The Fourth Cookie
The June issue of Harvard Business Review featured an article, “How to be a Good Boss in a Bad Economy.” One interesting piece of research the article cited was the “cookie experiment” that psychologists conducted in 2003.
In this study, groups were created with three students in each. Two of the students were asked to write a short policy paper. The third student in each group was asked to evaluate the papers and determine how much the first two would be paid. (This made the third student the “boss” over the other students.)
About 30 minutes into the experiment, there was a break and a plate of five cookies was brought into the room. All three participants took a cookie. That left two – the last cookie which, out of politeness, no one was expected to (nor did) take – and the fourth cookie, which was the real object of the experiment.
Question: Who would feel “entitled” to grab the extra cookie?
Answer: The boss. In all cases, it only took half an hour for the randomly chosen bosses to not only take the fourth cookie, but to chew with their mouths open and to carelessly scatter crumbs.
It could be dismissed as a silly experiment if it wasn’t consistent with the findings in many other studies. Power, it seems, does corrupt – if only to make people more focused on their own needs, less focused on others’ needs, and more likely to behave as if the rules expected of others didn’t apply to them.
The June issue of Harvard Business Review featured an article, “How to be a Good Boss in a Bad Economy.” One interesting piece of research the article cited was the “cookie experiment” that psychologists conducted in 2003.
In this study, groups were created with three students in each. Two of the students were asked to write a short policy paper. The third student in each group was asked to evaluate the papers and determine how much the first two would be paid. (This made the third student the “boss” over the other students.)
About 30 minutes into the experiment, there was a break and a plate of five cookies was brought into the room. All three participants took a cookie. That left two – the last cookie which, out of politeness, no one was expected to (nor did) take – and the fourth cookie, which was the real object of the experiment.
Question: Who would feel “entitled” to grab the extra cookie?
Answer: The boss. In all cases, it only took half an hour for the randomly chosen bosses to not only take the fourth cookie, but to chew with their mouths open and to carelessly scatter crumbs.
It could be dismissed as a silly experiment if it wasn’t consistent with the findings in many other studies. Power, it seems, does corrupt – if only to make people more focused on their own needs, less focused on others’ needs, and more likely to behave as if the rules expected of others didn’t apply to them.
Labels: Harvard Business Review, leadership
posted by ckg @ 3:02 PM
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