The Folly of Fools Read Online Free PDF Page B

times, so one could control exactly for degree of familiarity. In-group members, for example, tend to be more familiar, but independent of familiarity, they are preferred over out-group members. That males more readily associate out-group members with negative stimuli, and in-group with positive, is consistent with work on humans in which men typically are relatively more prejudiced against out-group than in-group members.

The Biases of Power
     
    It has been said that power tends to corrupt and absolute power, absolutely. This usually refers to the fact that power permits the execution of ever more selfish strategies toward which one is then “corrupted.” But psychologists have shown that power corrupts our mental processes almost at once. When a feeling of power is induced in people, they are less likely to take others’ viewpoint and more likely to center their thinking on themselves. The result is a reduced ability to comprehend how others see, think, and feel. Power, among other things, induces blindness toward others.
    The basic methodology is to induce a temporary state of mind via a so-called prime, which can be conscious or unconscious and as short as a word or considerably more detailed, as in this case. The power prime consists of asking some people to write for five minutes about a situation in which they felt powerful, supplemented by having the subjects apportion candy among a group, while the low-power prime group writes about the opposite situation and is allowed only to say the amount of candy they hope to receive.
    This modest prime produced the following striking results. When the subjects were asked to snap their right-hand fingers five times in succession and quickly write the letter E on their foreheads, an unconscious bias was revealed. Those who had been primed to feel powerless were three times as likely to write the E so that others could read it, compared to those primed to feel powerful. This effect was equally strong for the two sexes. The basic shift in focus from other to self with power was confirmed in additional work. When compared with those with a neutral prime, those with the power prime were less able to discriminate among common human facial expressions associated with fear, anger, sadness, and happiness. Again, the sexes responded similarly to the power prime, but in general women are better at making the emotional discriminations, and men are more likely to be overconfident. In short, powerful men suffer multiple deficits in their ability to apprehend the world of others correctly, due to their power and their sex. And since, at the national level, it is powerful men who usually decide for war, they have an in-built bias in the wrong direction, less oriented toward others, less inclined to value their viewpoint, with, alas, often tragic effects all the way around (see Chapter 11).
    There must be a thousand examples of power inducing male blindness, but why not look at Winston Churchill? He experienced highs and lows in his life that were often nearly absolute. One moment he was the prime minister of the UK during World War II—one of the most powerful prime ministers ever—and the next moment he is an ex–prime minister with almost no political power at all. Similar reverses were associated with World War I. At the heights of his power, he was described as dictatorial, arrogant, and intolerant, the stuff of which tyrants are made; at low power, he was seen as introspective and humble.

Moral Superiority
     
    Few variables are as important in our lives as our perceived moral status. Even more than attractiveness and competence, degree of morality is a variable of considerable importance in determining our value to others—thus it is easily subject to deceit and self-deception. Moral hypocrisy is a deep part of our nature: the tendency to judge others more harshly for the same moral infraction than we judge ourselves—or to do so for members of other groups compared to members