Mixed Mental Arts

Awww, yeah! Dacher Keltner is back, ladies and gents, and we're going to talk all about power, which seems like a really relevant topic after the election of Donald Trump. Here in California (or as my grandfather describes it the land of fruits and nuts) there's a lot of fear about Donald Trump abusing power. However, Mixed Mental Artists don't just buy into the narratives of one culture, they roam across cultures so other people can help them see the logs in their own eye…and so there's another type of abuse of power at work that it's awful hard for liberals to see: the abuse of intellectual power. A long time ago, Lord Acton said "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Dacher has studied this phenomenon experimentally and improved on that understanding finding that power makes people more impulsive and less empathetic. In one of the all-time great experiments of human psychology, Dacher and his colleagues watched cars at an intersection and recorded which makes and models stopped f