The Compassionate Instinct

Given the psychological and financial harm done by assholes, you’d think that most organizations would refrain from hiring them or be quick to expel these creeps once their true selves are exposed. But it’s not so simple. Although I suspect that some people are genetically predisposed to be nasty, years of research has suggested that under certain circumstances, almost any of us is susceptible to becoming an asshole. This is especially true of people who assume positions of power. Study after study has found that giving people even a little bit of power over others can induce them to abuse that power. It isn’t just a myth: power can turn any of us into assholes.

Fortunately, there’s also evidence that we can limit the negative influences of power and keep our offices civil, supportive, and even inspiring places to work. I’ve identified several strategies for combating assholes—and preventing ourselves from becoming one of them.

ARE ASSHOLES BORN OR MADE?

Yes, some assholes are born that way. But there is also strong evidence that no matter what our “personality” is, we all can turn into assholes under the wrong conditions. This happens frequently and with shocking speed and intensity when people assume powerful positions. A huge body of research—hundreds of studies—shows that when people are put in positions of power, they start talking more, taking what they want for themselves, ignoring what other people say or want, ignoring how less powerful people react to their behavior, acting more rudely, and generally treating any situation or person as a means for satisfying their own needs. What’s more, being put in positions of power often blinds them to the fact that they are acting like jerks.

One of my Stanford colleagues, Deborah Gruenfeld, has spent years studying and cataloging the effects of putting people in positions where they can lord power over others. She’s found that even tiny and trivial power advantages can rapidly change how people think and act, and usually for the worse. In one experiment, student groups of three discussed a long list of contentious social issues, things like abortion and pollution. One member was randomly assigned to the more powerful position of evaluating the recommendations made by the other two. After 30 minutes, the experimenter brought in a plate of five cookies. The more powerful students were more likely to take a second cookie, chew with their mouths open, and get crumbs on their faces and the table.

This study might sound silly, but it scares me because it shows how having just a slight power edge causes regular people to grab the goodies for themselves and act like rude pigs. I was on the receiving end of such boorish behavior a few years ago. It was at a lunch with the CEO of a profitable company who had just been ranked as one of the top corporate leaders by a famous business magazine. He treated our little group of four or five professors (all 50-plus-year-old professionals) as if we were naive and rather stupid children. Although, in theory, he was our guest, he told us where to sit and when we could talk. He interrupted several of us in mid-sentence to tell us he had heard enough or didn’t care about what we were saying. He even criticized the food we ordered, saying things like “That will make you fat.” He generally conveyed that he was our master and commander and that our job was to focus our efforts on satisfying his every whim.

The most striking part was that he seemed completely oblivious to the fact that he was bullying us and that we were offended. This is consistent with research showing that power makes it harder for people to see the world from the perspectives of others. In one recent study, Adam Galinksy of Northwestern University and his colleagues divided participants into two groups: members of one group were made to feel powerful by recalling and writing about an incident when they had power over others; the other group was asked to write about an incident in which someone had power over them. Then all the participants were told to draw the letter E on their forehead. If a person drew the E so it seemed backward to himself but legible to the rest of the world, this indicated that he had considered how others would see the letter. If the E seemed correct to himself but backward to everyone else, this suggested a failure to take other people’s perspectives into account.

Sure enough, Galinsky and his colleagues found that people who had been primed to feel powerful were nearly three times as likely to draw the E so it seemed legible to themselves but backward to others. In other words, power made them much less likely to see the world through other people’s eyes.

FIGHT THE POWER