In England one member of parliament was memorably outed for using the public purse to fund the cleaning of his castle moat. In New Zealand, a former cabinet minister has fessed up to charging pornographic movies to his ministerial credit card.
In France an embattled president Sarkozy has had to explain the spending of E12,000 by a public official on fine cigars.
Given that none of the people involved were newcomers to politics, why did they do it? Where were their political antennae?
According to research reported in The Economist, 23 January 2010, the reason may lie in the sense of entitlement that develops in many people put in positions of power. The research, originally reported in Psychological Science, appears to prove Lord Acton's dictim that all power tends to corrupt, rather than merely attracting the corruptible.
The results suggest that power promotes a hypocritical tendency to hold other people to a higher standard than oneself.
On a nine point morality scale (with 1 being highly immoral and 9 being highly moral), high power individuals felt that if others broke tax laws this rated 6.6, whereas they rated themselves 7.6. When it came to stealing a bicycle they had a real need for, the rankings were 5.1 and 6.9 respectively. For speeding when late for an appointment, 6.3 and 7.6.
In contrast, low power people saw everyone as equal. On speeding, they scored 7.2 for others vs 7.3 for themselves. In the other tests they were actually harder on themselves than others: speeding 7.7 vs 6.8 and for stealing a bike 5.1 vs 4.3.
An intriguing element of the research was the behaviour of people in high-powered states who felt they did not deserve their elevated positions. They gave others a lenient 6.0 when stealing a bike but assigned themselves a highly immoral 3.9 if they did it themselves.
This reversal, called ‘hypercrisy' by the researchers, may be a signal of submissiveness - one employed by other animal species who find themselves in the wrong place in the heirachy and want to escape punishment by the real dominants.
In contrast, those who abuse the power status they enjoy, do so because at some intuitive level they feel entitled to take what they want. If the researchers are right, the sense which some powerful people seem to have that different rules apply to them is not just a convenient smokescreen. They genuinely believe it.
This sense of entitlement is crucial to understanding why many of those we appoint to high office behave the way they do.
Source: The Economist, reporting on a study by Dr Joris Lammers, Tilburg University, The Netherlands and Adam Galinsky, North Western University, Illinois
- Trevor Walton
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