Cycling one morning over the East Bay Hills, Professor Dacher Keltner had a near-death experience. “I was riding my bike to school,” he recalls, “and I came to a four-way intersection. I had the right of way, and this black Mercedes just barrelled through.” With two feet to spare before impact, the driver slammed on his brakes. “He seemed both surprised and contemptuous, as if I was in his more important way.” Keltner’s first response was a mixture of anger and relief: no Berkeley psychology professor with surfer-dude hair had been smeared over the Californian tarmac that day. His second was more academic. Was there, he wondered, a measurable difference between the behaviour of Mercedes owners and those of other cars? Cars that didn’t cost twice the average annual income of an American middle-class family? Had the guy who nearly killed him bought something else, along with $130,000-worth of German engineering?
The professor put a group of students on the case; sent them out with clipboards to loiter on the traffic islands of Berkeley. They monitored vehicle etiquette at road junctions, kept notes on models and makes. They observed who allowed pedestrians their right of way at street crossings; who pretended not to see them and roared straight past. The results couldn’t have been clearer. Mercedes drivers were a quarter as likely to stop at a crossing and four times more likely to cut in front of another car than drivers of beaten-up Ford Pintos and Dodge Colts. The more luxurious the vehicle, the more entitled its owner felt to violate the laws of the highway.
What happened on the road also happened in the lab. In some experiments Keltner and his collaborators put participants from a variety of income brackets to the test; in others, they “primed” subjects to feel less powerful or more powerful by asking them to think about people more or less powerful than themselves, or to think about times when they felt strong or weak. The results all stacked the same way. People who felt powerful were less likely to be empathetic; wealthy subjects were more likely to cheat in games involving small cash stakes and to dip their fists into a jar of sweets marked for the use of visiting children. When watching a video about childhood cancer they displayed fewer physiological signs of empathy.
Similar results occurred even when the privilege under observation had no meaning beyond the experiment room. Rigged games of Monopoly were set up in which one player took a double salary and rolled with two dice instead of one: winners failed to acknowledge their unfair advantage and reported that they had triumphed through merit. In another study, volunteers were divided into bosses and workers and set to work on an administrative task. When a plate of biscuits was brought into the room, the managers reached for twice as many as the managed. “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” said Lord Acton in 1887. Here was the evidence, lab-tested, that it also awakened the Cookie Monster within.
Acton’s pronouncement on power was a response to a specific 19th-century event – the Vatican’s decision, in 1870, to adopt the doctrine of papal infallibility. When 20th-century social scientists began studying the moral conduct of powerful people, they did it in reaction to the absolutism of their own age. In 1956 the sociologist C. Wright Mills published “The Power Elite”, an account of American society that shocked a generation: partly because it suggested the country was controlled by self-sustaining cliques of military, political and corporate men; partly because Mills modelled his work on an earlier study of the social and political hierarchies of Nazi Germany. Three years later, Pitirim Sorokin, founder of Harvard’s sociology department and a refugee from Lenin’s Russia, published “Power and Morality”, which proposed that the individuals described by Mills were not just self-interested, but sick. “Taken as a whole,” he wrote, “the ruling groups are more talented intellectually and more deranged mentally than the ruled population.”
Sorokin’s pathological language may seem intemperate, but the idea of power as a disease or disorder was infectious. In 1959, Eugene Jennings, the founder of business psychology and nobody’s idea of a dangerous radical, quizzed 162 American executives about their ethical lives. While in the office, he discovered, most professed that they treated colleagues with suspicion, regarded friendship as a weakness and allowed self-interest to govern their behaviour. At the weekends, however, they were Mr Nice Guys who played with their children and invited their neighbours over for barbecues. “Typical executive possesses Jekyll-Hyde Strain”, said the headlines. The implication was that these men were born with it: that unethical behaviour was a trait of the powerful, not a side-effect of being in charge.
A study conducted at the beginning of the 1970s, however, rewrote that assumption, and popularised a new idea – that the moral character of an individual mattered less than that of the social environment. The Stanford Prison Experiment made the reputation of its creator, Philip Zimbardo – one that is elevated but ambiguous, as befits a man who begins lectures by performing air-guitar to Santana’s “Evil Ways”, and was played by Billy Crudup in the movie of his life. In 1971, Zimbardo created a jail-like environment in the basement of the psychology building at Stanford. For a period of two weeks, a group of 24 male students was divided into prisoners and guards, and given uniforms and props that reinforced those roles. Over a cctv link, Zimbardo watched as the guards became nastier and the prisoners more submissive. The characters of the participants seemed barely relevant. The situation had made this happen – and, after six days, it had got brutally out of hand. By the end, Zimbardo had harvested videotape imagery of hooded captives and club-waving guards that captured the troubled American 1970s as effectively as Nixon’s goodbye from the White House lawn or the crowbarred Watergate filing cabinets now on display in the Smithsonian.