The third symptom of power poisoning is selfishness. People who are puffed up with self-importance are prone to devote little attention to the burdens they inflict on others, and to care little about the plight of people with less privilege. In The Power Paradox, Dacher Keltner from the University of California at Berkeley shows that, in numerous studiesâon everything from donating money, to teasing, to how much people talk, to negotiation strategies, to sharing cookiesâwhen people lord over others or feel powerful and prestigious, they (1) focus more on satisfying their own needs, (2) focus less on othersâ needs and behaviors, and (3) act as if the rules donât apply to them.
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The root problem in society is an astounding degree of unconsciousness in dealings among people. Many act and speak from their deep needs, long- standing neurotic patterns and fearsâwith little or no awareness. You see this in shouting matches in which people hear nothing of what the other has to say. A community thrives on a spirit of cooperation and empathy, but often what you see is pure narcissism, self-interest, and gross immaturity.
If you are more powerful than your colleagues or customers, you are at risk of being clueless about their friction troubles, and of how you add to their misery. Beware of three symptoms of such power poisoning. The first symptom is privilege that spares you from the hassles, humiliations, and barriers heaped on everyone else. Privilege, as psychologist and former National Basketball Association player John Amaechi explains, provides an âabsence of inconvenienceâ from obstacles and challenges that others cannot escape.
The second symptom of power poisoning is the belief that, because you are powerful and a connected insider, you automatically know everything that matters about your organization. Academics call this the fallacy of centrality. It was uncovered by Ron Westrum in a study of why pediatricians did such a lousy job of diagnosing child abuse in the 1950s and 1960s. The limited self-awareness of these experts, their failure to see through parentsâ lies, and the silence of terrified children led the doctors to conclude, wrongly, âIf parents were abusing their children, I would know about it; since I donât know, it isnât happening.
The research shows that effective perspective-taking, attuning yourself with others, hinges on three principles.
1. Increase your power by reducing itâŚ
As the researchers conclude, âpower leads individuals to anchor too heavily on their own vantage point, insufficiently adjusting to othersâ perspective.â
The results of these studies, part of a larger body of research, point to a single conclusion: an inverse relationship between power and perspective-taking. Power can move you off the proper position on the dial and scramble the signals you receive, distorting clear messages and obscuring more subtle onesâŚ
2. Use your head as much as your heartâŚ
Perspective-taking is a cognitive capacity; itâs mostly about thinking. Empathy is an emotional response; itâs mostly about feeling. Both are crucialâŚ
This second principle of attunement also means recognizing that individuals donât exist as atomistic units, disconnected from groups, situations, and contexts. And that requires training oneâs perspective-taking powers not only on people themselves but also on their relationships and connections to othersâŚ
3. Mimic strategicallyâŚ
People therefore looked to cues in the environment to determine whom they could trust. âOne of those cues is the unconscious awareness of whether we are in synch with other people, and a way to do that is to match their behavioral patterns with our own.â Synching our mannerisms and vocal patterns to someone else so that we both understand and can be understood is fundamental to attunementâŚ
The key is to be strategic and humanâto be strategic by being human.
Seeking first to understand, diagnosing before you prescribe, is hard. Itâs so much easier in the short run to hand someone a pair of glasses that have fit you so well these many years. But in the long run, it severely depletes both P and PC. You canât achieve maximum interdependent production from an inaccurate understanding of where other people are coming from. And you canât have interpersonal PCâhigh Emotional Bank Accountsâif the people you relate with donât really feel understood. Empathic listening is also risky. It takes a great deal of security to go into a deep listening experience because you open yourself up to be influenced. You become vulnerable. Itâs a paradox, in a sense, because in order to have influence, you have to be influenced. That means you have to really understand. Thatâs why Habits 1, 2, and 3 are so foundational. They give you the changeless inner core, the principle center, from which you can handle the more outward vulnerability with peace and strength.