Authoritarian Sociopathy: Part 3: Power and Compassion

By Davi Barker This was originally posted at Examiner.com. Comments on the original are appreciated.

In Part 1 we already discussed how the majority of otherwise psychologically healthy people are capable of murder if ordered by someone in a position of authority, and how being in a position of power can transform an otherwise psychologically healthy person into a sadist willing to torture a powerless person. In Part 2 we discussed how people experiencing authority for only an hour no longer exhibit the typical physiological signs of lying. Today we’re going to be discussing compassion, that human tendency to recognize, reciprocate and seek to alleviate the suffering of others.

Power and Compassion: (raw data)
Psychologist Gerben A. Van Kleef from the University of Amsterdam collaborated with colleagues from UC Berkely to conduct an experiment designed to identify how power influences someone’s emotional reactions to the suffering of others.

Unlike the previous experiments we’ve discussed, where participants were randomly selected for “high-power” and “low-power” roles, in this experiment participants from diverse backgrounds filled out a questionnaire about their own sense of power in their actual lives. Subjects were randomly paired off to take turns sharing stories in which they experienced great pain, or emotional suffering.

During the exchange both participants were hooked up to electrocardiogram (ECG) machines which measured stress levels, and after the exchange they all filled out a second questionnaire describing their own emotional experience, and what they perceived of their partner’s emotional experienced.

The results were unmistakable.

For starters, increased stress readings in the story teller correlated with increased stress readings in low-power listeners, but not in high-power listeners. In other words, low-power individuals respond to the suffering of others with emotional reciprocity, but high-power individuals experience greater emotional regulation, or detachment.

According to self-reporting after the experiment high-power feel less compassion than low-power individuals, which you might expect. But there were other interesting results in the post analysis. High-power listeners were less accurate in their assessment of their partners’ emotions. This could explain why high-power listeners don’t experience emotional reciprocity. They simply don’t perceive other people’s suffering.

Also, story tellers with high-power listeners reported higher distress than story tellers with low-power listeners. This could indicate that high-power individuals suffer in their interpersonal relationships because their lack of compassion actually exacerbates the suffering of those around them.

After the experiment researchers inquired about whether participants would like to stay in touch with their partners. As you might expect, the low-power subjects were into it, but the high-power subjects were not.

Now… lets speculate.

In the Stanford Prison Experiment we saw subjects randomly appointed as “high-power” individuals torture subjects randomly appointed as “low-power” individuals. This research may explain why. Once they had a taste of power they simply no longer experienced reciprocal emotions with those who were powerless. And worse, the lack of compassion of the “guards” would have exacerbated the suffering experienced by the “prisoners.”

How can we apply these findings to the Milgram Experiment scenario, where an authority orders a subordinate to murder a stranger? We already know that 65% of subordinates in that experiment obeyed orders that they viewed as unethical. In this case the authority is the “high-power” individual, the subordinate is the “low-power” individual, and the stranger is the one who suffers. So, we can speculate that the authority will feel less compassion for the suffering of the victim, which would make giving the lethal order easier for him (Maybe even pleasurable, as we discussed in Part 2). But we can also reason that the authority is less likely to feel compassion for the emotional distress of the subordinate. In fact, he may not ever perceive it. That means that the person making the life or death decision is the one the most cut off from it’s consequences.

But here’s where it gets sick. The subordinate, a “low-power” individual, has no such emotional detachment. As we saw in the Milgram Experiment, some of the subordinates “exhibited signs of extreme stress.” The subordinate is stuck in the impossible position of both being conditioned to obey the authority, and empathizing with the victim. Is it any wonder why we see high instances of suicide and post-traumatic stress disorder among soldiers, but not among the ranking officers who give them their orders.

Stay tuned for our final installment: Power and Hypocracy.