Washington: US President-elect Barack Obama may prove wrong the famous adage of Lord Acton that "power tends to corrupt" if the latest research on political power and resultant authority is to be believed.
According to the findings of the research, people need not worry about power corrupting 47-year-old Obama, who has promised "change" in the way US administration works.
"Our research suggests that people may not need to worry too much about power corrupting Obama," says Joe Magee of New York University, who collaborated in the study.
Obama s new-found power "might enable the change he desires rather than that power changing him instead. This is contrary to what most people think: that the longer he works in Washington the more he will be influenced by the same old ways of doing things," Magee said on Obama, the first black President-elect who will assume office on January 20 next.
The research concluded that being in a high power position may protect people from being influenced, creating a psychological environment where they are comfortable relying on their own attitudes, insights, expressions and intentions.
"Although power is often perceived as the capacity to influence others, this research examines whether power protects people from influence," Adam Galinsky, professor at Kellogg School, Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who led the study was quoted as saying in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Though power is often thought of as a "pernicious force that corrupts people who possess it, it is the protection from situational influence that helps powerful individuals surmount social obstacles and express the seemingly unpopular ideas of today that transform into the ideals of tomorrow," Galinsky and his team concluded through a series of five experiments.
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," noted historian Lord Acton said in 1887.
