How modern power works: less Game of Thrones, more Black Lives Matter

Social psychologist Dacher Keltner, author of The Power Paradox, says the key to success is changing. The Machiavellian rule of the Lannisters is less effective than ground-up collaboration

If you drive a Prius, Dacher Keltner believes, there is an above-average chance that you are not an especially pleasant person. He explains how he came to this conclusion as congenially as he can. It is not a hunch.

One day, near the Greater Good Science Center that he runs in Berkeley, California, Keltner was riding his bicycle, minding his own business, when a black Mercedes almost hit him. Afterwards, he thought about that moment – the indomitable motorcar paying no heed to the fragile two-wheeler – as a miniature of the power dynamics in daily life, a subject that has occupied his attention for years. “It’s morality and it’s deadly – and there are laws,” he says. “It’s society in play. And I was like: That’s what we’re studying, right there.”

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