This article, Power Corrupts, Especially When It Lacks Status, explores a very important subject and extends a line of research which is decades old or centuries old if you wish to consider the work of Jeremiah and Plato, Tacitus and Augustine, Dante and Goethe, and so on. That older understanding is substantial but poorly focused in many ways. This might be an area where disciplined science can add to the works of those philosophers and theologians and poets.
The research discussed in this article, which the scientists wisely recognize to be preliminary, tells us much and points to further questions and possible lines of analysis. In the article, we read:
In a new study, researchers at USC, Stanford and the Kellogg School of Management have found that individuals in roles that possess power but lack status have a tendency to engage in activities that demean others. According to the study, “The Destructive Nature of Power without Status,” the combination of some authority and little perceived status can be a toxic combination.
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According to the study, possessing power in the absence of status may have contributed to the acts committed by U.S. soldiers in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2004. That incident was reminiscent of behaviors exhibited during the famous Stanford Prison Experiment with undergraduate students that went awry in the early 1970s. In both cases the guards had power, but they lacked respect and admiration in the eyes of others and in both cases prisoners were treated in extremely demeaning ways.
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Social hierarchy, the study says, does not on its own generate demeaning tendencies. In other words, the idea that power always corrupts may not be entirely true. Just because someone has power or, alternatively, is in a “low status” role does not mean they will mistreat others. Rather, “power and status interact to produce effects that cannot be fully explained by studying only one or the other basis of hierarchy.”
I’ll suggest a new idea to be explored as scientists go forward in exploring the uses and abuses of power by one or more human beings over others: power tends strongly to corrupt when it is gained by the struggle to gain power and may not tend so strongly to corrupt when it comes as a result of productive achievements.