Behavioural Geopolitics: How power changes people

Over the Christmas break, I fell into a rabbit hole and read a whole lot of papers on the link between behavioural economics, social psychology, and geopolitics. It was all triggered by an article by Caleb Pomeroy in Foreign Affairs Magazine, which was published on the 24^th of December (so blame them for me reading on geopolitics over Christmas). I am certainly not an expert on the topic of behavioural geopolitics, but I wanted to use today and the next three Wednesdays in February to summarise what I have learned in a little series on behavioural geopolitics. Because I am a newbie to this field, please take my summary with a grain of salt. It is likely I may have missed some nuances and issues.

So, join me throughout this month on a journey into how power changes people, why and how power corrupts, why powerful countries may feel more threatened by their neighbours and what all that means for the US, Europe, Russia, and China.

Lord Acton already knew that “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. But there is an entire literature that ironically comes out of studying CEOs and other powerful executives that shows how power changes the behaviour of people.

These behavioural changes can be beneficial, like taking the initiative. In conversations, more powerful people tend to make the opening statement or make the first argument. In a commercial setting, more powerful people also tend to initiate negotiations. Of course, this can turn into a detrimental behavioural pattern as well, since more powerful people tend to interrupt less powerful people in a team setting or in a discussion or talk over less powerful people in the room.

Powerful people think differently

More importantly, powerful people tend to process information and think differently. CEOs and other powerful people in business tend to use more of what Daniel Kahneman called System 1 thinking. Intuitive and fast rather than deliberate and slow.

Erik Dane and Michael Pratt argued that a key demand on managers in companies is that they have to make decisions fast and under a lot of uncertainty. Hence, relying on their intuition may be advantageous for powerful people in organisations.

Indeed, this study by Ana Guinote showed in a series of experiments that powerful people in organisations tend to focus more on the core information and inputs to solve a specific problem and blend out peripheral information as noise. This increased focus, in turn, led to faster action and greater flexibility when dealing with many challenges simultaneously.

This is the positive change that people experience when they become powerful. It is not an effect where people who are naturally more dominant or better able to focus rise to the top. Instead, you can take a random person in a lab setting and ‘give her power’, and the person will feel and act more confidently and proactively by focusing on the core information needed to solve a challenge.

Indeed, experiments show that it is not necessarily the most competent people who become more powerful in an organisation. Yes, more competent people tend to become more powerful in organisations. Still, this study showed that people who appear intelligent have an even easier time accumulating power in an organisation. The one quote that stuck with me the most (and depressed me the most) comes from this study from 2004:

“[I]t may be the social self—how leaders are perceived by others—rather than scores on objective instruments that is more important in attaining leadership roles […] It is possible the validity observed for perceptual measures of intelligence reflects the fact that leadership status is afforded to those who effectively manage a reputation for intelligence.”

Translation: People who are clubbable and appear intelligent will accumulate more power in organisations than people who are competent. And in turn, when people become more powerful in organisations, other people in the organisation will perceive them as more intelligent and competent.

The behavioural downside of power

As people become more powerful in organisations, their psychology changes. We have already seen that they tend to rely more on the core information at hand and use faster, intuitive thought processes rather than slow, deliberate processes.

Indeed, this study shows that this comes at high costs for the organisation. Because powerful people in organisations tend to rely more on their gut feelings, they also overemphasise their personal experiences. Hence, they tend to act in line with their previously held beliefs, rather than fully examine a situation and try to come up with the best solution.

This can go as far as ‘dehumanising’ subordinates. Powerful people in organisations tend to know less about their subordinates than their subordinates know about them. On the one hand, this reflects the fact that subordinates need to manage around their bosses, so they better know what they like and don’t like and how best to present an argument to them. But there is also an active component of dehumanisation and stereotyping of subordinates by the bosses at play, as this study showed in two rather depressing experiments.

Finally, power does corrupt. This study, for example, shows that the political leaning of CEOs influences a company’s corporate social responsibility actions. CEOs direct company resources to their pet projects and decide which corporate social responsibility actions are worth their while. Blake Ashforth and Vikas Anand discuss all the pathways and mechanisms by which corrupt behaviour can become normalised in an organisation and how an organisation needs to take active steps to contain these tendencies.

This is why good governance is so important. If you give a CEO too much power, he or she will eventually abuse the power to enrich themselves or take on too many risks and may cost the company and its shareholders dearly.

Power does change people. It changes their self-esteem and then their behaviour and their perception of others. This is true in a business setting, where these effects have been documented via lab experiments. Still, it is also true in the corridors of political power from Washington to Westminster, and from Beijing to Berlin.

Next Wednesday, I will discuss not just how absolute power in politics corrupts absolutely, but why unchecked power almost inevitably leads to a corrupt bureaucracy. This is where we leave the realm of business and organisations in general behind and jump into the realm of geopolitics.