Friday, December 19, 2008

Are Power and Compassion Mutually Exclusive?


This article seems to follow naturally from yesterday's post. As usual, I have some thoughts about this below the article.

Are power and compassion mutually exclusive?

The fact that many cultures emphasize the concept of "noblesse oblige" (the idea that with great power and prestige come responsibilities) suggests that power may diminish a tendency to help others. Psychologist Gerben A. van Kleef (University of Amsterdam) and his colleagues from University of California, Berkeley, examined how power influences emotional reactions to the suffering of others.

A group of undergraduates completed questionnaires about their personal sense of power, which identified them to the researchers as either being high-power or low-power. The students were then randomly paired up and had to tell their partner about an event which had caused them emotional suffering and pain. Their partners then rated their emotions after hearing the story. In addition, the researchers were interested in seeing if there were physical differences in the way high-power people and low-power people responded to others' suffering; specifically they wanted to test if high-powered individuals would exhibit greater autonomic emotion regulation [or respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) reactivity]. When we are faced with psychological stress, our RSA reactivity increases, resulting in a lower heart rate and a calmed, relaxed feeling. To measure RSA reactivity and heart rates, all of the participants were connected to electrocardiogram (ECG) machines during the experiment.

The results, reported in the December issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reveal that individuals with a higher sense of power experienced less compassion and distress when confronted with another's suffering, compared to low-power individuals. In addition, high-power individuals' RSA reactivity increased (as indicated by lower heart rate) as they listened to the painful stories; that is, high power participants showed more autonomic emotion regulation, which buffered against their partner's distress.

Analysis of the participants' final surveys (where they rated their thoughts about their partners) revealed that high-power individuals reported a weaker desire to get to know and establish a friendship with their partner. In other words, powerful people were not motivated to establish a relationship with distressed individuals. This idea is supported by the fact that the distressed participants reported less of a social connection with high-power partners compared to low-power partners. The authors suggest that powerful people's tendency to show less compassion and distress towards others reinforces their social power.

These results do not just apply to how powerful people react to strangers; the authors note that this study "suggests that high-power individuals may suffer in interpersonal relationships because of their diminished capacity for compassion and empathy. The many benefits enjoyed by people with power may not translate to the interpersonal realm."

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For more information about this study, please contact: Gerben A. van Kleef (g.a.vankleef@uva.nl)

For a copy of the article "Power, Distress and Compassion: Turning a Blind Eye to the Suffering of Others" and access to other Psychological Science research findings, please contact Barbara Isanski at 202-293-9300 or bisanski@psychologicalscience.org

Wow, that would seem to be a pretty depressing study, if taken at face value.

The important question is less about who has power, but where are these people developmentally? And how much empathy are they capable of holding?

The reality is that power and compassion are NOT mutually exclusive, but the degree to which that is true depends on the developmental stage of those who hold the power.

Power, in general, is not confined to one or another developmental stage, although the Red Meme in Spiral Dynamics is often associated with the quest for power in an egocentric way. And this is an important point - the subjects in the study who held power seemed from the description to be more egocentric.

Here again, were the important findings:
The results, reported in the December issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reveal that individuals with a higher sense of power experienced less compassion and distress when confronted with another's suffering, compared to low-power individuals. In addition, high-power individuals' RSA reactivity increased (as indicated by lower heart rate) as they listened to the painful stories; that is, high power participants showed more autonomic emotion regulation, which buffered against their partner's distress.
Essentially, these subjects -- if we consider the spectrum to be egocentricity at the low end and empathy at the high end -- are lower on the developmental scale.

So really, this issue is not power, it's the developmental line best expressed as egocentricity vs empathy. We really need better research models that can encompass a more integrated understanding of human beings.


1 comment:

Booster said...

In leadership training in the military, we were trained to maintain an emotional and personal barrier to our subordinates. The logic being, that a leader emotionally attached to his subs would be less likely to make the "best" decisions (from a mission success perspective) when the safety of his troops was threatened.

In essence, compassion and empathy were presented obstacles in carrying out one's orders.

Whenever a mission (or collective good) conflicts with an individual good (in this case personal compassion for those affected), wisdom is required to reconcile the two and see the Most Correct Action.