Research in cognitive science reveals the former First Lady is right: Power exposes your true character. It releases inhibitions and sets your inner self free. If you’re a jerk when you gain power, you’ll become more of one. If you’re a mensch, you’ll get nicer. So if you happen to all of a sudden become president, or at least president of your lab or book club, what inner self will come out? [...]
It’s no surprise the traits of narcissism and Machiavellianism are stoked by power. A German study comparing 76 inmates convicted of high-level white-collar crimes with 150 managers on the outside found that the criminals were more narcissistic.7 A Dutch study published last year found that among 225 managers, those scoring higher on Machiavellianism were rated by their subordinates as abusive (“Our supervisor ridicules us”). [...]
Culture of origin can shape how individualistic or communal you are—and how you use power. Hispanic immigrants, on average, have been found to be more collectivistic than European Americans, more inclined to use power to help people, and less inclined to use it to take advantage of others.14 Priming European Americans to feel powerful increased the mental accessibility of words related to entitlement, but priming Asian Americans to feel powerful conjured responsibility.15 And while feeling powerful increased selfishness in European Americans, it reduced it in Asian Americans. [...]
In short, when people obtain power, don’t expect them to behave dramatically differently from how they behaved before. Nice people don’t suddenly become tyrants, and jerks don’t automatically become servants. How people behave when few people are watching them is a good indicator of how they’ll act when everyone is.
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