Gray Matters | How Rule-Breaking Makes You Look Powerful

[Much of the focus of 13.7 Billion Years has been to highlight the bad decisions that humans make that have had detrimental effects such as species extinction, loss of biodiversity, animal abuse and the degradation of public health and the environment. For the month of June, the weekday series "Gray Matters " will take a look at recent research that has shed light on the inner workings of the mysterious and frustratingly complex marvel that is the human brain. The future health of the planet depends largely on the actions that mankind collectively makes -- actions that are ultimately the result of billions of individual decisions made every day, at every moment. But in order to start making better decisions, it's important to figure out why bad decisions are so often made in the first place.]

It is widely accepted that people in positions of power often don't obey the rules because they believe their power makes it such that for them, the normal rules don't apply. And thus, corruption is born. To read the news is to witness the seemingly daily manifestation of Lord Acton's famous line, "Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely."

But according to a new study by a team led by Gerben Van Kleef of the University of Amsterdam, it's not just the powerful who break rules because they think they can. The researchers' aim is to "introduce the reverse phenomenon -- violating norms signals power." Put another way, people without social power break rules so that they seem powerful to others.

Published in the current issue of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science , "Breaking the Rules to Rise to Power: How Norm Violators Gain Power in the Eyes of Others," shows the results of four studies based on participants' responses to the actions of four individuals. The first individual took coffee from a co-worker without asking. The second violated rules of bookkeeping. The third dropped cigarette ashes on the floor. And the fourth put their feet on the table. Even though there was no indication that these individuals possessed any heightened level of social power (i.e., they weren't bosses or political leaders), they were perceived as more powerful than individuals in similar situations who obeyed the rules.

Van Kleef's team concluded that "violating a norm implies that one has the power to act according to one's own volition in spite of situational constraints, which fuels perceptions of power." So, simply breaking the rules makes one seem powerful in the eyes of others.

But there are much bigger rules being broken all the time, and with much graver consequences than a little cigarette ash on the floor. And a lot of small time rule-breaking can add up to a great deal of harm. (Imagine the effect on marine life if millions of people decided to be litterbugs and tossed a single plastic bag in the ocean.)

The ultimate issue here isn't about rule-breaking. It's about power, and why humans tend to crave it so much. It isn't true that rules are made to be broken, but changing a culture of corruption means that something must be broken, and that something is the destructive desire for power. For Homo sapiens to evolve in harmony with the planet, there must be a shift away from the bad intention to gain power to the power of good intentions.

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