bullshit

I noticed this article in hwong14's shared items and the headline caught my attention: "Does Power Corrupt? Absolutely Not." So I read the article and was a bit confused because the headline has basically nothing to do with the article. So then I went and read the paper featured in the article.

The experiments in the paper manipulate people's feelings of power, inducing them to feel temporarily powerful or powerless, and then gives them tasks. It generally found that people who feel powerful perform better than those who feel powerless. Read the paper for the details. One of the paper's authors, Adam Galinsky, has done other work on power, for example finding that feeling powerful is associated with reduced tendency to understand how other people think. I can see how that would bear on the corruption issue. But I don't see any way the featured research justifies a headline like that. It has nothing at all to do with corruption, though Galinsky does say it has "direct implications" on power and corruption. Aside from the headline, the lede sentence, and that quote, no other mention of corruption is made.

Coincidentally, the article was published in Time Magazine, a powerful and corrupt publication.