, diplomats from the Middle East in particular were notorious illegal parkers. Norwegian or Swedish diplomats, on the other hand, were very good. Was it the national character, or does such a position offer career opportunities to the wrong people in some countries? In any case, when the New York police decided to prosecute, or at least threatened to prosecute those illegal parkers, the Lebanese and Saudis became just as good as the Norwegians in no time.
This brings us to Klaas’ main conclusion: watch the boss. We can organize application and selection procedures in such a way that the chance is minimal that egocentric power-hungry people will get through, but power corrupts. Klaas spoke with a number of folk heroes who gained power thanks to their clean hands, but then transformed into corrupt rulers.
After the publication of his car research, Keltner received an angry letter from a Prius driver. His car was expensive, that’s true, but he bought it for environmental reasons. To save this world. He wasn’t a bastard. According to the letter writer, a further analysis of the figures would show that Prius drivers do stop neatly for the zebra crossing. Keltner appreciated that hypothesis and ran the data through the computer again. “The Prius drivers,” he told Klaus, “turned out to be the worst of all.”
Brian Klaas: Power† New Amsterdam; 302 pages; €25.99.
