Power, for All

by Julie Battilana

  3 Paul Rozin and Edward B. Royzman, “Negativity Bias, Negativity Dominance, and Contagion,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 5, no. 4 (2001): 296–320.

  4 Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 51.

  5 Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis (Psychology Press, 2004), 12.

  6 Miriam Rykles in discussion with the authors, April 2019 and February 2020.

  7 For an overview, see Dacher Keltner, The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence (New York: Penguin Press, 2016). See also Adam D. Galinsky et al., “Power and Perspectives Not Taken,” Psychological Science 17, no. 12 (2006): 1068–74; Deborah H. Gruenfeld et al., “Power and the Objectification of Social Targets,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 95, no. 1 (2008): 111–27; Joe C. Magee and Pamela K. Smith, “The Social Distance Theory of Power,” Personality and Social Psychology Review, no. 2 (May 2013): 158–86.

  8 Simon Baron-Cohen et al., “The ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes’ Test Revised Version: A Study with Normal Adults, and Adults with Asperger Syndrome or High-Functioning Autism,” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines 42, no. 2 (2001): 241–51.

  9 Michael W. Kraus et al., “Social Class, Contextualism, and Empathic Accuracy,” Psychological Science 21, no. 11 (2010): 1716–23.

  10 Cameron Anderson et al., “The Local-Ladder Effect: Social Status and Subjective Well-Being,” Psychological Science 23, no. 7 (2012): 764–71.

  11 Vanessa K. Bohns and Scott S. Wiltermuth, “It Hurts When I Do This (or You Do That): Posture and Pain Tolerance,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 48, no. 1 (2012): 341–5.

  12 Petra C. Schmid and Marianne Schmid Mast, “Power Increases Performance in a Social Evaluation Situation as a Result of Decreased Stress Responses,” European Journal of Social Psychology 43, no. 3 (2013): 201–11.

  13 Cameron Anderson and Adam D. Galinsky, “Power, Optimism, and Risk-Taking,” European Journal of Social Psychology 36, no. 4 (2006): 511–536.

  14 Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (Mt. Kisco, NY: Moyer Bell, 1988).

  15 Graves, The Greek Myths, 313.

  16 Dacher Keltner et al., “Power, Approach, and Inhibition,” Psychological Review 110, no. 2 (2003): 265–84; Nathanael J. Fast et al., “Illusory Control: A Generative Force Behind Power’s Far-Reaching Effects,” Psychological Science 20, no. 4 (2009): 502–8.

  17 Fast et al., “Illusory Control,” 502–8.

  18 David Gergen in discussion with the authors, June 2019. See also David Gergen, Eyewitness to Power: The Essence of Leadership Nixon to Clinton (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

  19 François Hollande in discussion with the authors, July 2019.

  20 “Acton-Creighton Correspondence” (1887), accessed December 9, 2020, https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/acton-acton-creighton-correspondence.

  21 Moral purity is a psychological state derived from a person’s view of the self as clean from a moral standpoint and through which a person feels virtuous. Research on embodied cognition has shown that people express a greater desire to cleanse themselves physically when feeling dirty because of having behaved in morally questionable ways. The word-filling paradigm to detect unconscious feelings of moral impurity was developed by Chen-Bo Zhong and Katie Liljenquist in “Washing Away Your Sins: Threatened Morality and Physical Cleansing,” Science 313, no. 5792 (2006): 1451–2. See also Spike Lee and Norbert Schwarz, “Dirty Hands and Dirty Mouths: Embodiment of the Moral-Purity Metaphor Is Specific to the Motor Modality Involved in Moral Transgression,” Psychological Science 21, no. 10 (2010): 1423–5.

  22 William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 1.

  23 Tiziana Casciaro, Francesca Gino, and Maryam Kouchaki, “The Contaminating Effects of Building Instrumental Ties: How Networking Can Make Us Feel Dirty,” Administrative Science Quarterly 59, no. 4 (2014): 705–35.

  24 Tiziana Casciaro, Francesca Gino, and Maryam Kouchaki, “Learn to Love Networking,” Harvard Business Review 94, no. 5 (2016): 104–7.

  25 Casciaro, Gino, and Kouchaki, “The Contaminating Effects,” 705–35.

  26 Vera Cordero in discussion with the authors, September 2018 and February 2019.

  27 Julie Battilana et al., “Associação Saúde Criança: Trying to Break the Cycle of Poverty and Illness at Scale,” Harvard Business School Case 419-048, 2018.

  28 Battilana et al., “Associação Saúde Criança.”

  29 Casciaro, Gino, and Kouchaki, “Learn to Love Networking,” 104–107.

  30 This act of convincing ourselves our behaviors are moral when they are not is one way we overcome cognitive dissonance by adding a consonant cognition. See Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957).

  31 “Princess Diana: A ‘Modern’ Mother Who Ripped Up the Rule Book,” HistoryExtra, November 3, 2020, https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/princess-diana-mother-parenting-william-harry-mother-son-relationship/.

  32 David Eagleman, Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain (New York: Pantheon Books, 2020).

  33 Jamil Zaki, The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World (New York: Crown, 2019).

  34 C. Daniel Batson et al., “Empathy and Attitudes: Can Feeling for a Member of a Stigmatized Group Improve Feelings Toward the Group?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 72, no. 1 (1997): 105–18.

  35 Fernanda Herrera et al., “Building Long-Term Empathy: A Large-Scale Comparison of Traditional and Virtual Reality Perspective-Taking,” PLOS ONE 13, no. 10 (2018): e0204494.

  36 Christopher J. Patrick, ed., Handbook of Psychopathy, 2nd ed. (New York: Guilford Publications, 2019).

  37 Harma Meffert et al., “Reduced Spontaneous but Relatively Normal Deliberate Vicarious Representations in Psychopathy,” Brain 136, no. 8 (2013): 2550–62.

  38 Hazel R. Markus and Shinobu Kitayama, “Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation,” Psychological Review 98, no. 2 (1991): 224–53; Theodore M. Singelis, “The Measurement of Independent and Interdependent Self-Construals,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 20, no. 5 (1994): 580–91; Serena Chen, “Social Power and the Self,” Current Opinion in Psychology 33 (2020): 69–73.

  39 For an example, see Wendi L. Gardner, Shira Gabriel, and Angela Y. Lee, “ ‘I’ Value Freedom, but ‘We’ Value Relationships: Self-Construal Priming Mirrors Cultural Differences in Judgement,” Psychological Science 10, no. 4 (1999): 321–6.

  40 For an overview of influential psychological models of ego-development, from Jean Piaget’s to Lawrence Kolhberg’s and Robert Kegan’s, see Lene Rachel Anderson and Tomas Björkman, The Nordic Secret: A European Story of Beauty and Freedom (Stockholm: Fri Tanke, 2017).

  41 Matthieu Ricard, Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World, translated ed. (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2015); Thich Nhat Hanh, The Art of Power (New York: HarperCollins, 2009).

  42 Analayo, Satipatthana Meditation: A Practice Guide (Cambridge, UK: Windhorse Publications, 2018).

  43 See Peter Sedlmeier et al., “The Psychological Effects of Meditation: A Meta-Analysis,” Psychological Bulletin 138, no. 6 (2012): 1139–71.

  44 Martin Luther King Jr., “A Christmas Sermon on Peace,” December 24, 1967.

  45 Cem Çakmaklı, Selva Demiralp, Ṣebnem Kalemli-Özcan, Sevcan Yeşiltaş, and Muhammed A. Yıldırım, “The Economic Case for Global Vaccinations: An Epidemiological Model with International Production Networks,” w28395, National Bureau of Economic Research, January 2021.

  46 John Vidal and Ensia, “Destroyed Habitat Creates the Perfect Conditions for Coronavirus to Emerge,” Scientific American, March 18, 2020, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/destroyed-habitat-creates-the-perfect-conditions-for-coronavirus-to-emerge/.

  47 Karin Brulliard, “The Next Pandemic Is Already Coming, Unless Humans Change How We Interact with Wildlife, Scien
tists Say,” Washington Post, April 3, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2020/04/03/coronavirus-wildlife-environment/.

  48 Mary Beard, The Roman Triumph (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009).

  49 While this image has long been a staple in popular consciousness, the evidence for it is less clear, and contradictions between different sources and interpretations abound. For a summary, see Beard, The Roman Triumph, 85–92.

  50 Mashroof Hossain in discussion with the authors, May 2019 and June 2019.

  51 “Rohingya,” Britannica Academic, Encyclopædia Britannica, 2020.

  52 Hannah Beech, Saw Nang, and Marlise Simons, “ ‘Kill All You See’: In a First, Myanmar Soldiers Tell of Rohingya Slaughter,” New York Times, September 8, 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/09/08/world/asia/myanmar-rohingya-genocide.html.

  53 Amy Edmondson, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2018); Amy Edmondson, “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams,” Administrative Science Quarterly 44, no. 2 (1999): 350–83.

  54 See also Julia Rozovsky, “The Five Keys to a Successful Google Team,” 2015, https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/five-keys-to-a-successful-google-team/.

  55 Bradley P. Owens, Michael D. Johnson, and Terence R. Mitchell, “Expressed Humility in Organizations: Implications for Performance, Teams, and Leadership,” Organization Science 24, no. 5 (2013): 1517–1538. In Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know (Viking, 2021), Adam Grant also shines a light on humility as essential to keeping an open mind, learning, and improving decision-making.

  56 See Julie Exline and Peter Hill, “Humility: A Consistent and Robust Predictor of Generosity,” Journal of Positive Psychology 7, no. 3 (2012): 208–18; Jordan Paul Labouff et al., “Humble Persons Are More Helpful than Less Humble Persons: Evidence from Three Studies,” Journal of Positive Psychology 7, no. 1 (2012): 16–29.

  57 For another analysis of the criteria people should use to elect powerful political leaders, see Gautam Mukunda, Picking Presidents: How to Make the Most Important Decision in the World (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, forthcoming 2022).

  58 Danielle V. Tussing, “Hesitant at the Helm: The Effectiveness-Emergence Paradox of Reluctance to Lead,” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2018), 1–118.

  59 For analyses of the prevalence of authoritarian attitudes and their consequences across place and time, see Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Daniel Stevens, Benjamin G. Bishin, and Robert R. Barr, “Authoritarian Attitudes, Democracy, and Policy Preferences among Latin American Elites,” American Journal of Political Science 50, no. 3 (2006): 606-620; and Matthew C. MacWilliams, On Fascism: Lessons from American History (London: St. Martin’s Press, 2020).

  60 Anita Williams Woolley et al., “Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups,” Science 330, no. 6004 (2010): 686–8.

  61 Marko Pitesa and Stefan Thau, “Masters of the Universe: How Power and Accountability Influence Self-Serving Decisions under Moral Hazard,” Journal of Applied Psychology 98, no. 3 (2013): 550–8.

  62 Amy Edmondson, “The Competitive Imperative of Learning,” Harvard Business Review 86, no. 7–8 (2008): 60.

  3. WHAT DO PEOPLE VALUE?

  1 For a comparison and summary of essential views of human nature in Western and Eastern thought, including Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Plato, the Bible, Islam, and Kant, see Leslie Forster Stevenson, Thirteen Theories of Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

  2 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper, 2008), 8.

  3 Johannes Gerschewski, “The Three Pillars of Stability: Legitimation, Repression, and Co-Optation in Autocratic Regimes,” Democratization 20, no. 1 (2013): 13–38.

  4 Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

  5 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “Global Study on Homicide 2018: Gender-Related Killing of Women and Girls,” 2018; Jan Stets, Domestic Violence and Control (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1988).

  6 Margaret W. Linn, Richard Sandifer, and Shayna Stein, “Effects of Unemployment on Mental and Physical Health,” American Journal of Public Health 75, no. 5 (1985): 502–6.

  7 Michael Grabell, “Exploitation and Abuse at the Chicken Plant,” The New Yorker, May 8, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/08/exploitation-and-abuse-at-the-chicken-plant.

  8 David Nakamura and Greg Miller, “ ‘Not Just Chilling but Frightening’: Inside Vindman’s Ouster amid Fears of Further Retaliation by Trump,” Washington Post, February 8, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/not-just-chilling-but-frightening-inside-vindmans-ouster-amid-fears-of-further-retaliation-by-trump/2020/02/08/7d5ae666-4a90-11ea-bdbf-1dfb23249293_story.html.

  9 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (New York: Penguin, 1985).

  10 Philip Pettit, Just Freedom: A Moral Compass for a Complex World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), xxvi.

  11 Babu-Kurra, “How 9/11 Completely Changed Surveillance in U.S.,” WIRED, September 11, 2011, https://www.wired.com/2011/09/911-surveillance/. When experiencing uncertainty and threat that undermine their sense of control, people are inclined to defend the legitimacy of the governmental institutions that offer structure and order. See Aaron C. Kay, Jennifer A. Whitson, Danielle Gaucher, and Adam D. Galinsky, “Compensatory Control: Achieving Order Through the Mind, Our Institutions, and the Heavens,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 18, no. 5 (2009): 264–268.

  12 Toshiko Kaneda and Carl Haub, “How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?” Population Reference Bureau, January 23, 2020, https://www.prb.org/howmanypeoplehaveeverlivedonearth/.

  13 For classic treatments of people’s self-view, see Morris Rosenberg, Conceiving the Self (New York: Basic Books, 1979). Self-esteem is a component of self-concept. Self-concept is a person’s view of what they are like. Self-esteem is how a person values what they are like. See Jim Blascovich and Joseph Tomaka, “Measures of Self-Esteem,” in Measures of Personality and Social Psychological Attitudes, vol. 1, eds. John Robinson, Phillip Shaver, and Lawrence Wrightsman (San Diego: Academic Press, 1991), 115–60.

  14 A central idea in psychology, self-esteem is also controversial in its relationship with similar concepts, such as existential meaning and mattering. Supporting our view that existential anxiety is linked to the need to have a positive view of our worth, measures of self-esteem are highly correlated with measures of existential meaning, as well as measures of mattering, especially to others. See Andrew Reece et al., “Mattering Is an Indicator of Organizational Health and Employee Success,” The Journal of Positive Psychology 16, no. 2 (2019): 1–21.

  15 This view of self-esteem as a person’s superordinate goal finds its roots in Abraham Maslow’s famed hierarchy of needs, though Maslow’s original hierarchy conceives of esteem as subordinate to self-actualization (Abraham Maslow, “A Theory of Human Motivation,” Psychological Review 50, no. 4 [1943]: 370–96). Later psychologists would relate self-actualization needs to a person’s intrinsic esteem, as opposed to the extrinsic esteem someone derives from others. Clayton Alderfer’s ERG theory organized Maslow’s model into three categories: Existence concerns people’s basic physiological and safety needs. Relatedness concerns social and status need that correspond to Maslow’s social need and the external component of esteem. Growth refers to an intrinsic desire for personal development, which includes the intrinsic component from Maslow’s esteem category and self-actualization (Clayton Alderfelder, “An Empirical Test of a New Theory of Human Needs,” Organizational Behavior and Human Performance 4, no. 2 [1969]: 142–75). The evidence for the hierarchical ordering of these needs—such that people pursue a higher-level need only after they have satisfied lower-level needs—is mixed. What is better documented is that
people derive self-esteem from their self-assessment of being personally competent, worthy of love, virtuous, and having high status in a group, as we detail below. In this sense, self-esteem is a superordinate need.

  16 Susan T. Fiske and Shelley E. Taylor, Social Cognition: From Brains to Culture (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2013), 123–24.

  17 For a psychological view of secure and fragile self-esteem, see Michael Kernis, “Toward a Conceptualization of Optimal Self-Esteem,” Psychological Inquiry 14, no. 1 (2003): 1–26; Jennifer Crocker and Lora E. Park, “The Costly Pursuit of Self-Esteem,” Psychological Bulletin 130, no. 3 (2004): 392–414. Interestingly, Buddhism, which might be viewed as having nothing to do with self-esteem, given its emphasis on transcending self-concern, can instead be understood to parallel this distinction between fragile and secure self-esteem when it invites us to embark on a path of liberation from negative preoccupation with the self and the need for affirmation from others.

  18 This view of secure self-esteem as authentic mirrors modern and contemporary moral philosophy, in which authenticity is a rejection of the blind, mechanical acceptance of an externally imposed code of values justified by recourse to some higher authority. An ethic of authenticity is guided instead by motives and reasons that express a subject’s core individuality, who the person is. For key references, see Somogy Varga, Authenticity as an Ethical Ideal (New York: Routledge, 2012). For other sources, see Jacob Golomb, In Search of Authenticity: From Kierkegaard to Camus (London: Routledge, 1995); Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Having secure self-esteem does not mean being uninterested in improving oneself. A failure can be terribly disappointing to someone and motivate them to become better, but it does not infringe on the person’s fundamental self-acceptance and sense of worthiness. For philosophical discussions of the pursuit of self-esteem and its societal implications, see also Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Honor Code (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010); Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit, The Economy of Esteem: An Essay on Civil and Political Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). For the link between authenticity and the sense of power, see Sandra E. Cha et al., “Being Your True Self at Work: Integrating the Fragmented Research on Authenticity in Organizations,” Academy of Management Annals 13, no. 2 (July 2019): 633–1; Muping Gan, Daniel Heller, and Serena Chen, “The Power in Being Yourself: Feeling Authentic Enhances the Sense of Power,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 44, no. 10 (October 1, 2018): 1460–72.