As the game progressed, and the electric shocks became stronger, sounds of discomfort from the contestant on the electric chair turned into screams of pain. Some of the players hesitated as they heard their teammate saying they wanted to stop and demanded to be let out. Yet the host insisted the questioner continue: “The rules say you must go on.” “Go on, we are taking all responsibility for this.” Clapping and chanting, the audience urged that the game go forward, too. What neither the audience nor the contestants asking the questions knew was that this wasn’t a real TV show. The player in the box was an actor, and no electric shocks were administered. This was an experiment, staged to examine how far people would be willing to go in obeying the orders of the TV host. It was inspired by another famous and controversial study that Stanley Milgram, a twenty-eight-year-old, newly appointed psychology professor at Yale University, launched in 1961.
That year, television was saturated with live coverage of the war trial of Adolf Eichmann, who had played a leading role in implementing Hitler’s “Final Solution.” Professor Milgram, the son of Jewish immigrants, had closely followed the fates of Nazi leaders after the war, noticing that the accused, like Eichmann, often justified their actions by saying they were simply carrying out the orders of superior officers. How much, he wondered, could that basic dynamic—obedience to authority—explain the behavior of Eichmann and others who were complicit in the Holocaust’s atrocities. So Milgram set up an experiment in the psychology lab at Yale: Participants, who thought they were taking part in a study on memory and learning, were asked by a scientist to administer an electric shock when the person they were paired with made a mistake. At the time, the majority of the study participants—a full 65 percent—complied with the experimenter’s instructions and administered the maximum 450-volt shock.6 “With numbing regularity,” Milgram concluded, “good people were seen to knuckle under the demands of authority and to perform actions that were callous and severe.”7
What do you think happened with the French TV show? This time the authority figure wasn’t a scientist at a top university. Is the power of TV comparable to that of science? The results of the experiment surprised even the social psychologists who had designed it: 72 percent of the contestants ended up administering the maximum electric shock!8 Nor were the participants all young men as was the case at Yale. Of the seventy-six participants, the gender divide was almost fifty-fifty and the mean age of the group was 39.7 years old. Still haunted by the experience, one of the contestants reflected, “I wanted to stop the whole time, but I just couldn’t. I didn’t have the will to do it. And that goes against my nature.”9 This is what obedience to authority can do: lead us to violate our values.10
Would we dare to disobey if we were in Milgram’s experiment, or a contestant on the French TV show? Would we have denounced the power hierarchy that the Nazis established if we had been born into a middle-class German family circa 1920? We like to think so, but these experiments call for humility. When political philosopher Hannah Arendt attended Eichmann’s trial to see for herself the so-called architect of the Holocaust, she found a man who was “terribly and terrifyingly normal.”11 She concluded that he was less an ideologue than a bureaucrat, following orders with no regard for their consequences. “The banality of evil,” as Arendt famously described it, is the ease with which authority can transform someone like Eichmann into an instrument of unspeakable harm. Banality does not excuse evil. As Arendt wrote, “in politics, obedience and support are the same.” The lesson for us is that we need to acknowledge the lure of authority, remain alert to its temptations, and summon the courage to disobey when necessary. Power is sticky in no small part because authority can be difficult to resist.
AN INFERNAL TRIO
Power hierarchies are also sticky because those in power actively work, sometimes unconsciously, to maintain the status quo. Social psychologists have identified several mechanisms that lead the powerful to protect and reinforce their position.12 Three are particularly important: a lack of empathy, an enhanced sense of agency, and a tendency to see one’s own actions as legitimate.
We saw in chapter 2 that people who feel more powerful tend to become more self-focused, and therefore less empathetic.13 Being unaware of or indifferent to another person’s feelings and thoughts makes it easier to care only for oneself, hoarding resources instead of sharing them with others. Power persists, therefore, because the powerful lose sight of their interdependence with others, who need resources just as they do.
Power also gives us a greater sense of control, encouraging us to act. In one experiment, psychologists told participants to write about either a time when they felt powerful, or a time when they felt powerless.14 Here’s the trick: While they were writing, every participant was seated alone, at a desk, with a fan blowing directly onto their face. The experiment wasn’t about what they were writing, it was about that annoying fan. Would they move it? Turn it off altogether? Or continue to let it blow while they tried to hold down the paper so that they could write? It turns out that those who were writing about feeling powerful were much more likely to turn the fan off or move it out of the way than those responding to the powerlessness prompt, who continued to work with the fan blowing at them. Though the example may seem trivial, the insight is not. People who feel powerful are more likely to disrupt the status quo in order to make themselves comfortable. This study is just one of many showing that those who feel powerful are more prone to acting in response to affronts and to implementing plans and taking risks. Those who feel powerless, by contrast, are more apt to accept the situation, unpleasant as it may be.
Finally, when they do act, powerful people are more likely to consider their actions legitimate even when they are unethical or illegal.15 They convince themselves that they have earned their position—despite evidence to the contrary16—and, therefore, since their power is justified, they are entitled to keep it and use it as they see fit. In one experiment, participants were shown a graph that portrayed changes in average U.S. family income over the last thirty years. Asked why the average income for households in the top 5 percent had skyrocketed, while that of every other household flatlined, participants who considered themselves of higher status were more likely to attribute this income gap to their ability and hard work; they had rightfully earned their privileged position!17
In sum, power increases people’s propensity to act, as well as their sense of entitlement, while decreasing their ability to empathize with others. This is a risky trio, as it makes the powerful particularly adept at justifying their actions to themselves and others, and behaving in ways that give them greater control over valued resources, which in turn reinforces their power.18
WHY THE DISADVANTAGED REPRODUCE THE STATUS QUO, TOO
Those at the top are not the only people who contribute to keeping power hierarchies solidly in place. Counterintuitive as this may seem, just as the powerful defend the status quo, research finds that those harmed by the status quo tend to do the same, often unconsciously.19 This in no way means that the power-disadvantaged are to blame for their situation; but it does help explain how these disparities are reproduced and reinforced.
Powerlessness, by definition, deprives people of control over valued resources. For the disadvantaged, then, life is rife with uncertainty and deprivation, which undermine their sense of safety. The psychological effect of this precariousness and lack of control is to seek order, predictability, and stability. Paradoxically, this motivates the powerless to see the current system as good, fair, inevitable, even desirable, because for those in a situation of dependence, there is comfort in seeing the world as predictable and the power distribution as legitimate. This is why the powerless, consciously and unconsciously, tend to rationalize and justify the system as it stands, even if it goes against their interests.20
The justification of the status quo as legitimate manifests itself in many ways. Employees who feel more financially dependent on their job tend to accept the decisi
ons and instructions of their supervisor as more legitimate, regardless of their supervisor’s fairness. In the lab, participants who are experimentally induced to feel powerless are more likely to think that society is fair and people usually get what they deserve.21 In U.S. national survey studies, low-income respondents were more likely than high-income respondents to believe that large differences in pay are needed to foster motivation and effort.22
Not only can the power disadvantaged come to believe that the current system is the natural order of things, but others’ perception of them can reinforce their belief that they are not “good enough,” leading them to behave in ways that confirm this perception. This self-fulfilling prophecy is what happened in Jane Elliott’s exercise—and what happens in classrooms and workplaces everywhere.23 When the blue-eyed students were at the bottom of the hierarchy, they struggled to perform tasks that they usually completed with ease. They had quickly internalized the legitimizing story about brown-eyed superiority and their own inferiority in ways that negatively affected their performance. This behavioral confirmation response, whereby people adapt their behavior in ways that end up fulfilling the expectations others hold about them,24 further contributes to maintaining power hierarchies.
This dynamic can fuel a vicious cycle as those in power subsequently use the poor performance of the powerless to legitimize their position, making the status quo even stickier. The powerless then come to expect they will remain powerless and align their behavior accordingly. Hopelessness and disempowerment lead to paralysis or inaction, conspiring to maintain the status quo.25
THE POWER OF STORIES
We can now understand why both the power-advantaged and the power-disadvantaged reproduce the status quo; but we are still missing a critical factor in the persistence of power hierarchies: the stories we tell to justify the status quo. Look back in time, and you will notice that those who placed themselves at the top didn’t simply declare that they were at the top. They came up with narratives that justified their position.26 Stories are one of the most effective vehicles of persuasion because they appeal not only to reason, but also to our emotions.27
Taking on different shapes and forms, legitimizing stories have observable similarities throughout history and across the world. Leaning on religious beliefs is one consistent feature.28 In the eighteenth century BCE, King Hammurabi created the Code of Hammurabi, a set of 282 laws governing everything from theft and trade to incest and family life.29 Proclaiming that the gods had called him to spread justice in the land of Babylon, Hammurabi made sure that he and the code were imbued with uncontested legitimacy. While the exact details of the code’s distribution are lost to history, it is thought to have been spread via clay tablets and stone slabs, or steles. One of these steles—found in Susa and the source of most of what we know about the code—makes Hammurabi’s special connection with divinity clear: At the very top of the stele, before the text with the laws begins, we see him receiving the code from the Babylonian god Shamash.30 One of the oldest bodies of law in the world, Hammurabi’s Code created clear power hierarchies between men and women, as well as between the rich, the (poor) free people, and the enslaved.31 Legitimized by the story of the king’s godly connections, this social order was enshrined in laws that perpetuated these hierarchies long after Hammurabi’s death.
Hammurabi was hardly alone. Julius Caesar claimed he was a descendant of the goddess Venus, while the kings of France and England justified their absolute power over their subjects for centuries by citing its divine source. Monarchs used stories of miracles—like the “royal touch,” reputed to cure scrofula—to add to their mystique.32 News of these healing miracles spread throughout the monarchs’ respective regions as part of propaganda campaigns, which included written reports, sermons, and public ceremonies, all reinforcing the divine origins of their power.33 Paintings and engravings were also used to demonstrate rulers’ benevolence and power. Images of the monarch dressed in imposing robes and laying divine hands on your compatriots afflicted with a disfiguring disease might make you think twice before avoiding your taxes or, God forbid, openly rebelling.
Myths about physical or biological differences among human beings have also provided fertile ground for stories justifying power hierarchies. The belief that women are not as capable as men, for example, has been spread and reinforced by stories that were made up to justify patriarchal systems for millennia.34 The English classicist Mary Beard opens the manifesto Women & Power with a story that is the “first recorded example of a man telling a woman to ‘shut up’ ”—the beginning of Homer’s Odyssey, when Odysseus’s son Telemachus tells his mother, Penelope, to “go back up into your quarters” because “speech will be the business of men.”35
As scientific knowledge rose to prominence, some fueled these stories with pseudo-scientific findings. In the early 1900s, to cite but one example, biologists Sir Patrick Geddes and Sir John Arthur Thomson concluded that since male sperm were small and active, while female ova tended to be big and relatively inert, men were naturally “more active, energetic, eager, passionate, and variable,” while females were “more passive, conservative, sluggish, and stable.”36 Today, the scientific community rejects such claims as absurd, while research finds that cognitive differences between females and males, if they exist at all, are small and not a function of biology.37
In fact, decades of research on behavioral differences across genders have shown that many of these differences are related to differential access to power.38 As we’ve seen, when existing power hierarchies exclude a group from power, its members tend unconsciously to behave in ways that reproduce these hierarchies. For women, this has meant accepting inferior treatment and adjusting their behaviors accordingly, while men, who have been in power for centuries and whose behavior is shaped by the “infernal trio,” have also contributed to reinforcing the status quo. The observed behavioral differences between men and women are thus the result not so much of biological differences as of the stories that have shaped our perceptions and, in turn, our behaviors. As Simone de Beauvoir put it, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”39
Stories using pseudo-scientific evidence to justify differential treatment are particularly pernicious and hardly limited to women. English polymath Sir Francis Galton coined the term “eugenics” in 1883, and his ideas spawned a movement across the world that was particularly vibrant in the United States.40 Eugenicists claimed that “feeble-mindedness,” supposedly endemic in the poor and immigrants, was a problem of heredity. This legitimizing narrative, which was never backed by any rigorous science, was then used to justify the position of the poor at the bottom of the social hierarchy, not to mention the sterilization of people considered inferior, lest their defective genes degrade humanity’s gene pool. Even though science has since established that poverty is largely a societal problem, not a genetic one, the narrative that the poor are lazy and not as smart as others, and therefore deserve to be where they are, continues to be used to justify inequality.
More recently, another legitimizing myth has become dominant: that of meritocracy.41 In a meritocracy, power supposedly accrues to the most talented and the hardest-working, irrespective of, say, demographics, family connections, or inherited wealth—thereby implying that those who fail to rise lack the necessary ability or elbow grease.42 The myth of meritocracy conveyed through stories of self-made men and, lately, women, who started from nothing but ascended the power hierarchy entirely on their own through their extraordinary abilities and courage, has become especially prevalent in many capitalist societies.43 Books, movies, and the media reinforce this narrative in their portrayals of people whose financial worth often serves as a proxy for success.
Of course, a person’s competence and effort make a difference and deserve to be recognized; but the issue with meritocracy is the assumption that the rules of the game are the same for everyone, when they are not. As economists and sociologists have long established, the reason some people a
re poor is not because they are inherently less able or less intelligent.44 Instead, they are constrained primarily by the unequal distribution of society’s resources. They cannot access the quality schools, networks of influence, or résumé-building extracurricular activities that those at the top easily access. Society’s emphasis on individual blame is thus often incorrect. And yet, as philosopher Michael Sandel remarked, “when the meritocratic sorting machine has done its work, those on top find it hard to resist the thought that they deserve their success and that those on the bottom deserve their place as well.”45 This is how the myth of meritocracy contributes to justifying and reinforcing current power hierarchies.
Be they rooted in religion, pseudoscience, the belief in meritocracy, or some other legitimizing myth, the stories we tell ourselves to justify the status quo can become so ingrained that eventually we take the existing hierarchies for granted.46 They become invisible, like the air we breathe. We come to think of them as “business as usual,” when it would in fact be more accurate to think of them as “politics as usual.”47 Embedded in our cultural norms, from what the media cover and how, to what is taught in schools and makes it into the history books, they seep into our social norms and into our policies, influencing what is acceptable and legal. As a result, power hierarchies effectively rig the game against those at the bottom. Even when myths are disproven, they do not instantly evaporate. Rather, they can morph into patterns of discrimination that insidiously shape and bias the expectations we have of others, without ever having met them. They become, in a word, stereotypes.
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