This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantan.
When you imagine a powerful person, what comes to mind?
In Gaffney, we had our own brand of diplomacy.
Shake with your right hand, but hold a rock in your left.
Perhaps you don't picture someone as evil as Frank Underwood from House of cards, but you also probably don't think of someone very nice.
We don't normally associate power with qualities like passion and kindness.
But the psychologist Docker Keltner at UC Berkeley says maybe we should.
What the science is finding is that kids at school, kids in summer camps, people in colleges, people in organizations, if they are emotionally intelligent and really focus on others and even practice generosity, they rise in social power.
Docker studies power dynamics, and he's found something that might seem counterintuitive.
If you think of power as all about machiavellian scheming, the people who display altruism, kindness, social intelligence, Dhakar finds that these are the people who gain power and respect from their peers.
But there's a catch.
Once these people become powerful, power tends to undermine the very qualities that help them get there in the first place.
There's something about the seductions of power that makes you lose sight of ethics and other people's interests.
Doctor Kefner is the author of the new book the Power Paradox, how we gain and lose influence.
We think his ideas are especially relevant right now when so many people are vying for power in this election season.
Dacre, welcome to hidden brain.
It's great to be with you, Shankar.
I'm fascinated by the research that you cite in the book Dacre, that suggests that power shapes nearly all of our relationships.
If you put a bunch of 13 year old kids in a room, you say that power dynamics quickly emerge, and you make the case that kids who are kinder and more empathetic are the ones who quickly assume the mantle of power in the group.