So there are
regions of the frontal lobes that are now being called the
empathy network and those regions of the brain do a lot of things, but what one of
the things that they do is
they can help us detect other people's pain
when you damaged in the empathy networks of your brain,
which some people, do they become really impulsive and you can have
people who were really good citizens of the world, right?
And if they have this head trauma and little chunks of the frontal lobes are gone
they'll start wearing suddenly, they'll start yelling at their kids,
they feel disconnected. In the neuroscience literature they call this
"acquired sociopathy" - through brain trauma you become a sociopath and
our lab studies find if you give people a little bit of power they kind of look like those
brain trauma patients, right? So we find like,
if I feel powerful, I flirt inappropriately,
I am more likely at work to swear or act in a rude fashion,
I'm more likely to gamble. It makes you impulsive. When you feel powerful you
kind of lose touch with other people.
You stop attending carefully to what other people think.
In our lab its come to be known as the Cookie Monster study.
We brought three people to the lab. We pointed to one person and said, "you're in
charge," right? And that person kind of felt powerful
and then they had to do this really boring task of, like, writing policy for the
University.
And they're getting kinda bored. We bring a plate of
chocolate chip cookies. Everybody takes one cookie. All groups always leave one
cookie on the plate because you don't want to be that person that takes the last cookie.
So there's that fourth cookie and we find high-powered people
they reach out and take it. And then my grad student, Dan Ward at the time,
he came to me and is like, "I think people are eating differently when they have power."
and lo and behold our high-powered person is more likely to be with their mouth open,
lips-smacking,
crumbs literally like falling onto their sweaters...(laughs)...
It's ridiculous!