How Power Corrupts
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Summary
In this episode of the Art of Manliness podcast, Brett McKay sits down with political scientist and author Brian Klass to discuss why people who possess the so-called dark triad of traits are more likely to seek positions of power, how the framing around those positions can either amplify or alter the self-selection effect, and what a tyrannical homeowners association president and a psychopathic school janitor show us about these dynamics.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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By way of an answer, you probably think of that famous quote from Lord Acton,
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power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
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But my guest today, Brian Klass, would say that's only one part of what leads to corrupt
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The other being that people who are already corrupt are more likely to seek power in the
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Brian argues that if we ever hope to develop better systems from our national governments
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to our office hierarchies, we have to work on both prongs of this dynamic, not only preventing
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people who gain power from going bad, but encouraging good people to seek power as well.
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Brian is the author of Corruptible, Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us.
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Today on the show, he and I discuss how people who possess the so-called dark triad of traits
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are more attracted to positions of power, how the framing around those positions can either
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amplify or alter the self-selection effect, and what a tyrannical homeowners association
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president and a psychopathic school janitor show us about these dynamics.
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We also discuss why power does indeed corrupt people and can in fact change their very brain
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Brian explains the importance of accountability and keeping a system clean, and how you can
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serve in positions of power without being corrupted yourself.
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After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash power corrupts.
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So you have made a career for yourself interviewing despots, cult leaders, corrupt CEOs, torturers,
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How did that happen when you were 12, where you're like, I want to research human depravity?
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So I got interested in politics from a young age because my mom ran for the local school
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board, which I'm sure I'll talk about later on in the interview.
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But what ended up happening was I graduated from undergrad.
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I worked on a political campaign in my home state of Minnesota.
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Of course, I actually was a bartender before that in New Zealand for a little bit.
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I started trying to find my way in life and decided to study broken systems because I thought,
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you know, naively, this is more than a decade ago, I thought, oh, U.S. politics, it sort
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So I'll try to study somewhere that's totally, totally broken.
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And I went off and started doing fieldwork as part of grad school in sub-Saharan Africa,
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Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, et cetera, and found that the most interesting
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thing to do is to gravitate towards interviewing some of the worst people in the world.
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And that's what I ended up doing for the last 10 years and sort of trying to figure out what
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makes people tick in this sort of depraved world with the hopes that we can eventually
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stop them from inflicting so much harm on the world.
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And what you've done in your recent book, Corruptible, Who Gets Power and How It Changes
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After interviewing all these corrupt people, figure out this question I think people have
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is, does power corrupt us or do corrupt people gain power?
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Before we get to your findings, what do you think are some of the common ideas that people
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generally have about power and who ends up with it?
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And when did you start having a hunch that maybe some of our assumptions about power's corrupting
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Yeah, I mean, the most famous thing, and this is something that, you know, to this day when
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I talk about the fact that I'm a political scientist or that I study power, the standard
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response people say to me is, oh, yes, I know, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts,
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It's the standard thing that you sort of trot out as a witty quote when you're dealing with
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There's an entire chapter of the book that talks about why power corrupts, how it corrupts,
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how it changes our brain chemistry, our psychology, et cetera.
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But what occurred to me the more that I started to think about this was that, you know,
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we focus on the powerful and we don't focus on the people who never seek power.
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So one of the things that was immediately obvious to me when I was interviewing, you
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know, say a war criminal or a former dictator or, you know, someone who had wielded power
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in a highly unjust way is that they're not a normal cross-section of the population.
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And so what I thought was missing from this conversation is what about the people who never
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And also what's different about people who are really good at getting power?
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Because every time that we focus our attention on the sort of tip of the iceberg, the people
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who actually have power, we're ignoring a much bigger problem, which is that certain kinds
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of people are drawn to power in the first place.
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So the book is trying to sort of do this chicken or egg question, which is, you know, do corruptible
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But the real problem is that you have to accurately diagnose each situation according to actually
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what's happening because otherwise the remedy is totally different, right?
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In other words, like if an awful person gets power and hasn't been changed by the power
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itself, then there's a different solution to that problem than if power has turned them
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So even though both effects are real, figuring out which one is operating in which context
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is absolutely crucial to making the world a better place.
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So before we get to this chicken and egg problem, right?
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I think it helps to understand first why humans have a tendency to form societies where
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there's either one person or a small group of people who have power over a large group
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Going back to through human history, was this something our hunter-gatherer ancestors did?
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So the sort of standard narrative around hunter-gatherers in anthropology and evolutionary biology goes
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something like this, that for almost all of human history, we lived in small bands of around
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80 people and societies were structured in a way that was ruthlessly egalitarian.
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I say ruthlessly because the system was designed to basically cut down anyone to size who tried
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And this was made possible by the fact that we lived in small groups.
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Now, there are some wrinkles in this sort of simplistic narrative that have been emerging
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There's some evidence that there was a little bit more hierarchy than we expected in the
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But this is sort of the general idea of what most of the anthropology evidence suggests.
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And we know this from a few different forms of evidence, including the fact that like burials,
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for example, for most of human history, don't show any sort of elevated status for individuals.
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Now, since the sort of period, you know, 10 to 15,000 years ago, where a lot of this changed,
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there's a few different hypotheses about why power started to get amassed in individuals.
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And I call them the war and the peas hypothesis, war and peas.
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And the war hypothesis is basically that as conquest started to take place, it became advantageous
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So if you had more soldiers, you're going to win.
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And as it became better to have bigger societies, you started to sort of conquer other bands and
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And all of a sudden, you've got 5,000 people instead of 80, you need some sort of hierarchy.
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And it basically says, when the agricultural revolution happened, you no longer have to
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move around to get your food, you can sort of set up shop in a city.
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And that allows much larger groups of people to sort of put down roots, quite literally.
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And as a result of that, you end up with larger cities.
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And with larger cities comes inevitably the rise of hierarchy.
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But the really big point here, I think, is that the way that we experience the world
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with bosses above bosses above bosses, everything in society status driven, is extremely unusual
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And I think that's something that's worth keeping in mind because it doesn't necessarily
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And of course, when it comes to abusive power holders, it absolutely doesn't have to be this
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We can make a better system that produces better outcomes, perhaps with less hierarchy
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or perhaps just with hierarchy that functions better.
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You pointed out that there are advantages of hierarchy because it allows you to get more
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If responsibility is diffused amongst the group, you're on the issues of like freeloader problem,
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But if there's a hierarchy, you can get a lot more done.
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And the trick is, okay, if you're going to have a hierarchy, how can you organize in a way
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Yeah, I mean, there's a guy named Peter Turchin who I interviewed for the book.
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He's one of these sort of genius types, really impressive guy who wrote this book called Ultra
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And one of the quotes he had that stuck with me was he says, we're not ants.
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We don't have some pheromone system to regulate our behavior.
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So in order to organize human society, we probably eventually do need hierarchy.
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It's probably unrealistic to imagine some sort of egalitarian collective involving 192 countries
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So the more pressing question is, does hierarchy always have to come with abuse?
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And that's why I wrote this book, because I think there's a lot of ways that we can make
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seeking power something that's oriented towards service and also ending up with systems in
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which those people who do abuse their power get thrust out of power rather than promoted.
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So it's all about sort of tinkering with the system and thinking of our world as this sort
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of grand experiment where instead of being on autopilot, which I think we have been for
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quite a long time and how we sort of deal with power in society, we start to actually think
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about how would we engineer a system that's actually going to produce better leaders and
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And I don't think that conversation tends to exist.
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It goes back to your question about sort of what people's attitudes are towards power.
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I mean, the thing is, and this is something that I think like political scientists and
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business psychologists, all sorts of people should be thinking much more about is like
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pretty much everybody I talk to is unhappy with the powerful class in society.
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Like I've never really had a situation where I've talked about my research and they're
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I mean, no one says that that should be a wake-up call that we just shouldn't keep
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doing the same thing over and over and hope that it turns out better.
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And something you point out in the book, you do a good job, is that these gripes occur
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not only on the macro level, not only on the nation state level, but you see these gripes
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occur within businesses, departments in businesses, within homeowners associations, within church
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You see people griping about the people in charge.
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Yeah, I mean, this is a, it's a universal problem and it's not just, you know, even
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though my research began in rooms with, you know, former dictators and so on, and people
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who were at the highest echelons, generals in authoritarian societies and all that, what
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occurred to me in writing this was that the more I would tell people who had, you know,
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lives back home in the United States or in Britain where I live now about my experiences
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and I describe these encounters, they would say that personality that you're describing
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sounds just like the guy who was, you know, the megalomaniac sports coach or the guy who
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as, as you say, runs my homeowners association.
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And it sort of gave me a working hypothesis for the book, right?
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That there's like, there's something about power that's worth studying, not just about
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these sort of extremely high echelons that we tend to think of and that make headlines
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that actually there's a sort of syndrome around power that operates even on the small
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I mean, I, I did try to find people and I describe, you know, a psychopathic janitor in
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I said, I describe a megalomaniac homeowners association who's obsessed with palm trees being
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And the, the gravel in the area being not imported from out of state.
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I mean, we all sort of have in our mind's eye, somebody like this in our life.
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Like everybody I've talked to about with this book, when I describe my work, they always
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You know, it's, it's this person I used to have to deal with and thank God, you know,
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I never have to deal with that person again because I've just cut my losses.
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And I think, I don't think I'm, I'm not naive enough to say we can eliminate those sort of
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It's just that we can curtail how often we encounter them.
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And I think that, you know, even if we made this 20% better, the scale of human suffering
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and frustration that it would reduce would be absolutely enormous and transformative.
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So I think it's definitely worth, worth doing, even if we can only curb the problem rather
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So let's dig in more to like why it seems like just bad people end up in power.
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And the first prong of this idea is that power or positions of authority attract a certain
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So what does your research say about the type of person that's attracted to positions of
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So I think there's a, there's a few things to say here.
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First off, you know, when we describe someone who's power hungry, it's always a bad thing,
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but power hungry by definition is what you're describing when you're saying who is seeking power in
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a competitive environment, somebody who's ambitious and power hungry is more likely to throw their
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hat in the ring to apply for a job, a promotion to become a dictator.
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And I think, you know, it's, it's really easy to understand the sort of selection bias without
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I mean, you think about if you go to a high school basketball tryout, you would be completely
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baffled if the average student at that high school basketball tryout was of average medium
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There's a self-selection effect that tall kids go towards basketball and the same thing
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You have certain traits that self-select towards these positions more than others.
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One of them is obviously those people who are power hungry, but there's also what I describe
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in the book is what's called the dark triad, which is this sort of destructive chemical
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cocktail of personality traits of Machiavellianism, sort of the ends justifies the means types
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people, highly strategic thinkers, and then second, secondly, narcissists and thirdly, psychopathy
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And those three traits in common form something called the dark triad.
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And those people are obsessed with power and they're very, very good at getting it.
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So, you know, that's on the extreme end, right?
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These are the people who are disproportionately likely to seek power, get it, and then wield
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There's also just something about the systems that we inhabit that amplify the self-selection
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So, you know, when you think about those systems that involve public service and they're quite
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clearly are designed to serve the public, like if you're a librarian, you don't have people
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who are power hungry librarians because everybody knows that the job is not about sort of being
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And so the way you portray positions of power, I think is really, really important.
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And there's a section of the book I talk about this with in terms of policing that I think
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illustrates the point best of all, and it's basically looking at how recruitment for policing
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And I found some quite different examples of this internationally.
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So in the U.S., there is an ad that was put up on the Doraville, Georgia Police Department
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website, now taken down, that shows the Punisher logo first, right?
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A vigilante, a guy who basically captures criminals and then tortures them, and then shows these
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guys in military fatigues in a literal tank screaming into view.
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With death metal on screen, the sort of hatch opens, they throw out a smoke grenade, they've
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got assault weapons, and then the Punisher logo comes back on screen.
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And you sort of think, you know, like, what kind of person says that's exactly what job
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Well, I mean, you know, like militaristic people who like the idea of sort of being viewed as
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soldiers in an occupying army, not public service police officers.
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And in New Zealand, they recognized this self-selection problem and deliberately designed advertising
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Not because they didn't want people with military experience, they just figured they're going
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But because they thought, you know, we can counteract some of this self-selection by making policing
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So they designed this recruitment scheme with videos called, Do You Care Enough to Be a Cop?
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And in one set of videos, there's a hungry boy walking around a city in New Zealand with
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hidden cameras around to see who stops to help him.
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And the implication is, if you're one of the people who would stop to help this boy, you
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And lo and behold, you know, what happened was quite predictable.
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The diversity in terms of the people who applied for the police expanded dramatically.
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The relationship between the police and various communities improved significantly and levels
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It's like if you set up a system of power to appearing to be oriented towards service, people
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who are oriented towards service are going to apply for it.
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And I think, unfortunately, in a lot of the modern world, the trappings of power, the
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status symbols, the sort of fame, all these things, they put those self-selection effects
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I described earlier on steroids and make sure that the people who are power-hungry are far
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more likely to self-select into those positions of power in the first place.
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And so, you know, to me, the thing that we get wrong about power that we really have to
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think about is what I said at the beginning of this idea of just focusing on the tip of the
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If we only analyze who the powerful people are and how they behave, and we don't think about
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the people who don't end up trying to become more powerful in our societies, we're missing
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Because the problem isn't to make bad people behave better.
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It's to make good people want to seek power in the first place.
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And I think, you know, the thing that really alarms me in modern society is that becoming
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I mean, you know, think about running for political office.
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Like most people listening to this would never in a million years consider running for office
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because they're like, I don't want to destroy my life.
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I don't want to constantly have to raise money.
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I don't want to have to pretend that I believe things that I don't believe.
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And all of those things, which now have become, you know, part and parcel of being a modern
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politician, they're going to repel exactly the kind of person that we want to be a modern
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And all the people who love the power, the money, the fame, and don't really care about
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having to ask for money or pretend that they believe stuff they don't, those people are
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going to, you know, make a beeline to run for office.
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And so, you know, my big worry about this is that we've constructed a society in which
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And it goes back to what I was talking about with the school board member mom that I have.
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She used to be a school board member and she sort of inspired me to, to get
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I mean, even today, like you see videos of school board members who are getting death
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threats, who are getting their, their children sometimes get like harassed outside of schools.
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And it didn't used to happen, uh, in the 1990s when I was growing up and there was, you know,
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the sort of the big dramas in the, in the school board locally were, you know, about union
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pay disputes or, you know, some parents who's upset that evolution is being taught in school,
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So, so I think, I think we also have to think really carefully about how we can make power
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attractive to the kinds of people who currently think it would be a terrible burden that they
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Well, yeah, you can see this again on a micro level.
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I want to talk about this homeowner association guy being a homeowner association president
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Cause you're just basically, you're dealing with neighbors snipping at each other and
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like, well, this guy did this with his, his fence.
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And this guy is putting his garbage cans out at the wrong time.
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And he's got his RV out and like that's, and then you don't really get thanked for
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And so you have people who's like, I don't want to be homeowners association president.
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And so it's going to attract people with these dark triad personalities who are power hungry,
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And this happened, this homeowner association, Arizona, tell us about this guy.
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Cause it just sounds, everyone loves, loves to complain about their HOA.
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So, you know, I, I talked to a guy who I had to change all the names for, you know,
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for legal reasons in this, but I talked to this guy who went through the saga from hell
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And it's worse though, than just being thankless.
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It's actually like actively bad because you have to police your neighbors on things that
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Like when they put their trash bins out and like how they're mowing their grass and all
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this type of stuff, which attracts a certain type of control freak.
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So, so in this specific example, it's a homeowners association in Arizona, you know, reasonably
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small community, nobody really wants to do the job.
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And all of a sudden this guy just emerges out of the woodwork and is like really, really
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excited to do the job, which is like the alarm bell should be going off at this point.
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And he starts basically consolidating power, purging the homeowners association and all
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the other people are like, yeah, like we don't really want to be here anyway.
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So if you want to like replace us, that'd be great.
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But you know, unfortunately for them, the people he replaced him with were like his cronies
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who were like subservient to him, never challenging his power.
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And he started to target these individuals by name in various newsletters.
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And I've read like dozens of these newsletters that they were sent to me so I could verify
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I mean, it's, it's all these like all caps things insinuating.
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There's some like plot out to like not trim their palm fronds to sufficient code and so
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And then when, when these people start to stand up to him and say, we're going to try to
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boot you out of the HOA because you've become this power hungry tyrant, he develops all these
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new rules that begin to target them specifically, you know, going after the kinds of gravel they
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have in their yard, a rock at one point gets thrown through their window and they suspect
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And what's been interesting in writing the book is, is, you know, I, I found this, this
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story and talked to this person and thought, you know, this is quite a bizarre situation.
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It's actually the thing that I've gotten the most emails about, I would say, since the
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book came out is like these people unloading their HOA stories on me.
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And I'm like, you know, I, I, it's not like my professional job to like be an HOA chronicler.
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It's just like part of a book I wrote about power, but these people are venting because they're
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like, finally someone has captured the fact that like we have neighborhood tyrants who
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And I think this is an under scrutinized world because, um, they actually control a lot of
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I mean, the actual number of amount of assets controlled by HOAs is mind boggling.
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I think the number is something like the equivalent of the state of Florida's tax revenue.
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So you're talking about a lot of really power hungry, busybodies controlling a lot of money.
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Now, if you're, if there are any HOA presidents out there listening to this, I'm not saying
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It's more that there's a disproportionate selection effect.
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Anytime that you have a job that is actively policing people on the most trivial stuff, unpaid
00:23:44.200
and voluntary, and the self-selection effect I think tends to go on steroids in those environments.
00:23:49.820
And that's why I think, uh, modestly as a proposal, I might suggest if you want better people
00:23:54.960
in HOAs, uh, you might want to pay them a little bit.
00:23:57.980
So at least you're not just getting the person who gets off on the power of policing their
00:24:03.140
We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.
00:24:09.520
Well, another trait of people who are power hungry is psychopathy.
00:24:13.880
And you saw this again, this is like a really small scale.
00:24:16.840
This is this janitor who basically became Tony Soprano in the school district.
00:24:23.720
Like how was he able to accumulate so much power in the school district?
00:24:29.100
So this guy's name is Steve Rauchy and I don't have to change his name because he's been convicted
00:24:34.480
So Steve Rauchy was someone who perhaps had modest ambitions by most people's standards.
00:24:40.820
He was a janitor at the Schenectady New York state high school, and he wanted to be a sort
00:24:47.020
of kingpin in the school district maintenance office.
00:24:50.060
So he systematically set about to achieve this through incredibly Machiavellian scheming.
00:24:56.100
One of my favorite stories, and you know, there's, I went through so many court files and so on
00:25:00.880
in researching this bit of the book is going inside the mind of a psychopath is a very odd
00:25:05.560
But one of the plots he hatched in the sort of early days of consolidating power was that
00:25:11.960
the school district wanted to save money by reducing its energy costs.
00:25:17.460
So they appointed an energy czar, so to speak, whose job was basically to reduce the school's
00:25:23.540
And this guy who's put in charge of it just sort of, you know, it's the standard story.
00:25:26.600
Like, you know, the district asks you to do this.
00:25:30.300
And you just sort of say, yeah, okay, I'll do it.
00:25:31.900
And so Steve Rauchy sort of spotted an opportunity.
00:25:35.120
He said, look, you know, I know that you don't really understand the software that's been
00:25:40.500
presented to you to like manage the school district's energy supply.
00:25:43.980
I can just sort of manage it for you and you can take the credit.
00:25:47.080
Now, this guy accepts because he's sort of overwhelmed by the sort of software and doesn't
00:25:53.800
Steve Rauchy takes control of the software and starts manipulating it.
00:25:57.260
He starts turning on the stadium lights on public holidays.
00:26:00.940
He starts increasing the amount of time that the heating is on and that the lights are
00:26:05.820
on on weekends just to try to ramp up the energy bill, basically.
00:26:11.920
The guy who was appointed energy czar is relieved of that position because the energy usage has
00:26:20.040
And so Rauchy is then made into the energy czar for the district.
00:26:23.140
And he operated like this throughout his whole time in his pursuit of power.
00:26:27.540
I mean, he became a senior official in the union and ultimately started making quite a
00:26:35.320
But he also did this weird stuff where like when people would cross him, he would make
00:26:41.180
examples of them and then make everybody else around him like observe the fact that he had
00:26:46.180
So at one point he believes that he knows someone who has whistleblown on him, that he'd
00:26:51.560
been sort of behaving like a tyrant in the district maintenance office and needed to
00:26:57.020
So all of a sudden, these people's homes the next morning has the word rat spray painted
00:27:04.960
And Rauchy, you know, doesn't admit to it, but basically forces his employees on the clock
00:27:11.160
to make a pilgrimage in school district vehicles to like observe that these people have gotten
00:27:17.520
And, you know, I mean, there's, there's also stuff about his personality where like he says
00:27:22.420
stuff in various recordings that were then turned over to the court, their wiretaps and
00:27:26.160
so on, where he, uh, he talked about, you know, I wish I could have had a Steve so that
00:27:32.120
I, you know, I wish I could have had a twin so that I could have had a Steve in my life
00:27:35.260
thinking that like, he was really sad that he didn't have himself to turn to because
00:27:41.960
Anyway, the reason he ends up in prison is because he starts going over the top with his
00:27:47.660
He places explosives on the car of a colleague.
00:27:50.240
He has explosives in his office in the school district, you know, itself and has night vision
00:27:55.620
goggles in his office as well, which is quite an unusual thing for, uh, you know, a sort
00:28:00.160
of maintenance official at a public high school to have.
00:28:02.720
The reason I use him in this story though, is because what's really interesting about psychopaths
00:28:08.640
is that Rauchy is an example of an undisciplined non-functional psychopath, which is to say
00:28:15.740
when he needed to turn down these traits, he couldn't, it was impossible for him, but
00:28:21.800
for a lot of functional psychopaths as they're called, they can turn them down at times when
00:28:27.480
And this is something where, you know, the, the sort of all the psychopath researchers I
00:28:31.400
spoke to said that superficial charm is part of the, the psychopath modus operandi and that
00:28:37.640
the functional psychopaths can switch on their empathy when they need to, they can sort of
00:28:43.080
blend in when empathy or being chameleon-like in a certain situation is advantageous.
00:28:48.740
And those people, the functional psychopaths, the point they all make is those are the people
00:28:54.800
Uh, not, not universally, obviously there's still a small percentage of the overall pool,
00:28:59.420
but the best research that I've read places, the rate of psychopaths in leadership positions
00:29:06.080
between four times and 100 times higher than the general public, uh, depending on how you
00:29:11.740
define a psychopath and depending on which, uh, research paper you read, but it's, it's
00:29:16.700
They're definitely overrepresented in the halls of power.
00:29:20.740
So there's a certain type of person attracted to power, narcissistic, Machiavellian, psychopathic.
00:29:27.760
They, they've, they've got superficial charm and they're able to manipulate people and
00:29:35.700
And you think, well, that's a terrible, like, why do we even let these people get into positions
00:29:40.620
But then you highlight research saying like, well, actually followers, people who are
00:29:43.820
subordinates actually like those kinds of people and put those people in the power.
00:29:49.440
Why is it that we're attracted to people with these traits, but at the same time repulsed by
00:29:54.980
I mean, there's, there's, there's a few things that are, are worth mentioning here.
00:29:58.600
I mean, one of them is how narcissists, for example, make more money.
00:30:04.220
And, and this is, this has been shown in lots of research.
00:30:07.680
One of the reasons for that is because in, in sort of modest levels, medium levels, I should
00:30:12.360
say, narcissism can be advantageous for getting people to like you because part of being a narcissist
00:30:17.860
is an obsession with how other people perceive you.
00:30:21.140
And when you really care about that sort of perception management, it may be good for,
00:30:30.500
I mean, there, there are things about narcissists that are highly undesirable and it's not a
00:30:34.880
good strategy in general, but perhaps in the workplace in modest doses, it might be, you
00:30:40.140
And this helps explain why sometimes managers, politicians, et cetera, are so narcissistic
00:30:49.340
Now, I also think it's worth pointing out a lot of our leadership selection is non-rational.
00:30:56.340
And the reason that matters is because we like to think that we're making, you know, sort
00:31:00.840
of evidence-based rational assessments when we decide who to cast a ballot for or who we
00:31:08.500
But lots of scientific evidence counteracts that notion.
00:31:12.640
So the best example of this and the one that just sort of, it blew my mind when I read this,
00:31:18.060
It's a very solid finding published in, I forget if it was in science or nature, but
00:31:22.140
one of the top two scientific journals in the world.
00:31:25.060
What the researchers did is they showed children a series of faces, no other information, just
00:31:31.920
And they said, who do you want to be in charge of your ship in this computer simulation?
00:31:37.540
So all you see is two pictures of human faces and nothing else.
00:31:42.000
What the kids didn't know was that the two faces weren't random.
00:31:45.180
One of them was the winner of a French parliamentary election in a given district.
00:31:48.960
And the other face they saw was the runner up in that same district.
00:31:53.260
And overwhelmingly, the overwhelming majority of the time, the kids picked the winner to
00:32:00.520
And when they did this with adults, they got a similar result, which, you know, all it
00:32:04.760
says is that there's something about face that conveys leader to us.
00:32:09.480
And if that's the case, you know, that really causes us to sort of pause for a second and
00:32:15.560
say, wait a minute, if you can accurately predict the winner of an election based on faces alone,
00:32:20.820
then we have a real cognitive bias around leadership that we need to understand better because otherwise
00:32:26.640
we end up making stupid decisions based on superficial characteristics.
00:32:30.120
And I think the more that I read about this, you know, sort of realm of research in psychology
00:32:35.800
and evolutionary anthropology and so on, the more that it became clear to me that this
00:32:40.240
myth of rational leadership selection is just, it's just a myth.
00:32:45.740
And there are, there are some things that are rational and that are sort of reasoned in
00:32:49.460
terms of how we select our leaders, but a significant chunk of it is down to intuition and other
00:32:54.680
things that are not rooted in sort of a rational assessment.
00:32:58.000
So, uh, we've discussed, okay, there's a certain type of person attracted to power, oftentimes
00:33:05.240
We actually are attracted to those people sometimes, but let's talk about this idea of, of power
00:33:11.260
He said, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts.
00:33:14.180
And you see, your research says, yes, power does corrupt, can corrupt us.
00:33:17.500
So what is, what happens to us psychologically when we are put in positions of power and authority?
00:33:25.260
It changes us psychologically and it changes us physically.
00:33:28.000
There's, there's, there's a few things I'll point to.
00:33:30.020
I mean, I talk about this at length in the book, so I won't be able to talk about everything,
00:33:35.060
One is that you start to think about people below you in the hierarchy as abstractions.
00:33:40.560
And there's sort of this asymmetry that produces this view of, of being an abstraction.
00:33:44.520
And what I mean by this is that, you know, you think about why is it that many of us remember
00:33:51.680
like our boss's birthday and yet we're disappointed because our boss doesn't remember our birthday.
00:33:56.300
It's because there's an asymmetry there where you have, you know, in order to get ahead,
00:34:03.040
You need to be carefully attuned to the person above you in the hierarchy.
00:34:06.640
And as soon as you go up in the hierarchy, your success level is not necessarily predicated
00:34:11.880
on what other people below you think as much as people above you.
00:34:15.600
And so there starts to be this sort of discounting effect, which leads to abuse,
00:34:20.000
because as you become less interested in the sort of granular details of other people's
00:34:26.220
lives below you, it's easier to sort of discard them.
00:34:28.440
And there's lots of psychology research that shows that people in power become more reckless,
00:34:35.220
more willing to believe that they can affect outcomes that they can't actually affect.
00:34:47.400
One of the things that I remember that stood out to me is a very simple explanation of this.
00:34:52.440
When I was talking about the book early on, after it came out, I was interviewed by Andrew
00:34:58.040
Yang, who was the former presidential candidate on the Democratic side.
00:35:01.800
And I asked him, I said, you know, what was this like for you?
00:35:04.740
You all of a sudden got thrust in this position where you didn't have name recognition.
00:35:10.540
And he says it was super awful to have the sort of recognition that his mind was changing
00:35:19.040
by the basic fact that he walked into a room for a year.
00:35:24.460
Every joke he told, even if it sucked, they would laugh uproariously at, you know, the
00:35:36.160
But I think for people who don't experience that, it's hard to sort of understand how corrosive
00:35:41.340
it could be in your thoughts and sort of this idea you start to walk on water.
00:35:44.760
Now I said before that it also changes your physical basis.
00:35:48.700
And this I'm specifically talking about your brain chemistry.
00:35:51.220
And one of my favorite studies in the book, it's a fascinating world of research on macaque
00:35:57.300
monkeys, is a guy named Michael Nader, who's a professor and doctor out in Wake Forest,
00:36:06.860
And what he basically does is he takes these monkeys that are initially independently housed.
00:36:13.780
And then they sort of raise the barriers and put four monkeys together.
00:36:17.800
And within 10 minutes, the monkeys have established a hierarchy.
00:36:24.000
And then what they do is they put the monkeys in this chair that they've been trained to
00:36:27.720
use, where they either pull one lever and get banana pellets, food, or they pull the other
00:36:32.800
lever and they get cocaine intravenously injected into their bodies.
00:36:41.220
So the point is that when they do this, it always happens the same way.
00:36:46.440
The first and the second monkeys in the hierarchy, the top two, always take the banana pellets.
00:36:51.500
And the third and fourth, who end up in a subordinate position, always self-medicate with
00:36:56.660
And when you take the monkeys and rehouse them, if you were monkey one in the first housing
0.97
00:37:01.760
arrangement, and you end up as monkey four in the next one through bad luck or whatever,
00:37:09.620
And so what they found is that the dopamine receptors in the brain actually shift due to
00:37:16.360
They actually have a physical chemical change in their brains as a result of changing place
00:37:22.420
And this, you know, it's just, again, it's one of those hidden aspects where it's like,
00:37:26.340
okay, if we accept this, at least if we accept it's true in monkeys, it's very likely to be
00:37:32.240
So that really causes us to maybe think a bit more carefully about what we do when people
00:37:37.080
get immense, immense power, like they become presidents or congresspeople.
00:37:40.900
Because at that point, you sort of think something is actually changing about them and we don't
00:37:50.200
And I think there's some of this where we need to acknowledge that power does genuinely act
00:37:55.580
And we have to find ways to counteract it to make the world a little bit better place.
00:38:00.680
Yeah, the research about monkeys is really interesting because it seems like the lower
00:38:06.720
So they're going to go for the cocaine to self-medicate.
00:38:10.120
While the higher status monkeys, they've got power and then power acts like a natural drug.
0.99
00:38:15.360
So they don't need the cocaine to self-medicate.
00:38:18.400
But the downside is, you know, they want to hold on to that high.
00:38:22.840
So they're not going to want to give up their power.
00:38:24.640
So they're going to do whatever they have to do to stay on top.
00:38:30.180
If you look at the research, people who are higher in the social hierarchy, they often
00:38:34.660
live longer than people who are lower in the social hierarchy because they're feeling good.
00:38:38.600
While people who are, you know, lower in the social hierarchy, they've got more stress
00:38:48.360
Sometimes people who are in positions of power and authority, they live shorter lives.
00:38:53.800
And it has to do with whether that person in power or authority has any control.
00:38:59.160
So basically, the finding was, if you're in a position of authority, but you have no control,
00:39:08.840
So I'm afraid I'm going to go back to non-human primates with this example with baboons.
0.90
00:39:16.000
So the finding that you're talking about is from something with humans called the White
1.00
00:39:21.300
And Sir Professor, he's got both titles, Sir and Professor.
00:39:24.440
Michael Marmott is the guy who authored the study, one of my colleagues at University
00:39:29.200
And what he basically found is that, you know, if you control for a lot of confounding variables,
00:39:34.500
the actual data shows that being in a position of status that comes with stress but no control
00:39:43.560
Being low on the hierarchy without status and without control is even worse for you.
00:39:48.060
But it's actually pretty good for you if you have a position of sort of status, money and
00:39:53.820
And control meaning that you can sort of dictate how outcomes are happening in your life.
00:39:58.260
So a super stressed CEO during, you know, like an airline CEO during the pandemic, that
00:40:03.900
Being someone who's in charge of like a startup that's taking off, that's really good.
00:40:08.340
And so what you find in the baboon research that I think is really, really instructive is
1.00
00:40:14.140
using this technique called DNA methylation, you can actually measure biological aging separately
00:40:24.580
So, you know, maybe six months have passed, but your body has aged nine months, or maybe
00:40:30.240
And what they found is that when you look at baboons that rise through the ranks to become
1.00
00:40:34.580
the sort of alpha male, the worst, most stressed baboons are at the bottom.
0.99
00:40:42.540
It's, it basically sucks to be the worst baboon, right?
00:40:45.500
But as you rise through the ranks, it gets better until you become the alpha male.
00:40:52.980
And the reason for that is because you constantly have a target on your back.
00:40:56.140
So all the other baboons are thinking about usurping you, you sort of always have to worry
0.98
00:41:02.960
And so even though you have your pick of mates, and even though you have the prime food, your
00:41:07.600
body is actually aging faster because of all that stress.
00:41:11.320
And so the sort of takeaway that the way I put it is, you know, it's good to be in
00:41:17.980
And I think that's a lesson for all of us that actually it's different from what we
00:41:23.300
It's always sort of, you always want to be the alpha.
00:41:26.980
And the science seems to suggest actually that being close to power, but not dealing with
00:41:31.880
the stress of it might be the optimal thing for our bodies.
00:41:34.980
That stress and that paranoia, you see that with that janitor guy, right?
00:41:38.640
He started putting bombs on people's cars because he was worried that people were going
00:41:42.560
So that's another downside of being a business of power.
00:41:45.500
It might cause you to lash out and do just terrible things because you want to maintain
00:41:52.700
I mean, that's one of the classic traps that these people fall into, right?
00:41:55.940
They become so power obsessed that they end up destroying themselves.
00:42:00.540
And I think this is something where we've all seen this play out in, you know, whether
00:42:07.080
it's celebrity culture or politics or sports, whatever it is, where someone sort of just
00:42:12.400
thinks that they get high on their own supply, basically, right?
00:42:15.440
They start to believe the lies that they tell themselves about how great they are.
00:42:19.220
And when people cross them, they really lash out and undermine their own position.
00:42:23.420
So, you know, I mean, this is one of those things too, where it's sort of a red flag when
00:42:34.320
It's something that can help you accomplish certain goals.
00:42:36.940
It can help you, you know, change the world in some way.
00:42:40.540
And the people who view power as the ultimate aim are the exact wrong people to be in power.
00:42:46.520
And at any time that somebody is behaving that way, that's a major red flag that they need
00:42:51.960
Okay, so we've talked about, again, I want to reiterate, we've talked about the type,
00:42:56.460
the selection bias that comes with power, how power can corrupt us, can make us want to
00:43:01.140
break the rules, abstract people below us, depersonalize individuals.
00:43:05.960
But let's talk about this idea of the system that you find yourself in can actually cause
00:43:14.800
It's just that the way the power is manifested, right?
00:43:19.420
Yeah, so the sort of takeaway, the big takeaway is that rotten systems attract rotten people
00:43:26.760
And the evidence, I'll point to two studies briefly that I think are just, they're two
00:43:31.780
of the most fascinating pieces of research I came across in writing the book.
00:43:34.900
The first one is about the sort of self-selection effect based on the system.
00:43:40.500
So these economists ask these students to roll dice and they say, you know, roll a dice 42
00:43:45.740
times and write down what your score is each time.
00:43:49.280
But every time that you roll a six, we're going to give you some cash.
00:43:53.840
We're not going to check, you know, we're not going to watch you do it.
00:43:56.180
So you can lie, but we're going to do statistical analysis to figure out who lied and who didn't.
00:44:00.500
So one student in India, you know, kudos to him for brazenness.
0.81
00:44:05.640
He put down 42 sixes in a row trying to get 42 times the cash.
00:44:09.880
You know, it was pretty easy to spot that he'd lied.
00:44:11.980
But, you know, there were different levels of dishonesty in these groups.
00:44:15.840
What was fascinating, though, is that because they could figure out using statistical methods
00:44:20.020
who was likely to have lied and who wasn't, they then asked the students, what do you want
00:44:25.620
And in India, a place where being a civil servant, you know, being sort of the local cop
00:44:32.220
or the local bureaucrat means you can extract bribes from people.
00:44:35.700
In India, the people who lied about their dice rolls to make more money were disproportionately
00:44:42.800
When they did the exact same study in Denmark, the result was flipped.
00:44:46.600
The people who lied about their dice rolls did not want to go into civil service.
00:44:50.560
And the people who were scrupulously honest did.
00:44:53.000
And so, you know, it's this classic sort of story of if you have a clean system, people
00:44:58.160
who are more willing to behave in clean, uncorrupt ways are going to go for that system.
00:45:04.060
Now, the other study that I think really beautifully illustrates this point is about United Nations
00:45:11.660
And I know it sounds like a weird realm to explore, but it's sort of a natural experiment
00:45:15.460
where before 2002, anybody who parked illegally in New York who was a diplomat had diplomatic
00:45:21.840
immunity and therefore didn't have to pay their fine.
00:45:24.440
So these diplomats rack up 150,000, believe it or not, parking tickets to the tune of $18
00:45:30.980
And finally, in 2002, the mayor of the time, Mike Bloomberg, says enough is enough.
00:45:35.400
Not only are you annoying because you're parking illegally all the time, but it's also a revenue
00:45:40.600
So we can't force you to pay it, but we can take away your cars.
00:45:43.460
We can impound your cars if you keep doing this.
00:45:49.920
Well, in the pre-enforcement period where they can get away with everything, there's
00:45:57.920
So the people who are from Norway, Japan, Germany, the sort of non-corrupt countries,
00:46:05.040
And the people who are from the corrupt countries, Yemen, Egypt, et cetera, are parking extremely
1.00
00:46:12.040
The average number of parking tickets per diplomat in the worst country was, I think, 190 parking
00:46:21.280
And overnight, when the enforcement kicks in, they basically all become Norway.
00:46:27.880
And the kicker, though, is that the longer the Norwegians and Germans and Japanese diplomats
00:46:32.820
were in New York in the pre-enforcement period, in other words, the longer they could get away
00:46:36.940
with it, the more they started to park like the Yemenis and the Egyptians.
00:46:40.080
So the lesson is that cultures of corruption are obviously important in dictating behavior,
0.99
00:46:45.520
but accountability is also super, super important in deterring bad behavior once you
00:46:54.380
You need to attract good people into positions of power.
00:46:57.220
You need to clean up the system to attract better people.
00:46:59.940
And then within that good system, you need to really crack down on the people who behave
00:47:07.000
And it's not, again, it's not rocket science, but most of our systems aren't designed with
00:47:13.600
In other words, there's not like a systematic attempt to think very carefully about both
00:47:20.300
And I think if every organization just did sort of an assessment of these aspects, the
00:47:25.180
world would become a much better place quite quickly.
00:47:27.080
Because as I say, the interventions are not difficult.
00:47:31.140
They just involve serious thought about designing systems to attract and promote better people
00:47:36.840
and to weed out those who are breaking the rules.
00:47:39.840
Well, let's say someone's listening to this and they're put into a position of power
00:47:43.380
Whether it's at work or the homeowner association, like individually, like any insights from your
00:47:48.740
research for that person to be like, I don't want to become a crazy homeowner association
00:47:57.860
Like what sort of, I guess, breaks can you put on yourself so that doesn't happen to you?
00:48:03.980
So first off, I'd say that if you're one of these good people that's sort of driven
00:48:07.380
by service, these corrosive effects of power are less likely to be as much of a problem.
00:48:12.180
You've already solved half the problem because you're not a power hungry, megalomaniac,
00:48:18.480
The other half, though, is that all of us will succumb to some of the psychological effects
00:48:22.660
of power no matter what, even the best of us, right?
00:48:24.520
I mean, there's pretty strong evidence that this does something to you over time.
00:48:29.680
And the best of us can counteract it, but it's not always a sort of bulletproof thing.
00:48:37.020
One is that you need to engineer systems in which you are constantly reminded of the weight
00:48:43.640
So if you're dealing with difficult decisions that result in harm for people, if you have
00:48:47.780
to fire people, if you have to make decisions that make people really unhappy or hurt people,
00:48:52.620
you should be well aware of the costs of those decisions.
00:48:55.920
I'm not going to go into the whole detail of it here, but I briefly talk about this in
00:48:59.700
the book with a guy who was involved in doling out money for the 9-11 Victims Compensation
00:49:05.260
He went through the excruciating process of meeting with every victim's family face to
00:49:12.020
face when he was trying to decide how much their life was worth financially because he
00:49:18.300
He said, the second that this becomes abstract to me is the second I need to get out of this
00:49:22.720
job because it has to be a reminder of how important this work is.
00:49:27.180
And I think that's true even in the smaller stages of power.
00:49:29.220
You need to be reminded of the effects of your decisions when you are affecting other
00:49:35.680
The other is just around sort of systems of power is engaging in a sort of team of rivals
00:49:42.840
The team of rivals is a term that refers to the way Abraham Lincoln set up his cabinet,
00:49:47.440
where he basically made people who were his rivals, right?
00:49:50.660
They were like genuinely sometimes adversaries of his debate, major subjects in front of
00:49:58.240
And they would tell him when he was being a moron.
00:50:00.720
And, you know, he would, he would encourage this basically because he thought it would
00:50:03.700
cut him down to size, remind him of different viewpoints, et cetera.
00:50:07.780
You contrast this with the Vladimir Putin approach to leadership of the current age.
00:50:12.800
And you're surrounded by yes men, you know, and in fact, people who cross you might go to
00:50:18.200
And you can think about what does that do to you?
00:50:20.600
I mean, you know, it's, it's something where if you proactively try to ensure that you are
00:50:24.900
checked, you're more likely to behave in a reasonable manner.
00:50:28.780
If you behave in a way where you think I am powerful and therefore people should defer to
00:50:34.720
me, you're more likely to miscalculate and abuse people because you never get differing
00:50:39.380
So some of this is possible to sort of proactively mitigate, but I will say that most of the
00:50:47.180
psychologists who study power argue that all of us would succumb at least to some extent
00:50:53.580
to some of the corrosive aspects of power if we were there long enough, which is why
00:50:57.380
you might want to rotate people around and indeed not have everybody inhabit a position
00:51:05.260
Well, Brian, this has been a great conversation.
00:51:06.680
Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
00:51:11.500
So Corruptible, Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us is the book and anywhere that you
00:51:16.000
You know, if you've got a local bookshop, by all means, go there.
00:51:22.200
And if people are interested, I also have a podcast called Power Corrupts, which is a podcast
00:51:27.320
about all the sort of dark sides of humans and the way we screw up the world and what we
00:51:40.240
It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.
00:51:42.180
You can find more information about his work at his website, brianpkloss.com.
00:51:48.660
Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash power corrupts, where you find links to resources
00:51:53.980
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast.
00:52:03.700
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00:52:05.960
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