Understanding Society
If Powerful People Feel Less Connected
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
Power encourages cynicism; powerlessness breeds hesitation and self-doubt. Doug follows Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History through this self-reinforcing nocebo effect, then considers a 2018 University of Cambridge-led study of empathy. It found that women scored higher on average, but DNA did not explain that sex difference — leaving social experience, including unequal distributions of power, as a possible explanation rather than a genetic destiny.
A Note on the Original Text
Doug’s writings are presented as originally written. Spelling, punctuation, and grammatical irregularities have been retained to preserve his words and the integrity of the original record.
ORIGINAL WRITING
The content in this post is based on the book Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.
…”is it any wonder they also tend to be more cynical? One of the effects of power, myriad studies show, is that it makes you see others in a negative light. If you’re powerful it’s more likely to think most people are lazy and unreliable. That they need to be supervised and monitored, managed and regulated, censored, and told what to do. And because power makes you feel superior to other people, you’ll believe all this monitoring should be entrusted to you.
Tragically not having power has exactly the opposite effect. Psychological research shows that people who feel powerless also feel far less confident. They’re hesitant to voice an opinion. In groups, they make themselves feel smaller, and they underestimate their own intelligence.
Such feelings of uncertainty are convenient for those in power, as self-doubt makes it unlikely to strike back. Censorship becomes unnecessary, because people who lack confidence silence themselves. Here we see a nocebo in action: treat people as if they’re stupid and they’ll start to feel stupid, leading rulers to reason that the masses are too dim to think for themselves and hence they—with their vision and insight—should take charge.
But isn’t it precisely the other way around? Isn’t it power that makes us short-sighted? Once you arrive at the top, there’s less of an impetus to see things from other perspectives. There’s no imperative for empathy, because anyone you find irrational or irritating, can simply be ignored, sanctioned, locked up, or worse. Powerful people don’t have to justify their actions and therefore can afford a blinkered view.
That might also help explain why women tend to score higher than men on empathy tests. A large study at Cambridge University in 2018 found no genetic basis for this divergence, and instead attributed it to what scientists call socialization. Due to the way power has traditionally been distributed, it’s mostly be up to women to understand men. Those persistent ideas about a superior female intuition are probably rooted in the same imbalance—that women are expected to see things from a male perspective, and rarely the other way around.”