Host Kathleen Stephenson speaks with Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology at University of California, Berkeley, where he directs the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab, about his new book, "The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence. "
"It is much safer to be feared than loved,” writes Niccolò Machiavelli in The Prince, his classic 16th-century treatise advocating manipulation and occasional cruelty as the best means to power. Guided by centuries of advice like Machiavelli’s, we tend to believe that attaining power requires force, deception, manipulation, and coercion.
Dacher Keltner says this notion is dead wrong. Instead, a new science of power has revealed that power is wielded most effectively when it’s used responsibly by people who are attuned to, and engaged with the needs and interests of others. Years of research suggests that empathy and social intelligence are vastly more important to acquiring and exercising power than are force, deception, or terror.
Keltner says true power requires modesty and empathy, not force and coercion, He says that Power Paradox is that what people want from leaders—social intelligence—is what is damaged by the experience of power.
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And later in the hour we speak with Douglas Tsoi of Portland's Underground Grad School about the upcoming First Annual PUGSfest, a Festival of Ideas.
- KBOO