Over recent weeks, the UK parliament has been beset by accusations about powerful men sexually harassing female MPs, journalists and party activists.
Those revelations followed hard on the heels of similar claims levelled against big names in Hollywood. Most recently, the leak of financial documents known as the “Paradise Papers” exposed a network of tax-avoidance schemes used by the world’s super-rich and famous.
A cascade of damning revelations about those in positions of authority, high-level instances of sleaze, avariciousness and dishonesty is hardly new of course. In 1887, the historian Lord Acton famously wrote: “Power tends to corrupt…”
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This latest clutch of scandals seems another depressing example of the apparent connection between unethical behaviour and the holding of power. What is the truth about that relationship?
Unleash the beast
A number of studies suggest that when people obtain the whip-hand over others, it can unleash an unsavoury side of their personality. The most famous example is the 1971 , in which one group of students were assigned to serve as prison guards over another group. The experiment was halted after people assigned as guards began to abuse those in their charge.
Similarly, a in which participants were asked to play a “dictator game” found that even those who started the experiment with good intentions weren’t immune to power’s corrupting influence.
The “dictators” in the study were each given a pot of money and told to spend it as they wished. The researchers found that the more power and influence participants were given, the greater the likelihood that they would act with avarice.
Does this absolve the powerful in some way? No. There is also evidence to suggest that, rather than possessing an ability to corrupt all it touches, power amplifies traits that were there to begin with.
A 2012 study found that . When a participant thought of themselves as compassionate, fair and generous, granting them perceived power resulted in them making more community-centred choices.
Liberating the true self
“Power isn’t corrupting; it’s freeing,” Joe Magee, a power researcher and professor of management at New York University, recently . “What power does is that it liberates the true self to emerge,” Magee added. In other words, power removes the social filter through which we tend to moderate our behaviour. A person who goes on to use power for corrupt ends was probably corrupt before he or she obtained power.
Part of the problem may be that the less altruistic are perhaps inclined to seek power more single-mindedly than more altruistic people.
George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm is often held up as an allegory on the corrupting nature of power. Yet the first description of Napoleon in the book – the Berkshire boar who becomes drunk on power and eventually betrays the revolution – is of a “fierce-looking” boar “with a reputation for getting his own way”.
Power can corrupt; yet there is nothing inevitable about the process. Those currently being dragged over the coals for wrongdoing are being brought low by their own choices.
Power didn’t make them do it; but it may have led them to believe they could get away with it. The answer is not to do away with power, but to redouble efforts to ensure those at the top have no hiding place.
