Monthly Archives: August 2015

Power and Corruption, Part 1

Politics, Social psychology,

Most previous attempts to test the adage that “power corrupts” have been unconvincing either because the participants were responding to hypothetical scenarios, or when the situation was real, the incentives for behaving badly were too low to tempt people to corrupt behavior. Two new studies by John Antonakis and his colleagues at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) were intended to overcome these problems.

The authors define power as “having the discretion and the means to assymetrically enforce one’s will over others.” In the study, they manipulated power by varying the number of others who were dependent on the leader, and discretion, the number of choices available to the leader. Corruption occurs when leaders make decisions that benefit themselves personally, but which harm the common good by reducing the outcomes of their followers. The authors specify that to qualify as corrupt, the behavior must (1) violate social norms, and (2) “destroy public wealth”—that is, the amount gained by the leader must be less than the amount lost by the followers.

Antonakis has prepared this video to explain his two studies.

In the first experiment, participants played the dictator game, in which leaders completely controlled their own and their followers’ outcomes. Power was manipulated by varying the number of followers the leaders had (either one or three), and discretion, the number of options they had (either three, one of which harmed the followers, or four, two of which harmed the followers). A separate study with different participants showed that both of these manipulations made people feel more powerful.

As predicted, both number of followers and number of options increased corruption, as measured by the percentage of leaders who made corrupt choices. Converted to dollars, the participants came away with between $12.30 and $21.24 for a study that lasted less than 15 minutes.

I have a reservation about the manipulation of discretion. Giving some leaders three options and others four complicates the data analysis. The authors deal with this by collapsing the two antisocial choices in the four option condition into a single category. That’s not entirely satisfactory. If you assume the participants responded randomly, 50% of them would make an antisocial choice in the four option condition, while 33% would make an antisocial choice with three options. Their choices can be compared to chance, but not directly to one another. Fortunately, the results are so robust that this problem does not appear to compromise the study.

The second experiment was more ambitious, introducing several new variables not present in the first:

  • The definition of corruption states that corrupt behavior violates social norms. After the dictator game was explained to the participants, but before leaders were assigned, participants were asked what they thought a responsible leader should do. Eighty-one percent chose the default option. The poll results were announced before the game began, making it clear to all participants that when leaders made antisocial choices, they were violating a group norm.
  • The phrase “power corrupts” is sometimes taken to imply that corruption increases over time. In this experiment participants played 15 trials of the game. Some of the leaders received more power (an additional follower and an additional option) over time. They increased their corruption, while those whose power remained low throughout did not. Payoffs in study 2 varied between $35.47 and $98.06. Unfortunately, since the amount of power possessed by the leaders increased over time, it’s not clear whether their increased corruption was due to the passage of time or their increased power.
  • It might be argued that these studies merely show that people are greedy. To check this, the researchers collected a separate behavioral measure of greed (a prisoner’s dilemma game). Their results showed that high power participants became more corrupt even when individual differences in greed were statistically controlled.
  • The authors thought that individual differences in honesty and testosterone level might modify the effects of power on corruption. Honesty was measured with a paper-and-pencil test and testosterone from a saliva sample. These measures were collected at a separate session not connected to the main study. The honesty measure added little of interest; it predicted initial level of corruption, but did not interact with power. Testosterone, which was analyzed separately for men and women, did serve to amplify the effect of the power manipulation. The highest level of corruption occurred when high testosterone was combined with high power.

What can be done to reduce corruption? The testosterone results suggest that we should try to place more women in positions of power, but other than that, they have no practical implications. Since announcing the social norm didn’t help, simply shaming powerful people who behave badly probably won’t help. Antonakis suggests that we need greater sanctions to deter corruption, but research is needed to address the practical problems of what the punishments should be and how they can be enforced.

You may also be interested in reading:

Power and Corruption, Part 2

Asian-American Achievement as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Education, Social psychology,

Most discussions of self-fulfilling prophecies are about the harmful effects of negative stereotypes. We are all aware, for example, of the tragic consequences of the belief by police that young black men are more violent than other young men. But stereotypes can be positive as well as negative.

Two sociologists, Drs. Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou, propose that positive stereotypes can become self-fulfilling prophecies that boost the academic achievement of Asian-American children. For their book, The Asian American Achievement Paradox, they interviewed 140 adult children of Chinese, Vietnamese and Mexican immigrants, and surveyed 4780 second generation immigrants. (This post is based on an article by Dr. Lee about their findings.)

A self-fulfilling prophecy is a behavioral sequence in which an initially false definition of a situation elicits behavior which causes the false expectation to be confirmed. The effects of self-fulfilling prophecies on classroom teachers was originally demonstrated in a 1968 experiment by Rosenthal and Jacobson in which teachers were told that a randomly-selected 20% of their incoming students showed unusual potential for academic growth. The researchers manipulated a positive expectation, since it would have been unethical to manipulate a negative one. In this segment from an old instructional video, Robert Rosenthal discusses his studies of teacher expectancy effects. The narrator is Phil Zimbardo.

A successful self-fulfilling prophecy involves five steps. In what follows, I’ll use the terms perceiver to refer to the person who forms the expectation, in this case, a teacher or guidance counselor, and target to refer to the person about whom the prediction is made, in this case, an Asian-American student.

  1. The perceiver forms an expectation. Based on previous experience or hearsay, the perceiver comes to believe that most Asian-American children are intelligent.
  1. The perceiver acts on the basis of that expectation. The target receives favorable treatment. He or she may be given more opportunities to perform well, or more informative feedback. Dr. Lee cites examples of Asian-American students with mediocre records who were surprised to be assigned to advanced placement courses.
  1. The target responds to the perceiver’s behavior. Dr. Lee reports that the majority of Asian-American students responded to these better opportunities and increased competion by performing well. Thus, the teachers’ expectations received behavioral confirmation.
  1. The perceiver interprets the target’s responds. “Aha!” they say, “I was right. Asian students really are smart.” Teachers typically overlook the role that their own behavior played in confirming their expectations.
  1. The target interprets his or her own actions. The Asian-American students observe their own performance and they also conclude that they are intelligent. This is the ultimate irony of the self-fulfilling prophecy. Targets wind up attributing to themselves the very qualities that the perceiver erroneously expected.

This seems like a benign outcome. But the researchers also interviewed Mexican-American children and observed the opposite side of the coin. Only 86% of their Mexican-American students graduated from high school, and a mere 17% graduated from college. If you work through the above five steps substituting a negative stereotype of Mexican-American children, you’ll see how self-fulfilling prophecies can contribute to a vicious cycle of prejudice and discrimination.

Of course, you can’t prove that self-fulfilling prophecies play a causal role in the achievement of Asian-American children just by doing interviews or surveys. However, Lee and Zhou’s claims are credible in light of past research.

The authors are not suggesting that self-fulfilling prophecies are the only reason for high achievement among Asian-American children. They also attribute their success to the cultural values of their parents, enhanced by U.S. immigration policies which gave preference to more highly educated Asians.

Dr. Lee also points out that the minority of Asian-American students who are unable to meet their parents’ and teachers’ high expectations suffer from lower self-esteem than they would have had they not been expected to do well. Also on the negative side, the stereotype that Asians are better followers than leaders may impose a “bamboo ceiling” on Asian-American advancement in the business world, which may explain why they are underrepresented among CEOs.

Social Psychology on Film, Take 2

Films, Social psychology,

2015 is a banner year for films about social psychology, although it may also demonstrate that such films are not readily marketable to a mass audience.

The Stanford Prison Experiment, directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez, depicts the 1971 study by Philip Zimbardo in which 24 male college students were randomly assigned to the roles of prisoners and guards in a simulated prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. The study, scheduled for two weeks, was discontinued after six days. It demonstrated that when people are given absolute power over others, they behave badly, endangering the mental health and physical safety of those in their charge. Zimbardo has noted similarities between the simulation and conditions in real prisons, as well as the behavior of American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

By coincidence, The Stanford Prison Experiment was shown at the Sundance Film Festival. Also shown at Sundance was Experimenter, an account of Stanley Milgram’s studies of obedience to authority. Not only are these the two best known examples of research in social psychology, they both have a similar message—that antisocial behavior that the public normally attributes to individual differences in personality is actually a predictable effect of the immediate social situation.

Phil Zimbardo served as a technical advisor to the film, supplying the filmmakers with videotapes of the experiment and other documentation. The film stands in contrast to the 2001 German film, Das Experiment, a fictional drama based on the Stanford prison experiment. At the time of its release, Zimbardo took strong exception to the way he and his study were portrayed. (There is also an obscure 2010 American film, The Experiment, with Adrien Brody and Forrest Whitaker, which is apparently a remake of Das Experiment. I haven’t seen it.)

The Stanford Prison Experiment escaped my notice until I read a favorable, but not enthusiastic, review by Max Nelson in Film Comment. Nelson praises it for its realism and its attention to details of the language and style of the period. He notes that the fact that it was almost all filmed on a single set gives it “tense, visceral power.” Given Zimbardo’s involvement in the production, he also makes two surprising claims. Zimbardo, he says, is portrayed by actor Billy Crudup as a “monomaniac.” He also says the film is “not entirely factual,” although he doesn’t explain why.

The film opened quietly on July 17 on only two screens and took in a disappointing $37,500 in its first weekend. It hasn’t been shown in Pittsburgh. No word yet on when it will be released on DVD.

As part of the advance publicity for the film, Phil Zimbardo did this half-hour interview with the Huffington Post. A good source of information about the Stanford Prison study and its real world applications is Zimbardo’s 2007 book The Lucifer Effect.

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Advance Planning

Trumping Bernie

Media, Politics, , ,

Although we are right to be concerned about the growth of campaign advertising, especially when the candidates’ resources are unequal, you could argue that the amount of free time (or space) given to candidates by the news media is more important.  Statements made by and about candidates in the free media are not as likely to be discounted as advertisements. (The discounting principle states that our confidence in a particular explanation of behavior is weakened by the presence of alternative explanations. In an advertisement, our knowledge that this is a paid message intended to persuade us makes us less likely to see the message as truthful.)

Senator Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have both shown similar increases in support in the presidential polls. According to the Real Clear Politics average of all polls, support for Sanders has grown from 12.7% to 25% from July 1 to the present, while Trump has gone from 6% to 22%. Sanders’ progress might be considered more impressive, however, since he has received less free media coverage.

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Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) used the Nexus database to count the number of free mentions of Sanders and Trump on 13 news media sources between July 1 and August 15. In all cases, Trump received more coverage. The chart below gives the percentage of stories mentioning Sanders as a percentage of those mentioning Trump. For example, on CNN, the ratio was 33%, meaning that Sanders was mentioned one-third as often, or that Trump received three times as much coverage.

TrumpSandersChartOn average, Sanders received 36% as much coverage as Trump. However, there were some interesting differences among the 13 outlets.

  • On the three outlets with the largest audience, the broadcast networks ABC, CBS and NBC, Sanders was mentioned only 16% as often as Trump, or in other words, Trump received six times as much publicity.
  • The country’s five major newspapers averaged 34%, very close to the overall average.
  • Public radio and television, which presumably have a mandate to be fair, scored only slightly above the overall average in Sanders coverage.
  • MSNBC, sometimes described as a “progressive” cable network, did have the highest percentage of Sanders coverage, but still mentioned Trump more often.

As Bernie Sanders continues to draw large crowds, the message of the news media seems to be that there’s “nothing to see here.” If we were to ask them why Trump receives so much more publicity than Sanders, my guess is they would claim that his flamboyant personal style makes his activities of greater public interest. However, I suspect that a more important cause is that a central theme of Sanders’ campaign is reducing economic inequality, an unwelcome message to those who own, advertise on, or perform on the news media.

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In addition to discounting campaign advertising, these data suggest we should also discount some of the coverage candidates receive in the free media. However, we’re less likely to do that, since their conflicts of interest are less obvious.