bdsm : 5 Scientific Reasons Powerful People Will Always Suck

1.Feelings of Power Trigger a Lack of Compassion
A study in an issue of Psychological Science set out to test this idea.
The subjects were then paired up, and one was told to relay an emotionally scarring event that had happened to him. The listener was hooked up to an ECG machine, and all of his stress responses were measured.

The powerless people reacted the way you'd expect people would react when told a heart-wrenching tale. The powerful, on the other hand, felt nothing. Or at least, their responses couldn't be measured, whether they naturally felt no empathy or were just better at regulating their emotions.

The researchers had all of the subjects fill out a survey at the end and inquired about whether they'd like to stay in touch with the other experiment subjects after the experiment was over, to see if maybe they'd made any friends during this ordeal. The powerless subjects were into it. The powerful were not. They wanted nothing more to do with the stranger they'd just traded personal stories with.

2. Power Gives You a False Belief in Your Abilities
Another study found that people with power see the world more positively and are therefore more likely to take risks based on the pure blind faith that things always work out for them because they're awesome.

3. Experiments Show Power and Hypocrisy Are Linked in the Brain
It explains why so many vehemently anti-gay politicians and religious leaders are creepy sexual deviants.
A Dutch researcher mixed things up this time, using five different experiments to try to instill a sense of power in people using different methods, presumably to make sure it wasn't anything particular to a specific kind of role-playing that got the results.

No matter how the researcher went about instilling the feelings of power, the results were the same: Within minutes, a feeling of power flips a switch in the brain that says, "The rules now do not apply to me. BRING ME A WHORE."

But even stranger, the people induced to feel powerless went the opposite way -- they actually were more self-critical than they'd normally be. Think about what that says about society: The people who are already powerless, as a result feel like they're less worthy to be in power and thus stay powerless.

4.Feeling Powerful Makes It Easier to Lie
Researchers at Columbia Business School used a similar setup to the "E" experiment above, where they did a role-play that divided subjects into leaders and subordinates. Leaders were even given a fancy, large office; the underlings got a small, windowless room. All of them were then tempted to lie (they found a $100 bill and were put in a situation where they'd have to lie about it to the people running the experiment if they wanted to keep it).

5.Power and Self-Absorption Go Hand in Hand
First, researchers found that in leaderless situations, those with high opinions of themselves will take charge, for better or for worse.

Read more: 5 Scientific Reasons Powerful People Will Always Suck - Cracked.com


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