How Power Makes Us Cruel

Absolute power, Baron Acton said, corrupts absolutely.

But what kind of power is most corrupting?

The answer is pretty surprising: what's most psychologically dangerous is limited authority – the kind of clout that bank tellers or prison guards hold, rather than the authority of dictators.

In a forthcoming study, three researchers tried to figure out if people like the guards Abu Ghraib were more likely to abuse their authority than C.E.O.s or high-ranking politicians. Their method, (summarized nicely by Uncommon Knowledge), was to create an experiment where students were told they would be interacting with a fellow student in a business exercise and were randomly assigned to either a "Idea Producer" (high-status) role or "Worker" (low-status) role. Everyone was entered in a raffle, and each person had to select at least one task (from a list of 10, some more demeaning than others) for their partner to perform. High-power students could make this assignment without fear of repercussion, while low-power students could face retribution.

Students assigned to the low-status role but who were subsequently granted power selected the most demeaning tasks for their partners.

In the words of the authors:

We have suggested that low-status individuals are more motivated than high-status individuals to demean others, and that power frees them to do so. … This motivation to demean could stem from the negative feelings associated with failing to be seen positively by others and be aimed at boosting feelings of relative self-worth.

Put another way, the low-ranking guards at Abu Ghraib are more likely to become abusive precisely because they only have a little bit of power – and much less status than all the officers surrounding them. Officers, on the other hand, aren't insecure. They don't need to prove their authority through despotism.

So, it's not absolute power that corrupts. It's having a smidgen more than most other people, but far less than your superiors.