Power even prompts less complex legal reasoning in Supreme Court justices. A study led by Stanford psychologist Deborah Gruenfeld compared the decisions of U.S. Supreme Court justices when they wrote opinions endorsing either the position of a majority of justices on the bench—a position of power—or the position of the vanquished, less powerful minority. Sure enough, when Gruenfeld analyzed the complexity of justices’ opinions on a vast array of cases, she found that justices writing from a position of power crafted less complex arguments than those writing from a low-power position.
A great deal of research has also found that power encourages individuals to act on their own whims, desires, and impulses. When researchers give people power in scientific experiments, those people are more likely to physically touch others in potentially inappropriate ways, to flirt in more direct fashion, to make risky choices and gambles, to make first offers in negotiations, to speak their mind, and to eat cookies like the Cookie Monster, with crumbs all over their chin and chest.
Perhaps more unsettling is the wealth of evidence that having power makes people more likely to act like sociopaths. High-power individuals are more likely to interrupt others, to speak out of turn, and to fail to look at others who are speaking. They are also more likely to tease friends and colleagues in hostile, humiliating fashion. Surveys of organizations find that most rude behaviors—shouting, profanities, bald critiques—emanate from the offices and cubicles of individuals in positions of power. My own research has found that people with power tend to behave like patients who have damaged their brain’s orbitofrontal lobes (the region of the frontal lobes right behind the eye sockets), a condition that seems to cause overly impulsive and insensitive behavior. Thus, the experience of power might be thought of as having someone open up your skull and take out that part of your brain so critical to empathy and socially appropriate behavior.
Power may induce more harmful forms of aggression as well. In the famed Stanford Prison Experiment, psychologist Philip Zimbardo randomly assigned Stanford undergraduates to act as prison guards or prisoners—an extreme kind of power relation. The prison guards quickly descended into the purest forms of power abuse, psychologically torturing their peers, the prisoners. Similarly, anthropologists have found that cultures where rape is prevalent and accepted tend to be cultures with deeply entrenched beliefs in the supremacy of men over women.
This leaves us with a power paradox. Power is given to those individuals, groups, or nations who advance the interests of the greater good in socially intelligent fashion. Yet unfortunately, having power renders many individuals as impulsive and poorly attuned to others as your garden-variety frontal lobe patient, making them prone to act abusively and lose the esteem of their peers. What people want from leaders—social intelligence—is what is damaged by the experience of power.
When we recognize this paradox and all the destructive behaviors that flow from it, we can appreciate the importance of promoting a more socially intelligent model of power. Social behaviors are dictated by social expectations. As we debunk long-standing myths and misconceptions about power, we can better identify the qualities powerful people should have and better understand how they should wield their power. As a result, we’ll have much less tolerance for people who lead by deception, coercion, or undue force. No longer will we expect these kinds of antisocial behaviors from our leaders and silently accept them when they come to pass.
We’ll also start to demand something more from our colleagues, our neighbors, and ourselves. When we appreciate the distinctions between responsible and irresponsible uses of power—and the importance of practicing the responsible, socially intelligent form of it—we take a vital step toward promoting healthy marriages, peaceful playgrounds, and societies built on cooperation and trust.
EDIBLE ETHICS: AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL POLLAN
Jason Marsh
IT’S NOT UNCOMMON these days to find yourself stranded in a supermarket aisle, paralyzed by the choices before you. How do you decide between the organic eggs laid by cage-free hens and the eggs laid by free-range hens fed on omega-3 fatty acids? Should you really buy that tomato, even though it’s well out of season? Is it worth paying an extra $5 for the sustainably farmed, antibiotic-free chicken breast?
Before trying to answer any of these questions, it would help to read Michael Pollan’s books. For years, eaters have turned to Pollan, a regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine and a professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, for some of the most thoughtful, provocative, and practical contemporary writing on food.
In his 2007 bestseller The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, Pollan attempts to navigate the seemingly endless food choices available to Americans today. Getting past marketing slogans, dietary fads, and cryptic ingredients—what exactly are sodium aluminum sulfate and xanthan gum, and why are they in our food?—he traces our food’s journey from farms and factories, through the marketplace, and onto our plates.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma was a logical successor to Pollan’s previous book, The Botany of Desire, which chronicled the history of humans’ relationship with four common plants. But it might be more appropriately grouped with other books, such as Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and Marion Nestle’s Food Politics, which try to explain the social and political forces that shape our food’s production, and shed light on the impact our food choices have on our health, our communities, and our planet.
What makes many of these choices so hard is that they’re personal, everyday decisions fraught with vast ethical implications. As Pollan makes clear in his book, every food purchase we make, whether it’s at a McDonald’s or a Whole Foods supermarket, supports a certain set of environmental and economic values. But we can’t be sure of which values we’re supporting when the labels on our food make it hard to understand where this food actually came from—and that’s where Pollan comes in.
GREATER GOOD: In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, you investigate the stories we’re not being told about where our food comes from. But it’s also hard to understand the stories we are being told, as they often rely on words like “sustainable farming,” “free range,” and, especially, “organic”—words that we may have encountered in the supermarket, but we may not know exactly what they mean.
MICHAEL POLLAN: I think that’s true. In doing this research, I tried to look behind some of those stories to the reality, and sometimes the reality was not at all what the story suggested.
For instance, I think consumers assume that when they spend the extra money to support an organic dairy, they’re supporting a small farmer, they’re supporting dairies where cows get to eat grass, as cows evolved to do. But in fact, while that is true of many dairies, there are also now huge organic feedlot dairies, where cows live in groups of several thousand, where they do not get to graze in a pasture, and they eat corn all the time, which isn’t very good for the cows to eat.