Search string: "Does everyone abuse power if given the chance?"
Abuse of Power; Beyond the power analysis: Boundaries and attachment (bolds mine)
Human beings need other human beings as much as we need air and water. The attachments we form with family, friends, and trusted others like[...], teachers, students, and colleagues are not imaginary and not ephemeral. [...]Power analysis points out that relationships contain elements of authority, conformity, and fear; an understanding of human attachment suggests that the same relationships also contain caring, comfort, security, and affection. When someone we love treats us badly, we want the behavior to stop, but we do not want the loved one to go away. It is an observable fact of human nature that this is true no matter how bad the behavior is. Loss of an abusive parent [or] partner [...] is still loss.***
Children adapt to abusive or unavailable parents by developing patterns of anxious or ambivalent attachment. These children approach their parents with anxiety and caution or appear to avoid or ignore them, in an attempt to protect themselves psychologically and perhaps physically. The bond that forms in these troubled relationships is if anything stronger than in healthier relationships. Love is still there, mixed with anger, confusion, and fear, all of them made more intense and urgent by strong doses of anxiety and doubt.
While searching for a Google books link on a Carol Tavris book for a friend, I came across this interview with her by American Scientist. In it she talks about cognitive dissonance and how people tend to adjust facts/reality to keep their self-concept (whether positive or negative) relatively stable regardless of external factors (bolds mine):
We know from studies that the overwhelming majority of people believe themselves to be at least moderately competent, smart and ethical. So most of the examples in our book illustrate the dissonance caused when such individuals are faced with evidence that they just did something incompetent, foolish or unethical. But dissonance will also apply to somebody who has a poor self-concept, and who then gets evidence that they actually did something terrific: Their self-concept remains the same, and they dismiss the compliments as being phony or untrue. That is what is so powerful about understanding dissonance. We will put ourselves into contortions to preserve the beliefs that are most central to us—even when they're just clearly wrong.
Now, another aspect of this is the problem for people who don't reduce dissonance enough. One of the things we say in the book is that the ability to reduce dissonance is adaptive, precisely because it allows us to sleep at night. You couldn't get anything done if you had to keep reassessing every decision you made and every belief you held 40 times a day. It's beneficial to stay with a set of beliefs that guide how you live your life. And it's also a fine thing to be able to reduce dissonance after you've made a decision and bought that car and married that person and moved to Cincinnati, so that you won't beat yourself up about everything that you might have done wrong. The people who don't reduce dissonance enough suffer from regret and remorse, and it can be just as dysfunctional for them not to reduce dissonance as it is for other people to reduce dissonance too quickly, too mindlessly.
This issue leads to a great existential question: What happens when the action we've taken has really been a devastating one to ourselves or others, whether it's in the course of our professional lives, our private lives or a war? How do we live with the realization that we committed a devastating mistake, caused devastating harm? How do we forgive ourselves? What do we do to not just bury the dissonance—but to accept what we did because it can't be undone? How can we understand what we did wrong, and not just make a superficial apology, but learn in some deep way from the harm that we caused, so that we don't make the same mistake again? That's the goal.
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