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Study Shows People In Power Make Better Liars
oDDmON oUT writes "MSNBC is reporting that a Columbia Business School study shows those who hold power over others make better liars. According to one of the study's coauthors, 'It just doesn't hurt them as much to do it.' For the average liar, she said, the act of lying elicits negative emotions, physiological stress and the fear of getting caught in a lie. As a result, she added, liars will often send out cues that they are lying by doing things like fidgeting in a chair or changing the rate of their speech. But for the powerful, the impact is very different: 'Power, it seems, enhances the same emotional, cognitive, and physiological systems that lie-telling depletes. People with power enjoy positive emotions, increases in cognitive function, and physiological resilience such as lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Thus, holding power over others might make it easier for people to tell lies.'"
RTFA. There's an actual experiment here, not just observations like the summary here implies.
Or maybe you could RTFA where in the study they control for that... because the participants in the study were randomly assigned "leader" and "subordinate" roles.
Fricking knee-jerk "Correlation != Causation".
It's quite possible that both claims are true (TFA's and yours) -- but in this case, it appears from the study simply that:
Causation = Causation.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Delegating! Good leaders know how to delegate better than lesser leaders. Thus, they delegate the lying to the professionals. Rent 'Wag the Dog' for a good example. There's also 'plausible deniability'. By not actually educating themselves on anything, they 'rely on what their researchers told them', when their handlers tell the researchers to tell them what the money men want them to say.
I'm guessing you're just being snarky, but taking your comment at face value: that's a hasty assumption to make; even if you assumed all politicians are liars (which isn't very scientific either) it doesn't follow that all leaders, or even most important leaders, are politicians. If you also consider all the differences between political processes in different countries and cultures, in terms of public exposure, accountability, and levels of direct and indirect power - there are a lot of variables that would account for the usual complaint.
The experiment design seems to reduce this to few enough variables, in a general enough context, to legitimately say "power makes people better at lying".
Note that from TFA this wasn't a survey among known leaders - they randomly assigned power relationships to equivalent populations in an experiment, and found a correlation. So this rules out many of the alternative arguments: self-selection ('better liars acquire power'), specialized populations ('publicly elected politicians need to be better liars'), or learned behavior ('people in power become desensitized to lying').
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
The terrifying conclusion of this research is that when you randomly assign normal people to positions of power, they become psychopaths.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
But, i actually rtfa
Pfft. Great! There goes your chance to sound smarter than the professional researchers. Now you only sound smarter than the slashdotters racing to sound smarter than the researchers. Some accomplishment!
Volunteers [were] told they were either leaders or subordinates. The leaders were given a large office, and the subordinates given a small windowless space.
Ha! That doesn't solve the problem, there's still an issue here that started with the second run of the trial.
Researcher: "Okay, now for control purposes we need to switch the groups. Now, who hasn't been a 'leader' yet?"
Sociopath: "Oh, not me!"
Researcher: "Wait, weren't a leader last time?"
Sociopath: "Golly, no! I swear!"
Researcher: "Okay then."
See? The good liars are still more likely to be leaders. ;)
The enemies of Democracy are
Heck they used to say no more taxes for those making less than $250K (per couple I think). Well, in many parts of the US, that is NOT being wealthy. I think those living in SF and NYC might could vouch for that.
Whereas I think being able to afford to live in the parts of SF or NYC that cost that much means you're wealthy. If you make $250k you're wealthy. If you choose to spend most of that on an apartment in lower Manhattan, that's your choice.
I forget the exact statistic, but something along the lines of the top 10%-15% or so already pay > 80% of the US's taxes.
Yes but they also have over 90% of the wealth. Funny how that works out.
At some point, you can't squeeze more money out of them and have to hit lower hanging fruit.
We aren't even squeezing them. They sure as fuck aren't paying 80% of their own income as taxes if that's what that factoid above was meant to imply. They aren't even paying the proportionally greater amount that our progressive taxation system is supposed to make them pay!
As Warren Buffet noted, he pays less in taxes than his secretary.
There's plenty of squeezing left that can be done, and Mr. Buffet agrees. But really, I'd be happy just ensuring that our tax system is in fact progressive.
The enemies of Democracy are
Kill the upper class and you kill the middle class.
That would be an interesting and relevant comment if MY WHOLE POINT wasn't that we AREN'T "killing" the upper class with progressive taxes. Not anywhere close! They aren't even paying the tax amount that they should be. And even if they were, it wouldn't even come close to ending the upper class. They'd still be ridiculously rich!
No, instead we're killing the middle class directly, and letting the rich shirk their responsibility with accounting tricks. Kinda makes your argument moot, in as much as it applied in the first place.
Class warfare never ends well.
Quoting Buffet again: "There's class warfare all right, and my class is winning."
But I forgot, the kind of class warfare where the wealthy suck up all wealth from the middle and lower class, creating ever-escalating concentration of wealth in their hands, is good for us. It's only when we want to stop this from happening that it's bad.
The enemies of Democracy are