If there are particular studies you want to read, you can ask here (or on the research request page) and I'll jailbreak them for you. There are so many possible studies that I didn't feel like jailbreaking them all in advance...
Luke/SI asked me to look into what the academic literature might have to say about people in positions of power.
Why?
It seems relevant to what powerful uploads might do; or just future humans period - Hanson has pointed out that we should expect ever more extreme differences in wealth & power as time & economic growth go on.
In addition to gwern's reply, it's also highly relevant for replying to arguments suggesting that game theory shows co-operation to be the most beneficial course of action, therefore we should expect AIs to want to co-operate with humans. The obvious flaw with that argument is that somebody might have more beneficial courses of action - such as exploitation - available to them, in which case we would expect AIs to ruthlessly exploit us if they were in the right position. It seems reasonable to presume that if you are in a position of power over someone, it easily becomes more beneficial to exploit them than to co-operate.
"Are humans more likely to exploit other humans when they have more power over them" is a testable prediction of this hypothesis: if exploitation is more beneficial than co-operation when you're powerful enough, then we would expect our brains to be evolved to take advantage of that.
"The loss of power: How illusions of alliance contribute to powerholders’ downfall", Brion & Anderson 2013:
Though people in positions of power have many advantages that sustain their power, stories abound of individuals who fall from their lofty perch. How does this happen? The current research examined the role of illusions of alliance, which we define as overestimating the strength of one’s alliances with others. We tested whether powerholders lose power when they possess overly positive perceptions of their relationships with others, which in turn leads to the weakening of those relationships. Studies 1 and 2 found that powerful individuals were more likely to hold illusions of alliance. Using laboratory as well as field contexts, Studies 3, 4, and 5 found that individuals with power who held illusions of alliance obtained fewer resources, were excluded more frequently from alliances, and lost their power. These findings suggest that power sometimes leads to its own demise because powerful individuals erroneously assume that others feel allied to them.
Courtesy of The Economist:
So not only do bosses set too much store by their strengths, as our Schumpeter column notes, they also habitually overestimate their ability to win respect and support from their underlings. Somehow, on reaching the corner office, they lose the knack of reading subtle cues in others’ behaviour: in a further experiment Mr Brion found that when a boss tells a joke to a subordinate, he loses his innate ability to distinguish between a real and fake smile.
There is, she says, a common misperception that at moments like this, when people face an ethical decision, they clearly understand the choice that they are making. "We assume that they can see the ethics and are consciously choosing not to behave ethically," Tenbrunsel says. This, generally speaking, is the basis of our disapproval: They knew. They chose to do wrong.
But Tenbrunsel says that we are frequently blind to the ethics of a situation. Over the past couple of decades, psychologists have documented many different ways that our minds fail to see what is directly in front of us. They've come up with a concept called "bounded ethicality": That's the notion that cognitively, our ability to behave ethically is seriously limited, because we don't always see the ethical big picture. One small example: the way a decision is framed. "The way that a decision is presented to me," says Tenbrunsel, "very much changes the way in which I view that decision, and then eventually, the decision it is that I reach." Essentially, Tenbrunsel argues, certain cognitive frames make us blind to the fact that we are confronting an ethical problem at all.
Tenbrunsel told us about a recent experiment that illustrates the problem. She got together two groups of people and told one to think about a business decision. The other group was instructed to think about an ethical decision. Those asked to consider a business decision generated one mental checklist; those asked to think of an ethical decision generated a different mental checklist.
Tenbrunsel next had her subjects do an unrelated task to distract them. Then she presented them with an opportunity to cheat. Those cognitively primed to think about business behaved radically different from those who were not — no matter who they were, or what their moral upbringing had been."If you're thinking about a business decision, you are significantly more likely to lie than if you were thinking from an ethical frame," Tenbrunsel says. According to Tenbrunsel, the business frame cognitively activates one set of goals — to be competent, to be successful; the ethics frame triggers other goals. And once you're in, say, a business frame, you become really focused on meeting those goals, and other goals can completely fade from view.
I thought this was an interesting description of the feeling of losing power; "Julia Gillard writes on power, purpose and Labor’s future; Exclusive: Australia's former prime minister breaks her silence, writing exclusively for Guardian Australia on her legacy, her hopes for a new Labor leader… and the pain of losing power":
I sat alone on election night as the results came in. I wanted it that way. I wanted to just let myself be swept up in it.
Losing power is felt physically, emotionally, in waves of sensation, in moments of acute distress.
I know now that there are the odd moments of relief as the stress ekes away and the hard weight that felt like it was sitting uncomfortably between your shoulder blades slips off. It actually takes you some time to work out what your neck and shoulders are supposed to feel like. I know too that you can feel you are fine but then suddenly someone’s words of comfort, or finding a memento at the back of the cupboard as you pack up, or even cracking jokes about old times, can bring forth a pain that hits you like a fist, pain so strong you feel it in your guts, your nerve endings. I know that late at night or at quiet moments in the day feelings of regret, memories that make you shine with pride, a sense of being unfulfilled can overwhelm you. Hours slip by.
I know that my colleagues are feeling all this now. Those who lost, those who remain.
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/09/the_debiasing_d.html
Caruso, Vohs, and Baxter's recent paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology ("Mere Exposure to Money Increases Endorsement of Free Market Systems and Social Inequality," 2012) suggests that critics should also object to commercialism on instrumental grounds. Mere exposure to money makes people more pro-market:
[S]ubtle reminders of the concept of money, relative to non-money concepts, led participants to endorse more strongly the existing social system in the United States in general (Experiment 1) and free market capitalism in particular (Experiment 4), to assert more strongly that victims deserve their fate (Experiment 2), and to believe more strongly that socially-advantaged groups should dominate socially-disadvantaged groups (Experiment 3).
The paper's highlight tests whether subtle exposure to money leads to unconventional pro-market views:
[P]articipants read about the current organ transplant system in the United States. They were told that because organs such as kidneys are in short supply, the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) uses a systematic formula to determine which patients get priority. In addition to assessing the likelihood that the transplant will work, this formula aims to ensure that the socially disadvantaged get preferential access to kidneys because they tend to lack other alternatives (such as dialysis) and therefore are most in need.
Participants then learned that although this is the existing system in the United States, in other countries there is a free market for organs. Just as wealthier and more successful people can afford to purchase relatively better medical care if they choose, in a free market system anyone can buy or sell organs. Accordingly, priority does not necessarily go to those who are the most needy or disadvantaged, but to whoever can most afford to pay.
Result: Fully 37% of Americans subtly exposed to money supported a free market in organs - versus 0% of Americans who were not so exposed.*
https://www.1843magazine.com/features/does-power-really-corrupt
Prickly venture capitalists, however, are not the only ones to express unease, and not every critique has been written in green ink. When Keltner and his colleagues published an influential paper on the subject in 2010, three European academics, Martin Korndörfer, Stefan Schmukle and Boris Egloff, wondered if it would be possible to reproduce the findings of small lab-based experiments using much larger sets of data from surveys carried out by the German state. The idea was to see whether this information, which documented what people said they did in everyday life, would offer the same picture of human behaviour as results produced in the lab. “We simply wanted to replicate their results,” says Boris Egloff, “which seemed very plausible to us and fine in every possible sense.” The crunched numbers, however, declined to fit the expected patterns. Taken cumulatively, they suggested the opposite. Privileged individuals, the data suggested, were proportionally more generous to charity than their poorer fellow citizens; more likely to volunteer; more likely to help a traveller struggling with a suitcase or to look after a neighbour’s cat.
Egloff and his colleagues wrote up their findings and sent them to the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which had also published Keltner’s work. “We thought,” says Egloff, “naive as we were, that this might be interesting for the scientific community.” The paper was rejected. They extended their analysis to data from America and other countries, and felt confident that they had identified several more pieces that didn’t fit the jigsaw being assembled by their American peers. They argued that psychology’s consensus view on social status and ethical behaviour did not exist in other disciplines, and concluded with a quiet plea for more research in this area. Their paper was rejected again. Last July, it eventually found a home in a peer-reviewed online journal.
Egloff has been doing research since 1993 and is used to the bloody process of peer review. But he was shocked by the hostility towards his work. “I am not on a crusade,” he says. “I am not rich. My family is not rich. My friends are not rich. We never received any money from any party for doing this research. Personally I would have loved the results of the Berkeley group to be true. That would be nice and would provide a better fit to my personal and political beliefs and my worldview. However, as a scientist…” The experience of going against this particular intellectual grain was so painful that Egloff vows never to study the topic of privilege and ethics again.
...In September 2015, five social psychologists and a sociologist published a paper in the Journal of Behavioral and Brain Sciences that suggested why psychology might show privileged people in a bad light. Left-wing opinion, contended Jonathan Haidt and his co-authors, was over-represented in psychology faculties. This, they suspected, might be distorting experimental findings – as well as making campus life difficult for researchers with socially conservative views. “The field of social psychology is at risk of becoming a cohesive moral community,” they warned. “Might a shared moral-historical narrative in a politically homogeneous field undermine the self-correction processes on which good science depends? We think so.” So does Boris Egloff. “It was a great and timely paper,” he says. “I congratulate them on their courage.” But it came too late for him. “We spoilt the good guys’ party,” he says.
Presumably "A Large Scale Test of the Effect of Social Class on Prosocial Behavior", Korndörfer et al 2015:
Does being from a higher social class lead a person to engage in more or less prosocial behavior? Psychological research has recently provided support for a negative effect of social class on prosocial behavior. However, research outside the field of psychology has mainly found evidence for positive or u-shaped relations. In the present research, we therefore thoroughly examined the effect of social class on prosocial behavior. Moreover, we analyzed whether this effect was moderated by the kind of observed prosocial behavior, the observed country, and the measure of social class. Across eight studies with large and representative international samples, we predominantly found positive effects of social class on prosociality: Higher class individuals were more likely to make a charitable donation and contribute a higher percentage of their family income to charity (32,090 ≥ N ≥ 3,957; Studies 1–3), were more likely to volunteer (37,136 ≥N ≥ 3,964; Studies 4–6), were more helpful (N = 3,902; Study 7), and were more trusting and trustworthy in an economic game when interacting with a stranger (N = 1,421; Study 8) than lower social class individuals. Although the effects of social class varied somewhat across the kinds of prosocial behavior, countries, and measures of social class, under no condition did we find the negative effect that would have been expected on the basis of previous results reported in the psychological literature. Possible explanations for this divergence and implications are discussed.
"Wealth and the Inflated Self: Class, Entitlement, and Narcissism", Piff 2013:
Americans may be more narcissistic now than ever, but narcissism is not evenly distributed across social strata. Five studies demonstrated that higher social class is associated with increased entitlement and narcissism. Upper-class individuals reported greater psychological entitlement (Studies 1a, 1b, and 2) and narcissistic personality tendencies (Study 2), and they were more likely to behave in a narcissistic fashion by opting to look at themselves in a mirror (Study 3). Finally, inducing egalitarian values in upper-class participants decreased their narcissism to a level on par with their lower-class peers (Study 4). These findings offer novel evidence regarding the influence of social class on the self and highlight the importance of social stratification to understanding basic psychological processes.
This would be much, much easier to read if the citations were in footnotes instead of riddling the entire text.
The powerful or elite are: fast-planning abstract thinkers who take action (1) in order to pursue single/minimal objectives, are in favor of strict rules for their stereotyped out-group underlings (2) but are rationalizing (3) & hypocritical when it serves their interests (4), especially when they feel secure in their power. They break social norms (5, 6) or ignore context (1) which turns out to be worsened by disclosure of conflicts of interest (7), and lie fluently without mental or physiological stress (6).
What are powerful members good for? They can help in shifting among equilibria: solving coordination problems or inducing contributions towards public goods (8), and their abstracted Far perspective can be better than the concrete Near of the weak (9).
I applaud your voluntary performance of work that a less heroic mind might've been tempted to think was someone else's responsibility!
For the love of the heavens! It's gratitude to shokwave! I can't do a hundredth of the good ideas I have, and I've no doubt that neither can gwern.
For the love of the heavens! It's gratitude to shokwave! I can't do a hundredth of the good ideas I have, and I've no doubt that neither can gwern.
If only you lived on a planet where most other people wouldn't intend that comment (or this one) as pure snark!
All I have to say is that when Eliezer's posts include a tenth as many citations or external links as my average post, then I'll listen to his snark about preferred citation formats.
If it is a dig, it ought not be. Doing useful drudgery despite bystander effects is remarkable and surprising, and should be applauded!
I think you interpreted "dig" as meaning "dig at user:shokwave", as did I initially. I think it instead meant "dig at user:Alicorn".
I did, at first; and rethought it before I posted. And I figured that the same response was also roughly correct if it was a "dig at Alicorn." Doing useful drudgery despite bystander effects is remarkable and surprising, so arch comments about someone not doing so would be silly.
Given that everyone around here is usually pretty reasonable, if prone to fallacies of transparency, I therefore assume that Eliezer's actually giving straightforward applause, rather than being ironic. (If I'm wrong ... well, that'd be useful to learn.)
I prefer the original format. When pulling a few excerpts to email to a friend, it left enough info that he could conceivably locate the cited work.
We find that across a range of experimental designs, subjects who reach their decisions more quickly are more cooperative. Furthermore, forcing subjects to decide quickly increases contributions, whereas instructing them to reflect and forcing them to decide slowly decreases contributions. Finally, an induction that primes subjects to trust their intuitions increases contributions compared with an induction that promotes greater reflection. To explain these results, we propose that cooperation is intuitive because cooperative heuristics are developed in daily life where cooperation is typically advantageous. We then validate predictions generated by this proposed mechanism. Our results provide convergent evidence that intuition supports cooperation in social dilemmas, and that reflection can undermine these cooperative impulses.
"Spontaneous giving and calculated greed", Rand et al 2012; courtesy of Ed Yong, "Quick intuitive decisions foster more charity and cooperation than slow calculated ones"
"Power Changes How the Brain Responds to Others", Hogeveen et al 2013:
Power dynamics are a ubiquitous feature of human social life, yet little is known about how power is implemented in the brain. Motor resonance is the activation of similar brain networks when acting and when watching someone else act, and is thought to be implemented, in part, by the human mirror system. We investigated the effects of power on motor resonance during an action observation task. Separate groups of participants underwent a high-, neutral, or low-power induction priming procedure, prior to observing the actions of another person. During observation, motor resonance was determined with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) via measures of motor cortical output. High-power participants demonstrated lower levels of resonance than low-power participants, suggesting reduced mirroring of other people in those with power. These differences suggest that decreased motor resonance to others’ actions might be one of the neural mechanisms underlying power-induced asymmetries in processing our social interaction partners.
Popular media coverage: http://www.npr.org/2013/08/10/210686255/a-sense-of-power-can-do-a-number-on-your-brain
"Business culture and dishonesty in the banking industry", Cohn et al 2014 https://pdf.yt/d/7aIznZHMLtx1cosW / https://www.dropbox.com/s/bqg59zs60m2v0uq/2014-cohn.pdf?dl=0 / http://libgen.org/scimag/get.php?doi=10.1038%2Fnature13977 (NYT)
Here we show that employees of a large, international bank behave, on average, honestly in a control condition. However, when their professional identity as bank employees is rendered salient, a significant proportion of them become dishonest. This effect is specific to bank employees because control experiments with employees from other industries and with students show that they do not become more dishonest when their professional identity or bank-related items are rendered salient. Our results thus suggest that the prevailing business culture in the banking industry weakens and undermines the honesty norm
...On average, the bank employees had 11.5 years of experience in the banking industry. Roughly half of them worked in a core business unit, that is, as private bankers, asset managers, traders or investment managers. The others came from one of the support units (for example, risk or human resources management). Subjects participated in a short online survey. After answering some filler questions about subjective wellbeing, subjects in the professional identity condition were asked seven questions about their professional background (for example, ‘‘At which bank are you presently employed?’’ or ‘‘What is your function at this bank?’’). Those in the control condition were asked seven questions that were unrelated to their profession (for example, ‘‘How many hours per week do you watch television on average?’’).
After the priming questions, all subjects anonymously performed a coin tossing task that has been shown to reliably measure dishonest behaviour in an unobtrusive way 18–20 and to predict rule violation outside the laboratory 17 . The rules required subjects to take any coin, toss it ten times, and report the outcomes online. For each coin toss they could win an amount equal to approximately US$20 (as opposed to $0) depending on whether they reported ‘heads’ or ‘tails’. Subjects knew in advance whether heads or tails would yield the monetary payoff for a specific coin toss. Moreover, subjects were informed that their earnings would only be paid out if they were higher than or equal to those of a randomly drawn subject from a pilot study. We introduced this element to mimic the competitive nature of the banking profession 9 . Given that the maximum payoff is approximately $200, subjects faced a considerable incentive to cheat by misreporting the outcomes of their coin tosses.
...We conducted a manipulation check in which subjects converted word fragments into meaningful words. For example, they could complete the word fragment ‘‘ oker’’ with the bank-related word ‘‘broker’’ or an unrelated word such as ‘‘smoker’’. This allowed us to test whether the treatment increased professional identity salience. The frequency of bank-related words in the professional identity condition was increased by 40%, from 26% in the control to 36% (P 5 0.035, rank-sum test), indicating that our manipulation was successful.
Figure 1a shows the binomial distribution of earnings in the coin tossing task that would result if everyone behaved honestly, and the empirical distribution from the control condition. Both distributions closely overlap, suggesting that the control group behaved mostly honestly. On average, they reported successful coin flips in 51.6% of the cases, which is not significantly different from 50% (95% confidence interval: 48%, 56%). By contrast, the bank employees were substantially more dishonest in the professional identity condition (Fig. 1b). On average, they reported 58.2% successful coin flips, which is significantly above chance (95% confidence interval: 53%, 63%) and significantly higher than the success rate reported by the control group (P 5 0.033, rank-sum test). Figure 1 shows that the treatment effect appears to be driven by two factors: (1) a higher fraction of subjects claiming the maximum earnings; and (2) an increase in incomplete cheating (that is, reporting 6, 7 and 8 successful coin flips). Assuming that subjects did not cheat to their disadvantage, the rate of misreporting is 16% in the professional identity condition. Alternatively, we can compute the fraction of subjects who cheated, which is 26% (Supplementary Methods).
Regression analysis (Extended Data Table 1) shows that the treatment effect is robust even when we control for a large set of individual characteristics such as age, gender, education, income, and nationality (P 5 0.034, Wald test). When also controlling for business unit and experience in the banking industry, we find that employees in core business units were more dishonest than those in support units (P 5 0.008, Wald test). However, the treatment effect is not stronger in these units because the interaction between the professional identity condition and working in a core unit is not significant (P 5 0.960, Wald test).
"Extreme Wealth Is Bad for Everyone—Especially the Wealthy", review of Billionaires: Reflections on the Upper Crust by Darrell M. West:
In yet another study, the Berkeley researchers invited a cross section of the population into their lab and marched them through a series of tasks. Upon leaving the laboratory testing room the subjects passed a big jar of candy. The richer the person, the more likely he was to reach in and take candy from the jar—and ignore the big sign on the jar that said the candy was for the children who passed through the department. Maybe my favorite study done by the Berkeley team rigged a game with cash prizes in favor of one of the players, and then showed how that person, as he grows richer, becomes more likely to cheat...A team of researchers at the New York State Psychiatric Institute surveyed 43,000 Americans and found that, by some wide margin, the rich were more likely to shoplift than the poor. Another study, by a coalition of nonprofits called the Independent Sector, revealed that people with incomes below twenty-five grand give away, on average, 4.2 percent of their income, while those earning more than 150 grand a year give away only 2.7 percent. A UCLA neuroscientist named Keely Muscatell has published an interesting paper showing that wealth quiets the nerves in the brain associated with empathy: if you show rich people and poor people pictures of kids with cancer, the poor people’s brains exhibit a great deal more activity than the rich people’s. (An inability to empathize with others has just got to be a disadvantage for any rich person seeking political office, at least outside of New York City.) “As you move up the class ladder,” says Keltner, “you are more likely to violate the rules of the road, to lie, to cheat, to take candy from kids, to shoplift, and to be tightfisted in giving to others. Straightforward economic analyses have trouble making sense of this pattern of results.”...Not long ago an enterprising professor at the Harvard Business School named Mike Norton persuaded a big investment bank to let him survey the bank’s rich clients. (The poor people in the survey were millionaires.) In a forthcoming paper, Norton and his colleagues track the effects of getting money on the happiness of people who already have a lot of it: a rich person getting even richer experiences zero gain in happiness. That’s not all that surprising; it’s what Norton asked next that led to an interesting insight. He asked these rich people how happy they were at any given moment. Then he asked them how much money they would need to be even happier. “All of them said they needed two to three times more than they had to feel happier,” says Norton.
Men are in more positions of power than women or children. And by more, I mean across all cultures and all times and by a large margin. This was not stated in the above. Stating so might further illuminate the psychology of power.
There have been matriarchal cultures around (even though there have been so few of them that the spellchecker in my phone wants to correct that word to "patriarchal").
From army1987's link:
Most anthropologists hold that there are no known societies that are unambiguously matriarchal, but possible exceptions include the Iroquois, in whose society mothers exercise central moral and political roles.
However, this reluctance to accept the existence of matriarchies might be based on a specific, culturally biased notion of how to define 'matriarchy': because in a patriarchy 'men rule over women', a matriarchy has frequently been conceptualized as 'women ruling over men', whereas in reality women-centered societies are - apparently without exception - egalitarian.
In other words, there isn't a trivial symmetry between those societies that are called "patriarchy" and those that are called "matriarchy".
Feminism is necessary because of auto-correct feature that suggests closely related words that are used more often?
The word "patriarchy" and its derivatives are used extensively by feminists and feminist scholars. If anything, the fact that the word "patriarchy" pops up more often can indicate that there is more awareness of current and historic gender asymmetry. Also, the word patriarchy is bound to be used more often simply due to historical context.
There are legitimate reasons for the feminist movement to continue. This is not one of them.
I was making a joke (hence the smiley).
There are legitimate reasons for the feminist movement to continue. This is not one of them.
I thoroughly agree and consider myself a feminist.
I've seen too many comments like yours on Facebook or on Reddit without a hint of irony to think that it's a joke. Or maybe I'm just terribly dull when it comes to differentiating what is and isn't humor.
I suspect it's the latter.
I think it's fair to say that most of us here would prefer not to have most Reddit or Facebook users included on this site, the whole "well-kept garden" thing. I like to think LW continues to maintain a pretty high standard when it comes to keeping the sanity waterline high.
No problem; even before your comment I considered adding a disclaimer so that people wouldn't misinterpret it as a slam against feminism. (The downvote on the great-grandparent wasn't from me, by the way.)
For this to illuminate the psychology of power, we'd first have to be able to accurately articulate the differences between "men" and "women" (the quotes are because I understand those terms to be gender roles, which makes universals tricky; I still don't know all the true differences between males and females).
Very nice.
I was reminded of this golden oldie from the '90's:
"Bill Clinton is an extraordinarily good liar." --Larry Nichols
Based on observing my own thoughts, I strongly suspect there's an Asch conformity-type effect for high status folks, where the opinions of high-status folks end up getting disproportionate weight in your beliefs just because they're high status. (The fact that philosophers have identified "appeals to authority" as frequently fallacious is additional evidence.) Is anyone aware of any research on this?
The phrase "warning, Stapel" should be linked to the explanatory post.
Luke/SI asked me to look into what the academic literature might have to say about people in positions of power. This is a summary of some of the recent psychology results.
The powerful or elite are: fast-planning abstract thinkers who take action (1) in order to pursue single/minimal objectives, are in favor of strict rules for their stereotyped out-group underlings (2) but are rationalizing (3) & hypocritical when it serves their interests (4), especially when they feel secure in their power. They break social norms (5, 6) or ignore context (1) which turns out to be worsened by disclosure of conflicts of interest (7), and lie fluently without mental or physiological stress (6).
What are powerful members good for? They can help in shifting among equilibria: solving coordination problems or inducing contributions towards public goods (8), and their abstracted Far perspective can be better than the concrete Near of the weak (9).
These benefits may not exceed the costs (is inducing contributions all that useful with improved market mechanisms like assurance contracts - made increasingly famous thanks to Kickstarter?) Now, to forestall objections from someone like Robin Hanson that these traits - if negative - can be ameliorated by improved technology and organizations and the rest just represents our egalitarian forager prejudice against the elites and corporations who gave us the wealthy modern world, I would point out that these traits look like they would be quite effective at maximizing utility and some selected for in future settings…
(Additional cautions include that, in order to control for all sorts of confounds, these are generally small WEIRD samples in laboratory or university settings involving small-scale power shifts, priming, or other cues; as such, all the usual criticisms apply.)
1 Notes
2 References
“Power increases hypocrisy: Moralizing in reasoning, immorality in behavior”, Lammers et al 2010; warning, Stapel! But Lammers says committee cleared this paper.
“Moral Hypocrisy, Power and Social Preferences”, Rustichini & Villeval 2012:
“Breaking the Rules to Rise to Power: How Norm Violators Gain Power in the Eyes of Others”, Kleef et al 2011:
“Morality and Psychological Distance: A Construal Level Theory Perspective”, Eyal & Liberman:
“People with Power are Better Liars”, Carney et al 2010:
“Psychological perspectives on the fiduciary business”, Donald C. Langevoort
“The Dirt on Coming Clean: Perverse Effects of Disclosing Conflicts of Interest”, Cain et al 2005
“When Sunlight Fails to Disinfect: Understanding the Perverse Effects of Disclosing Conflicts of Interest”, Cain et al 2011
“Power Posing: Brief Nonverbal Displays Affect Neuroendocrine Levels and Risk Tolerance” Carney et al 2010
“Reality at Odds With Perceptions: Narcissistic Leaders and Group Performance”, Nevicka et al 2011:
“How quickly can you detect it? Power facilitates attentional orienting”, Slabu et al
“You focus on the forest when you’re in charge of the trees: Power priming and abstract information processing”, Smith& Trope 2006
“Powerful People Make Good Decisions Even When They Consciously Think”, Smith et al 2008
“Cooperation and Status in Organizations”, Eckel et al 2010
Another good set of studies focusing on rich/powerful behavior.
2 of the primary researchers write in a 2012 NYT op-ed “Greed Prevents Good”
Relevant studies:
Kraus & Keltner 2009, “Signs of socioeconomic status: a thin-slicing approach”:
Consistent with the previously cited studies about how acting rude or defecting is perceived as power.Kraus et al 2010 “Social Class, Contextualism, and Empathic Accuracy”:
See the previous discussions of blame, self-centeredness, lack of empathy, and rule-breaking; related: fundamental attribution bias.Stellar et al 2012, “Class and compassion: socioeconomic factors predict responses to suffering”:
Piff et al 2012, “Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior”: