权力导致腐败

译者 炸毛猫

All power tends to corrupt

权力导致腐败

But power without status corrupts absolutely

但是没有地位的权力导致绝对腐败

DURING the second world war a new term of abuse entered the English language. To call someone “a little Hitler” meant he was a menial functionary who employed what power he had in order to annoy and frustrate others for his own gratification. From nightclub bouncers to the squaddies at Abu Ghraib prison who tormented their prisoners for fun, little Hitlers plague the world. The phenomenon has not, though, hitherto been subject to scientific investigation.

二战时期，英语里出现了一个形容滥用权力的新名词。“小希特勒”是指那些为了自己的满足感，运用手中的权力折磨他人的小官员们。从夜总会保镖到阿布格莱布监狱以虐囚为乐的新兵，小希特勒们无处不在，给整个世界带来痛苦。然而，至今仍没有科学调查涉及这个现象。

Nathanael Fast of the University of Southern California has changed that. He observed that lots of psychological experiments have been done on the effects of status and lots on the effects of power. But few, if any, have been done on both combined. He and his colleagues Nir Halevy of Stanford University and Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University, in Chicago, set out to correct this. In particular they wanted to see if it is circumstances that create little Hitlers or, rather, whether people of that type simply gravitate into jobs which allow them to behave badly. Their results have just been published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

南加州大学的Nathanael Fast教授改变了这一点。他观察到，许多心理学实验研究地位对人的影响，也有很多研究权力对人的影响。但是几乎没有实验将这二者结合。在芝加哥，他和斯坦福大学的同事Nir Halevy和西北大学的Adam Galinsky准备证实这一点。他们尤其想弄清楚，是环境造就了小希特勒们，还是这一类人只是被某些可以滥用权力的职位吸引了。他们的研究结果在《实验社会心理学》上发表。

Dr Fast’s experiment randomly assigned each of 213 participants to one of four situations that manipulated their status and power. All participants were informed that they were taking part in a study on virtual organisations and would be interacting with, but not meeting, a fellow student who worked in the same fictional consulting firm. Participants were then assigned either the role of “idea producer”, a job that entailed generating and working with important ideas, or of “worker”, a job that involved menial tasks like checking for typos. A post-experiment questionnaire demonstrated that participants did, as might be expected, look upon the role of idea producer with respect and admiration. Equally unsurprisingly, they looked down on the role of worker.

Fast博士的实验将213个参与者随机分配到权力和地位的四种组合中去。所有的参与者都被告知他们在参与一个有关虚拟组织的研究，并且会与一个在同一家虚拟咨询公司工作的学生进行交流，但不会与他见面。之后，一些参与者担任“思想者”的角色，负责构思和实施一些重要的想法；另一些人被分派到“工人”的角色，主要从事一些如检查打字错误的低等工作。实验之后的问卷调查不出所料，参与者们对思想者表示尊敬和钦佩，对工人们则很轻视。

To manipulate their power, participants were told there would be a draw for a $50 bonus prize at the end of the study and that, regardless of their role, each participant would be able to dictate which activities his partner must engage in to qualify to enter the draw. Participants that Dr Fast wanted to imbue with a sense of power were informed that one other element of their role involved dictating which “hoops” their partners would have to jump through in order to qualify for the draw, and that they controlled the amount of effort the partner had to exert in order to win the $50. They were also told that the partner did not have any such control over them. In contrast, low-power participants were informed that while they had the ability to determine the hoops their partner had to jump through, that partner ultimately had more control because he could remove the low-power participant’s name from the raffle if he did not like the hoops selected.

为了改变权力这个变量，实验者告诉参与者，在实验的最后，将有一个奖励为50美元的抽签。不论角色如何，每一个参与者都有权力能命令他的搭档完成某项考验以获得抽签资格。Fast博士给部分参与者灌输很强的权力意识，他告诉他们，他们的角色可以支配自己的搭档通过考验来获得抽签资格，并且可以决定自己的搭档为赢得50美元所付出的努力，然而他们的搭档不能支配他们。相反，权力比较低的参与者被告知，尽管他们有权决定他们的搭档必须经受的考验，但如果他们的搭档不喜欢他们的选择，就可以把他们从抽奖名单中除名，因此，他们的搭档实际拥有更的的权力。

Participants were then presented with a list of ten hoops and told to select as many as they liked (but a minimum of one) for their partner to jump through. Unknown to the participants, Dr Halevy and Dr Galinsky had conducted an independent test, using 58 people not involved in the main study, to rate how demeaning, humiliating, degrading, embarrassing and uncomfortable each of the ten possible activities actually was. Five of the ten were rated as deeply demeaning. These included things like: “say ‘I am filthy’ five times” and “bark like a dog three times”. The other five were not considered particularly demeaning. They included: “tell the experimenter a funny joke” and “clap your hands 50 times”.

之后，实验者给参与者们展示了这十项考验的内容，并告诉他们，他们想选几项都可以（但至少一个）。参与者们不知道，Halevy博士和Galinsky博士已经进行了另一个独立的测试。他们使用了另外58名没有参与主要研究的实验对象，来评定这十项活动有多么有损人格，令人感到羞辱，失去尊严，尴尬和不快。其中有五项活动被评为极度有损人格，包括“说五遍‘我很脏’”和“学狗叫三次”。另外五项并没有被认为特别贬低人格，比如“给实验者讲个笑话”和“拍手五十下”。

Participants who had both status and power did not greatly demean their partners. They chose an average of 0.67 demeaning activities for those partners to perform. Low-power/low-status and low-power/high-status participants behaved similarly. They chose, on average, 0.67 and 0.85 demeaning activities. However, participants who were low in status but high in power—the classic “little Hitler” combination—chose an average of 1.12 deeply demeaning tasks for their partners to engage in. That was a highly statistically significant distinction.

那些既有地位又有权力的参与者并不会很大程度地贬低自己的搭档。他们选择让搭档通过的考验的平均打分为0.67。没有权力或没有地位的参与者与没有权力有地位的参与者选择相似，平均打分为0.67和0.85。但是，没有地位却享有很高权力的参与者选择了高达1.12的考验来贬低自己搭档的身份，他们就是典型的“小希特勒”。实验结果表明了统计学上显著的区别。

Of course, not everybody in the high-power/low-status quadrant of the experiment behaved badly. Underlying personality may still have a role. But as with previous experiments in which random members of the public have been asked to play prison guard or interrogator, Dr Fast’s result suggests that many quite ordinary people will succumb to bad behaviour if the circumstances are right.

当然，不是所有出于高权力和低地位组合的人都如此恶劣。根本的人格仍然起作用。但正如那些让随机选出的公众扮演监狱看守和审讯官的实验一样，Fast博士的实验说明，当条件满足时，许多普通人会屈从于不良行径。