Tuesday, November 27, 2007 - Posts
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Thanks, Ann, for pointing out that great study on the inverse correlation between empathy and power. I agree the methodology sounds kooky, but it does seem to illuminate some fundamental human need to disassociate oneself from the powerless as one clambers up the ladder. I can’t help but wonder, on that score, whether Barack Obama’s decision to take uber-listener Oprah Winfrey out on the campaign trail with him in Iowa is a small piece of rental empathy--some strange way for him to say, “Look, I don’t know what it’s like to stay at home with two kids and a basket of ironing, but Oprah sure does.” Her ability to marry bottomless suffering to boundless influence is without parallel in America.
Now Oprah isn’t actually a stay-at-home mom, but at least she spends her day with them. And all this is certainly unearthing some hilarious claims about the stay-at-home set, whether it’s former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, a Clinton backer, insisting that Iowa women don’t even get to watch daytime television because they're all out working, or HuffPo’s Joanne Bamberger writing that Winfrey’s “recommendations should stay in the bra and jean intervention categories,” there’s just nothing to beat Hollywood forays into reality.
In any event, your empathy thesis certainly explains why the Hillary campaign is sending into Iowa the only closer alive who might manage to out-compassion Oprah. Bill Clinton versus Oprah Winfrey. An Olympics of hearing-your-pain.
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I'm a fan of Shankar Vedantam's "Department of Human Behavior" column in the Washington Post, which reported yesterday on some recent social psychology research that perhaps sheds new light on tough Hillary, and the spectacle of the candidates in general. The experience of being powerful erodes empathy, a study published in Psychological Science (which I haven't actually seen) seems to suggest. Volunteers who were made to feel like top dogs, in contrast to those who were primed to recall situations of powerlessness, very quickly lost the capacity to see things from other people's perspectives. The experiment (which involves drawing the letter E on foreheads) sounds rather ridiculous, but has a certain explanatory, well, power. Here may be another reason that the same candidates who are so exquisitely attuned to the views of others while they're desperately chasing votes become more blinkered once they're in office-and a reason that toughness can eclipse sensitivity in the front-runner in the race, regardless of gender. (So much for femaleness as a vaunted incubator of empathy; here's grist for the notion that the experience of subordinate status, not two X chromosomes, may be a key influence.) The result, as the researchers observe, is a paradox: The very quality that often draws us to support leaders-their ability to see beyond themselves-is all too likely to fade once we've anointed them.
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