

The paradox of power - grellas
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704407804575425561952689390.html?mod=WSJ_hps_InDepthCarousel_2

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boredguy8
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.)

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Ardit20
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.

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CodeMage
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.

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xtho
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.

~~~
scott_s
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.

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zeteo
"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?!

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scott_s
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.

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barrkel
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.

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scott_s
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.

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CodeMage
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."

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drblast
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?

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edanm
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.

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gthank
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.

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napierzaza
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.

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nooneelse
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".

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loewenskind
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).

