Power Corrupts ... the Brain

Alex


Photo: Minerva Studio/Shutterstock

"Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely." We're sure you've heard the saying, attributed to English historian Lord Acton, before, and chances are, you've seen it firsthand in a friend who is a bit less friendly after getting a bit of fame or power. But why is that?

Neuroscientist Sukhvinder Obhi and his colleagues at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada, may have the answer: power fundamentally changes a person's brain. In their study, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, the researchers put participants in the mindset of either being powerful or powerless, then they monitored the mirror system, the part of their brains linked with empathy.

It turns out, feeling powerless boosted the mirror system — people empathized highly. But, Obhi says, "when people were feeling powerful, the signal wasn't very high at all."

So when people felt power, they really did have more trouble getting inside another person's head.

"What we're finding is power diminishes all varieties of empathy," says Dacher Keltner, a social psychologist at University of California, Berkeley ...

Full story by Chris Benderev over at NPR.


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Before the red shirt got attention with the way he took this kind of picture, I attempted this myself. It took an hour or so for me to get my perfect shot - by chinning the camera button on the side of my phone. I had to press through the skin into the underside of chin, into my jawbone, to click the button. It was my way of saying "I can do it with what I got." I feel that the very manner in which a photo is constructed can be picked up by the person deciphering the image. Every angle, every line speaks. They would understand how important it was to me. In that very brief moment they would scan it with their eyes and feel it in their gut.
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