Have you ever railed at corrupt politicians or megalomaniac business leaders? Are there times when you think your boss is selfish, power-h...
Have you ever railed at corrupt politicians or megalomaniac business leaders? Are there times when you think your boss is selfish, power-hungry or even a bona fide psychopath?
So often the people in charge of us seem ill-suited to the responsibilities they hold.
I’ve spent decades looking at these questions. I’ve explored who gets power, why they get it and how they behave when they achieve it.
Is it, as the old adage would tell us, that power corrupts? Well, possibly, but I’ve had my doubts.
Another, more troubling, thought has been gnawing at me instead – that something much bigger and more serious is lurking beneath the waves. That power-hungry narcissists are actively seeking out positions that give them control over others.
Such people certainly appear to be well represented in positions of leadership, from the highest offices of state down to the most junior roles in company management. More worryingly still, for deep evolutionary reasons, the rest of us do our very best to help them achieve the power they then abuse.
Have you ever railed at corrupt politicians or megalomaniac business leaders? Are there times when you think your boss is selfish, power-hungry or even a bona fide psychopath?
The pretend prison guards who abused their pretend prisoners
A notorious psychological experiment from the 1970s helps make the point. Researchers at Stanford University in California recruited a group of men and told half of them they were ‘guards’, the other half ‘prisoners. The results were dramatic.
No sooner were the guards handed control than they began abusing the prisoners, attacking them with fire extinguishers, forcing them to sleep on concrete floors and humiliating them.
So bad was the abuse that the experiment was ended early. When the findings were published, they shocked the world.
The evidence seemed all too clear: there are demons within all of us and that positions of authority set those demons free.
But consider this. To find their volunteers, researchers had placed newspaper adverts headed: ‘Male college students needed for a psychological study of prison life.’
Could the wording have skewed the sample of people taking part? When, in 2007, academics looked into this, they found a curious result. It turned out that people who respond to adverts containing the word ‘prison’ are not the same as those who respond to similar adverts that refer to psychological studies.
In fact, those who were drawn in by the word ‘prison’ scored significantly higher on measures of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism and social dominance and significantly lower on empathy and altruism.
It raises a fascinating question – while we always assumed that power corrupts, is it possible that corrupt and corruptible people seek out power? That power isn’t a force that turns good people bad, but a magnet that attracts bad people?
A notorious psychological experiment from the 1970s helps make the point. Researchers at Stanford University in California recruited a group of men and told half of them they were ‘guards’, the other half ‘prisoners. The results were dramatic
Spotting corruption with the roll of a dice
A study in India recruited hundreds of students and asked them to play a simple game: roll a dice 42 times and record the results.
Before they played, however, the students were told they’d be paid more if they rolled higher numbers. Some students cheated wholesale – the number six was recorded 25 per cent of the time, while the number one was recorded only ten per cent of the time. A few students were even so brazen as to claim they had rolled sixes 42 times in a row.
But there was a twist: the cheats had different career aspirations from those who reported scores honestly. Those with bogus high scores were much more likely to aspire to join India’s notoriously corrupt civil service.
When another team of researchers ran a similar experiment in Denmark, a country where the civil service is clean and transparent, the results were inverted. It was the honest students who wanted to be civil servants. The liars sought professions that could make them filthy rich.
Even five-year-olds love a strong man
Why do we let it happen? Why are corrupt narcissists so frequently in senior roles?
It is partly because our idea of what makes a good leader is ingrained from our earliest years. In one Swiss study, children aged five to 13 were asked to play a computer game in which they picked a captain for an imaginary ship based on two faces on screen.
What the children didn’t know was that the two captains weren’t random – the faces belonged to the winner and runner-up politicians in recent French parliamentary elections.
Staggeringly, 71 per cent of the time the children picked the candidate who had won the election.
The same experiment conducted with adults gave nearly identical results.
Who looks the part, in other words, is an essential part of how we pick our leaders. Some of this is a matter of culture, but across the world the evidence is clear: tall, strong, over-confident men have an advantage.
...And for that we can blame our ancestors
Part of the problem, it seems, is that our brains haven’t changed since the Stone Age. In that time there have been roughly 8,000 generations, and about 7,980 of them have lived in societies in which size and strength were major advantages.
Our brains are wired to favour people who look like they might be good at fending off sabre-tooth tigers or hunting gazelles.
Our world has changed but our brains haven’t. Combine those Stone Age biases with modern-day racism and sexism, and it makes the problem even worse.
Short men struggle, too. More than 2,000 years ago, Alexander the Great granted an audience to the captured Persian queen Sisygambis. Alexander was accompanied by his best friend, Hephaestion, who was taller. Immediately, Sisygambis knelt before Hephaestion to plead for her life, mistakenly assuming that the taller man was the king.
Height was believed to be a pretty good predictor of status then and it is now. American presidents are consistently taller than men of their time. Taller presidents also have a higher chance of being re-elected.
And it’s not just height that affects our judgment. All human faces can be scored by how baby-faced they appear. There’s evidence, for example, that judges and juries treat baby-faced defendants as less culpable for their actions. Political or business leaders with baby faces, meanwhile, may be seen as weak.
Enough about you, let's talk about me!
Not only do selfish people seek power, they are particularly good at obtaining it thanks to a combination of traits known as ‘the dark triad’: they’re Machiavellian, narcissistic and psychopathic – which often means they lack empathy, are impulsive, reckless, manipulative and aggressive.
Yet such people can also be charming, charismatic and ruthlessly focused – key qualities for success in job interviews.
In fact, for them a job interview is perfect: they love to talk about themselves. They strategise about how to get what they want, even if it means manufacturing lies or false credentials.
According to Dr Kevin Dutton, a research psychologist at Oxford University, the ten professions with the most psychopaths are chief executives, lawyers, TV and radio personalities, salespeople, surgeons, journalists, police officers, members of the clergy, chefs and civil servants.
Another study found that those with dark triad traits are strongly drawn to positions that give them an opportunity for dominant leadership, and particularly so in finance, sales and law.
Other researchers have found that Washington DC has by far the most psychopaths per capita of any region in the United States.
When you shake hands, as I have, with a rebel commander who committed war crimes, or a ruthless despot who tortured his enemies, it’s startling how rarely they live up to the caricature of evil. They’re often charming. They crack jokes and smile. They don’t appear to be monsters, but many are.
Why we let confident idiots lead the way
Not that all bosses are psychopaths. Far from it. They could be no more than confident fools, and there are plenty of them around. Yet show us certainty in the face of uncertainty and we’re sold.
A recent paper in the science journal Nature argued that over-confidence exists because it used to help humans survive. In the days of food scarcity, trying something – even a long shot – in the battle to survive was better than doing nothing. So groups learned to follow leaders who displayed over-confidence.
If someone tells you there’s a waterhole on the other side of the savanna, and you’re already dying of thirst, inaction is usually at least as bad as following someone with a false sense of certainty.
A series of studies has shown that incompetent but over-confident individuals quickly obtain social status in experimental groups.
Often wrong but never uncertain – it remains a winning strategy in far too much of our world.
Turn a spotlight on the dark corner offices
History has consistently taught us that people who know they are being monitored behave better.
Yet in today’s corporate and political systems, it is the workers who are scrutinised, not the bosses.
The most watched people in corporate headquarters are too often those who are least likely to do any serious damage.
Corner offices and boardrooms remain opaque.
Yet today’s watchers are the very people who should feel watched themselves.
The world would be a better place if people in power worried more that their every corrupt move was being scrutinised.
Headlines change the world for the better
Newspapers matter, and particularly local newspapers. The hollowing-out of local and regional journalism is likely to ensure that fewer people fear a free press.
Uganda provides an instructive lesson. An audit of education spending in the East African nation discovered that up to $8 out of every $10 allocated to schools was being stolen. The money was funding corruption, not children.
It made front-page news and, soon, only $2 out of every $10 was being stolen.
But here’s the crucial bit: embezzlement decreased most in places that were near newspaper distributors. When corrupt officials were being exposed, it mattered only if people could actually read about it.
If nobody writes the stories, or nobody reads them, the powerful will develop a sense of impunity and become even worse.
Now is the time to do something about it
Why are so many horrible people in charge? It is a particularly urgent puzzle to solve because we’re constantly disappointed by those in power.
Yet nothing is set in stone. Better people can lead us.
We can recruit more intelligently. We can remind leaders of the weight of their responsibility. We can make them see people as human beings, not abstractions.
We can rotate personnel to deter and detect abuse. We can use random tests to catch bad apples.
And if we’re going to watch people, we can focus on those at the top who do the real damage, not the rank-and-file.
With concerted effort and the right reforms, we can swing the pendulum back, pushing away corruptible people who seek and abuse power and invite others to take their place.
Whatever our Stone Age brains might tell us, there is a better way.
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