Or, how could they?
Only days after Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a French politician, was accused of sexually assaulting a maid at a New York hotel, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former governor of California, admitted that he had fathered a child with a household employee and hid the child from his wife for 10 years.
Yet for many men the two reports — so close in time, so vastly different in content — raised another question altogether: If I had all that power, how would I behave?
Sure, becoming a big shot can bring out a guy’s inner Boy Scout, his gentleman philanthropist and, even in later years, his bushy-browed wise man. But the headlines are a relentless reminder of how often success seems to breed serial philanderers, groping boors and worse, sexual deviants. Does power turn regular guys into sexual predators?
The answer in most cases is no, say social scientists and therapists who have long experience working with men. “Power is a facilitator,” said Ronald F. Levant, a psychologist at the University of Akron and co-editor of “Men and Sex: New Psychological Perspectives.” “It provides opportunities to men with certain appetites but seldom changes personality in any fundamental way.”
Make no mistake: Many men are faithful partners and remain so for life. Others would play the course like Tiger Woods if they had the opportunity and the chops.
But only a minority of men feel entitled to have their way to dominate others, to humiliate them if provoked. These guys usually know who they are, and the people around them sure do. They were grabbing waitresses or pulling the wings off flies well before becoming chairman of the board.
People are debating now whether some cultures even sanction this behavior. Yet if social science is any guide, arrogance generally precedes power, not the other way around. For all their professed suspicion of autocrats, people tend to cede authority precisely to those individuals who want it most. Studies of group behavior suggest that the overconfident, outspoken individuals are the ones who tend to become the leaders. And the experience of being at the top only reinforces the person’s sense of control and self-centeredness.
In one recent study, researchers led by Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University primed participants to feel powerful by having them write about an incident in which they had control over others and then distribute lottery tickets to themselves and another study subject. These “high-powered” people were significantly less accurate in reading emotions from facial photographs than a comparison group of participants who were not primed in the same way. This and other experiments suggest that power can blind people to the emotions of those around them and lead to “objectifying others in a self-interested way,” the authors concluded.
“If the person has this sense of superiority, and they’ve gotten away with these kinds of things before, they begin to think that the risk-reward ratio that applies to everyone else doesn’t apply to them because they’re so special,” said Samuel Barondes, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, and author of the forthcoming, “Making Sense of People.” “It’s hard for people who don’t think that way about themselves to believe that anyone else really does. But they do.”
The exception may be the sort of man who is so consumed with advancement that certain personality traits go unexamined or unexpressed along the way. Feelings of inadequacy, a longing for paths not taken, or a sense of gratification too long delayed can prompt the taking of one small risk, one awkward advance, and then another, therapists say. It’s easy to ridicule such motives, and they do not justify the harm done to others when the chairman reaches for the cookie jar, or the thigh of a Congressional page. But they are motives nonetheless — for sexual transgressions, if only rarely sexual deviance.
And once the cheating or the groping starts, “there’s really no telling where it ends, if the person has real power and begins to believe they can continue to get away with it,” said William B. Helmreich, a sociologist at City College of New York and author of “What Was I Thinking: The Dumb Things We Do and How to Avoid Them.”
That is, if it starts at all. In a survey of young men, Dr. Levant found that attitudes toward sex were far less defined by locker-room culture than commonly assumed. Responses varied widely but on average the participants agreed that a man “should love his sex partner,” that he should “have to worry about birth control,” and that he shouldn’t “always have to take the initiative when it comes to sex.”
These and other, similar findings seem only mildly surprising, until placed in a larger context. For most of human history, men have treated women much as they pleased, and powerful men routinely collected wives and lovers, feeling free to maim or kill those who offended. The social norms, criminal laws and progressive culture of the West evolved in part to check such abuses, and most men not only observe those rules but also, as the attitude surveys show, internalize them.
Mr. Schwarzenegger, who issued a public apology, is now familiar with the sting that violating such shared social rules can deliver. Mr. Strauss-Kahn, who is alleged to have committed a far more serious act, will suffer more than public embarrassment. He might face a jury of his peers.
没有评论:
发表评论