The Power Paradox : How We Gain and Lose Influence

The Power Paradox : How We Gain and Lose Influence
ISBN: 9780718197636
Publication Date: 4 May 2017

How do we gain and maintain power - through coercion or cooperation? What does it do to our behaviour? And what makes us lose power? In twenty revolutionary 'power principles', renowned psychologist Dacher Keltner turns everything we thought we knew about influence and status upside down, redefining power for our times.

This revolutionary new book shows us that everything we thought about power is dead wrong. It is not gained, as the Machiavellian view says, through coercive force. Influence comes instead to those who are socially intelligent and empathetic - but ironically the seductions of power make us lose those very qualities that made us powerful in the first place. Dacher Keltner illuminates this 'power paradox', revealing how both power and powerlessness distort human behaviour, affecting whether or not we will have an affair, break the law, suffer from depression or find our purpose in life.

By redefining power as the ability to do good for others, Keltner turns everything we know about influence, status, and inequality upside down.

About the Author

Dacher Keltner is Professor of Psychology and the Director of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley. A renowned expert in the biological and evolutionary origins of human emotion, he has received numerous prizes for his research, which has been covered in The New York Times, Newsweek, the BBC and CNN. He is the bestselling author of Born to Be Good and has served as a consultant to Google, Facebook, and on the award-winning Pixar film, Inside Out. In 2008, the Utne Reader listed him as one of the fifty visionaries changing the world.