Power: Our fundamental concept

British philosopher Bertrand Russell once wrote that 'The fundamental concept in the social sciences is power, in the same sense in which energy is the fundamental concept in physics'. We hold power over others as parents, teachers, bosses, or political leaders. We are subjected to the power of others as children, employees, or followers.

Power, despite its political connotations, pertains to social relations: it is asymmetric control over valued social resources. Without others around, there is no power. Power is relative: one can have power in one situation (e.g. being a manager interacting with an employee), but not in the other (being the same manager interacting with the president or the owner of the company). It's very rare that no other person exists that has access to and control over the resources one desires: perhaps even in the case of such powerful individuals as the US or Russian President. Thus, we very rarely observe the manifestations of absolute power, unconstrained by social context, which could be perceived as a stable characteristic of an individual. In all other cases, power is situational.

When we understand how power affects people in the political or workplace contexts, and how it can corrupt, we are better equipped as citizens.

Powerholders exert influence over others: sometimes over one or few others, sometimes hundreds, sometimes even millions of people and their lives. Yet, just as others do, those in power process information, make decisions and behave according to their values, motives, personality, and mindsets. Thus, investigating the powerholders' mindset and identifying predictable patterns enable understanding the core underlying mechanisms of group life.

When we understand how power affects people in the political or workplace contexts, and how it can corrupt, we are better equipped as citizens. Increasing trust by empowering the powerless is equally important in small groups and societies.

What do we know?

Evolutionary theories posit that leadership positions emerged to coordinate group efforts and enable the attainment of group goals. Thus, a high power position is supposed to be about generating the greater good. Evidence shows that those US Presidents who are perceived as great leaders from a historical perspective were also perceived as high in openness (one of the Big 5 personality traits) by their biographers or work associates.

But the power that leaders gain only too often undermines their leadership abilities.

Powerholders tend to be self-centered, and other factors related to social asymmetries – including class, race, or gender – bring about converging effects. And so having a higher position focuses individuals on agentic (rather than communal) concerns. At least in the short term, power lowers the tendency to look at the world through the eyes of another person, weakens the compassion felt in reaction to the suffering of others, distances from others, and leads to instrumental treatment of other people, perceiving them as means to one's own goals, and ignoring their point of view.

The corruptive effects of power happen mainly when people perceive power through the lens of the opportunities it offers.

Thankfully, the psychological feeling of power that is found to be corruptive is also closely associated with feelings of personal control. This may cancel out the association between power and anti-social tendencies such as aggression or exploitation. Personal control also explains the buffering effect: those in higher positions experience less stress in response to the same stimuli, because they experience greater control.

The corruptive (or metamorphic) effects of power happen mainly when people perceive power through the lens of the opportunities it offers. Holding power seems more attractive to people when power is construed in terms of opportunity, and this way of thinking is also more common. Thinking about power in terms of responsibility is less frequent, and power understood as responsibility attracts different people. Also, making people believe that power can be acquired through prosocial means attracts a wider range of potential candidates, including those from disadvantaged groups. This is one way in which lay beliefs about power may actually shape existing social hierarchies.

Wider reading

That's also why it's important to have books such as those featured in the three interviews which follow, with Jesse Singer, Brian Klaas, and Mark Knights. The experimental studies that dominate the social psychological arena are helpful in understanding the pure effects of power: how power would be held by people who neither particularly wanted to acquire power, nor received training, or were provided with an opportunity to self-reflect, but instead were randomly selected to power positions. But in real life, people do reflect, receive feedback, and gain experience on their way up; and this may also transform them. For a deeper understanding of power dynamics and their effects on social life, we need to hear real-life experiences, and research from other fields.

Also, understanding how policymakers may be affected in their thinking and decision-making processes by the power they hold is complementary to understanding what systemic changes are necessary to generate desirable system-level effects such as public health or environmental policies. Here, again, academic cross-pollination could result in deepening our understanding of power dynamics and their effects on social life.

Psychological research suggests that power is not only conferred by those in higher positions but may also be acquired in a sort of a bottom-up process.

In terms of my own wider reading, The Power Paradox by Dacher Keltner is a classic and a great starting point for those who seek solid psychological background. One of the best recent examples of non-fiction literature on power is by Polish journalist Krystyna Kurczab-Redlich, Vova, Volodia, Vladimir, on Russia ruled by Putin. Kurczab-Redlich tracked both Putin's way to the top, and his leadership and power-holding style, making links to psychology, sociology, political science, and economy. Hopefully, this fascinating work will soon be translated into other languages. And for those who love fiction, the Danish TV series Borgen provides great insights into the burdens and challenges of holding power from a female leader's perspective.

Open questions

Psychological research suggests that power is not only conferred by those in higher positions but may also be acquired in a sort of a bottom-up process: groups identify their members who seem to be most likely to contribute to an important group goal and select these individuals to leadership positions. So is the influence of power on an person who holds it different depending on the path taken to the top?

Also, the evidence regarding those in a low power position is inconsistent. Much of the work has been on the powerholders, and in many experimental designs the 'low power' and 'equal power' position manipulations are used interchangeably to contrast the 'high power' manipulation. When is merely activating the concept of power asymmetries enough to generate them? What effects only emerge in the high power positions?

Finally, we don't have enough evidence on how individual differences – for example narcissism, and other dark tetrad or Big Five traits – interact with power in shaping emotional, cognitive and behavioural tendencies of the powerholders. Does power transform people, or reveal who they are by amplifying their initial tendencies?

I encourage you to read the interviews that follow, seek out the books they are based on – along with others – and then perhaps consider ways in which your own work might feed off or into the research on power. There's still much we don't know, and it seems like a good time to learn more!

About the author

Dr Aleksandra Cisłak, Head of Center for Research on Social Relations at SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw, Poland. [email protected]

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'Power does corrupt, but that's just the tip of the iceberg…'

Our editor Jon Sutton meets Dr Brian Klaas, Associate Professor in Global Politics at University College London. He is author of Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How it Changes Us, published by John Murray in 2021.

I guess it turned out to be a very good time to publish a book on power and corruption? The Met Police, Russia/Ukraine, 'Partygate', etc… but maybe pretty much any time is a good time to publish a book on power and corruption! 

Yes, I actually spoke about that with my publisher. Usually they are hoping that something in the news will coincide with the book being published. I assured them it would happen, because we are consistently disappointed by those in power. Lo and behold, there were several major political scandals and a police abuse scandal that coincided with publication. The fact that it's so predictable is precisely why I felt the need to write the book: we can do better as a society.

What got you interested in power and corruption?

I have always been interested in people in power who behave badly. Perhaps that comes from growing up in Minnesota in the 1980s and 1990s, where the government was generally competent and it's the hub of 'Minnesota Nice'. It gave me the (perhaps overly) optimistic belief that humans can organise themselves to solve problems extremely effectively. And yet, the more I studied the world, the more I saw self-inflicted disasters of humanity causing mass suffering. I wanted to understand why that happens – and work to reduce those avoidable tragedies.

What surprised you when you researched the topic?

I was surprised by a few things. First, I was struck by how much I didn't know because I had generally stuck to political science. Researching Corruptible made me realise that lots of really smart people from totally different disciplines (evolutionary biology, behavioural economics, psychology, neuroscience, sociology, and history to name a few) were all interested in overlapping questions. But they rarely talk to one another. I met psychologists and neuroscientists who had studied power abusers for decades but has never met a despot or worked in a system beyond the United States. It's obvious that's not the best way forward, which is why I came away from this research thinking of myself far more as a social scientist rather than just a political scientist – which I think is a more functionally useful way to think about vast areas of research. And yet, the way research is structured makes genuine collaboration across seemingly disparate disciplines easier said than done.

Second, I was struck by how solvable these problems are. Humans have a tendency to stick with the way things are done, even when we're consistently getting bad outcomes. Take hiring for example. How much variation is there in most companies when it comes to deciding how to hire people? We don't experiment enough and creative solutions to common recurring problems are too readily dismissed. Why do we accept living in a society in which the majority of people think that those who are in charge aren't very good people and don't usually behave very well? Why do we imagine that a fixed feature of modern society is that the world of politics and business need be cutthroat and corrupt? There are, of course, plenty of good leaders, but I've never met someone who thinks we're generally doing really, really well at getting precisely the right people into power.

Did you form an overall impression of the psychologists you met along the way? Any individuals who stood out?

Dacher Keltner was amazing. I cold contacted him and asked if I could fly out to Berkeley to meet him. He met with me twice in one day, introduced me to several key colleagues, and was extremely generous with his wisdom. He also had a humility about his research findings that I found refreshing and helpful; we can't understand the social world with absolute precision and I found myself much more skeptical of researchers who behaved as if that wasn't the case.

You revisited that psychology classic, Zimbardo's Prison Experiment, to suggest that power doesn't corrupt – it attracts.

Yes, there is a little known 2007 study that tried to replicate the recruitment ad for Zimbardo's experiment. They just swapped out the words 'for a psychological study of prison life' with 'for a psychological study'. They then randomised who got which wording, and found that people with more abusive, authoritarian, narcissistic personalities showed up when the ad included the prison wording. That, to me, inverts the finding from Zimbardo. There was likely a self-selection effect.

That study also speaks to power within academia. The 2007 study was from a lesser known university so it didn't get nearly as much attention. Despite the ostensibly meritocratic myths of peer review, power structures in university reputations do still play a major role in determining what gets attention in social research.

Did conducting your research and interviews for the book all over the world change how you see the topic? I'm interested in the idea that maybe there's nothing psychologically 'universal' about these approaches at all… just systems that tolerate / foster corruption to a greater or lesser extent.

Yes, absolutely. I'm a strong believer that systems matter far more than some people imagine. Imagine if I could wave a magic wand and make an angelic individual become the dictator of Turkmenistan tomorrow. That person will almost certainly behave far worse than a mediocre or event malicious person in a robust democracy. So, while I think there are some universal average effects of power on individuals, I think other aspects such as self-selection and broken systems are woefully understudied as drivers of abuse.

How do you think our view of power and corruption might have been biased by the people we get to hear about and study?

It's certainly an issue. Survivorship bias means that we tend to see people who have sought, obtained, and retained power. That trifecta is rare and it's obviously presenting us with an unusual slice of the population. That's why I have issues with some psychological studies that use random samples but then try to extrapolate to the board room, to high political office, or even to different contexts like dictatorships. The people I've met who are in power (including despots and cult leaders) are not normal nor are they average.

I've tried to counteract that problem slightly by doing something that is rarely done in this kind of research: observational research using interviews with people with immense power. It's not a widely used method because it's time consuming and requires access, which can be difficult to come by. I've been fortunate and persistent and have spoken to more than a dozen current and former heads of state, dozens of generals, coup plotters, rebels, corrupt CEOs around the world, etc. But obviously they lie to me and the interviews have their own pitfalls. I've concluded that every method is flawed, but I will say that I've learned a heck of a lot from visiting places and speaking to people – and those insights couldn't have come from a random sample in a lab experiment.

What impact has interviewing mostly bad people had on how you view bad people?

I have met some awful people. And I still believe most people are good. My view is that we need to design better systems to more effectively block corruptible people from gaining power.

I also think people are really, really complicated and the moral condemnation (that many people I interviewed clearly warrant) wasn't as helpful as trying to figure out why they behaved as they did – so we can stop it in the future.

Were there any questions you were surprised haven't been answered?

I'm surprised that we don't have good data about power holders outside Western democracies. The skew in power studies toward college students and well-regulated Western businesses is still a huge problem. Very few people could answer my questions when I asked if psychopaths in China or Togo might be different in some way than in the United States, and I don't think psychology research generally does quite enough to deal with context, which is wildly different in authoritarian countries for example.

What concept was hard to get your head around?

I was somewhat amazed at how little we know about what causes some people to want power and others to not care very much one way or another. There are loads of different measures, but they each have flaws, and I don't think we have good answers to the question: what makes someone crave power?

In your experience, do most people still crave structure, order, hierarchy, even when most of the evidence you uncovered seems to suggest that a 'flat' approach to relations seems to have a happier ending?

I don't think that flat relations are necessarily more desirable nor are they realistic in mass population societies. Hierarchy, properly managed and with dignity for those on the lower end, can unleash a lot of human innovation and solve a lot of problems. But I think the system matters most. A toxic 'flat' culture isn't better than a well-managed vertical hierarchy that values individuals.

Has writing the book changed the way you think or behave yourself?

The main thing is I've started to read far more widely and well beyond political science. The world is way too complex to understand it through a single disciplinary prism.

Has it given you a concise retort to people who say to you at dinner parties 'Ah… power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely'?

All I can say is that they understand a tiny sliver of what's actually going on. Power does corrupt, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.

In terms of your 10 lessons [see below], which would you say is the most underappreciated / the most important in the modern world?

The easiest and quickest way to make an impact is to think more carefully about recruitment and promotion, ranging from business to politics. So much of our world operates on autopilot, and it needlessly attracts more corruptible people to try to seek power. We focus so much attention on what powerful people do – and not nearly enough attention on who becomes powerful. That's a dangerous, damaging mistake. 

Ten lessons

1. Actively recruit incorruptible people and screen out corruptible ones
2. Use sortition and shadow governance for oversight
3. Rotate to reduce abuse
4. Audit decision-making processes, not just results
5. Create frequent, potent reminders of responsibility
6. Don't let those in power see people as abstractions
7. Watched people are nice people
8. Focus oversight on the controllers, not the controlled
9. Exploit randomness to maximise deterrence while minimising invasions of privacy
10. Stop waiting for principled saviours: make them instead

 

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'It is a magic word, accident, powerful enough to mask some truly horrible things'

Jessie Singer is a journalist and the author of There Are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster – Who Profits and Who Pays the Price.

What got you interested in accidents?

In 2006, a drunk driver made a wrong turn onto a bike path and killed my best friend. In court, the driver called it 'this accident that happened' – as though he wasn't even there. That was my first inkling that the word 'accident' carried more meaning than it appeared.

But the intrigue that drives my book arrived a decade later when another man rented a truck and followed the exact same route as my best friend's killer, not making a wrong turn but driving down the bike path with murderous intent. That man kill eight and severely injured 11 in a vehicular terrorist attack. In the aftermath, I investigated and found that my best friend was not the only deadly 'accident' on that very path. It turned out that drivers were regularly found driving down this stretch of the path – and others had been killed and severely injured there, too, before and after my friend was. Nothing had been done to protect people because those were all 'accidents'.

After the terror attack, government officials installed steel and cement bollards at every possible intersection where a driver could potentially drive onto the path – making repetition of both the 'accident' and the crime impossible. It was proof that my best friend's killing could have been prevented. The fact that nothing was done before, that the same 'accident' repeating – again and again – merited no response, is the grotesque reality that drives this book. The word 'accident' is a giant rug under which we sweep a massive number of grave and preventable harms, so as not to have to do anything about them.

What's the extent of the problem?

In the US, some 173,000 people died by accident in 2019, the figure I quote in the book; by the time the book came out, so had 2020 data. The number had grown to more than 200,000.

What surprised you when you researched the topic?

I was shocked to find out exactly how predictable and preventable some 'accidental' death was, and the direct relationship between policy, infrastructure, race, and class in these allegedly random causes of death and injury. Accidental fire deaths, traffic crashes, drownings, overdoses – it's all divided along racial and class lines and preventable with simple regulation and existing tools and resources. Whether or not we survive is simply decided by the risk or safety of our built environment – be it our roads, our homes, or our workplaces. In these places, where government and corporate policies can do a great deal to protect us or expose us to more risk, we see accident outcomes are most unequal.

It was surprising to see how stark this data was, and how clear a picture of neglect it painted, but what was perhaps most shocking for me was the realisation that most people did not know about these inequities because each was chalked up as a random 'accident'. It is a magic word, accident, and it is powerful enough to mask some truly horrible things.

Another thing that surprised me was the way that these ideas – such as a disregard for 'accidents' and blaming victims instead of the built environment for accidental death – are built into our brains. While it is corporate power and racist policy that causes mistakes to turn into 'accidental' deaths, it is our own psychological tendencies that drive us to accept and allow it.

How is power central to accidents, and to who is 'allowed' to tell the stories of accidents?

Power is central to 'accidents' because the narrative that we are most likely to hear, the narrative that comes from people with power, is that accidents are a matter of unsafe people. And those powerful people, more times than not, are the ones in control of our exposure to dangerous conditions.

Automakers who built cars with designed-in dangers insisted that traffic crashes were caused by 'the nut behind the wheel'. Pharmaceutical companies that manufactured known-addictive opioids marketed as non-addictive insisted the overdose crisis was caused by 'criminal addicts and abusers'. Turn of the century factory owners insisted that accidents were caused by 'accident-prone workers', while sharp machines remained unguarded and assembly lines moved at impossible paces.

Whichever narrative we hear decides what happens next. After an accident, do you fire the injured worker or slow the pace of production? Do you punish the driver or redesign the car? In the answers to these questions, we can predict whether or not the same accident will happen again. A great deal of power resides with whoever decides the answers to these questions. Who tells the story, and the story they tell, is the secret to the accident.

Are there examples of accidents that were not handled in the way that concerns you, i.e. that didn't involve power, corruption and lies and which could therefore serve as a bit of a model for how to respond to accidents?

I see hope elsewhere. The truth is that no one in the wealthy world dies 'by accident' at the rate we do in the US because no other wealthy nation fails to both regulate corporations and to tax the rich to maintain infrastructure and the social safety net, as in the US. For example, in Europe and Japan, traffic fatalities are dramatically lower because vehicles are more strictly regulated and roads are designed and maintained for safety first. Countries across Europe did not suffer from the same opioid epidemic as the US because a social safety net, including universal medical care, is available to its citizens.

Two notable examples of accident prevention are traffic fatalities in Sweden and drug overdoses in Portugal. In both places, the 'accident' problem was approached with the goal of not blaming and punishing people for mistakes and bad decisions, but reducing harm when people made mistakes – changing the dangerous conditions. While Sweden redesigned roads in a way that prioritised protecting human life above all other goals, Portugal decriminalised drugs and made treatment widely and freely available, including safe injection sites. Both countries assumed that people would make mistakes and bad decisions, when on the road and when using drugs, and focused not on punishing those people or endeavoring to change their behaviour, but simply protecting them from harm if and when the worst occurred.

Did you meet any interesting psychologists along the way?

Yes! I learned so much from Paul Slovic and Barch Fischhoff at Decision Research, who taught me about how we perceive risk, and how regardless risk may be out of your control. David DeSteno helped me understand empathy fatigue, how we might misperceive scale in largescale 'accidents', such as oil spills or nuclear meltdowns, and how we might be easily persuaded by politicians who promise that they have solved the problems or 'it won't happen again'. And last but not least, Kevin B. Smith at Lamar University taught me about the 'just world' fallacy and how it might affect our perception of people of different economic classes, laying the groundwork for people living in poverty to both face a higher risk of accidental death and a higher likelihood of being blamed for it.

What concept was hard to get your head around?

'Accidental' death is not cancer or Covid, which is to say: we know how to solve this problem. Existing technology, properly regulated, prevents the harm of accidents. Mandating already-available safety technology, such as alcohol detection and emergency braking systems, in all vehicles can prevent traffic accidents; requiring pharmacists to distribute free naloxone with all opioid prescriptions and drug companies to blister package opioids can prevent accidental overdose death; demanding that all new apartment construction be built with sprinkler and fire-proof self-closing doors can prevent accidental fire death.

It's hard to conceive of how straightforward the solution is, and how readily disregarded it remains. None of this is rocket science but readily available harm reducing concepts, except currently, we restrict access or leave it to the free market to decide who gets safe passage. It's easy to protect people – it just costs money.

Which groups are more likely to die by accident and why?

In the US, generally, people living in poverty, Black people, and indigenous people are most likely to die by 'accident' especially when the risk of accidental death is decided by infrastructure and policy. For example, we all die by choking on food at pretty much the same rate across class, geography, and race lines, but Black people die in 'accidental' house fires at twice the rate of white people, Indigenous people are twice as likely as white people to be struck by a driver in a traffic 'accident', and people in (poorer) West Virginia die 'by accident' at twice the rate of people just across the state line in (wealthier) Virginia. When we call these predictable, preventable tragedies accidental, we sweep all this bold-faced inequality under the rug.

This is because the likelihood of accidental death is a matter of exposure to risk, and risk adds up. The more risk you are exposed to, the more likely you are to die. For example, driving an older car is a risk, and living in a place where more people live in poverty, so the government spends less money on road repair, is a risk – exposure to both of those dangerous conditions multiplies your risk of accidental death in a traffic accident. People living in poverty, Black people, and Indigenous people are generally exposed to more risk from their built environments, and as a result, are more likely to die by accident – so the most wide-reaching policy changes the US could make to reduce the risk of accidental death start with changing the built environment to reduce excess risk exposure. This will happen through rebuilding infrastructure, expanding the social safety net, and supporting aggressive federal safety regulations.

Has writing the book changed the way you think or behave yourself?

I've become hyperaware of the role of blame in the public discourse and in public policy, in particular the persistent and pervasive way that politicians rely on legislating blame as a way of doing nothing to solve problems while appearing functional.

For example, in New York City where I live, there was a horrible apartment fire in January which killed 17 people. In the aftermath, powerful people told this story: the fire began with a malfunctioning space heater and spread when someone running from the fire left their door open. However, in New York City, adequate heat and automatic self-closing doors (which prevent fires from spreading) are required by law – yet these lifesaving preventative measures were malfunctioning and unenforced. The fire began unintentionally but the death toll was no accident – the result of a negligent corporate landlord and city regulator.

In the aftermath, two pieces of legislation were introduced on the same day: one would increase inspections, fines, and enforcement against landlords for malfunctioning self-closing door violations, and the other would 'require education about safe use of electric space heaters' – the implication being that the apartment tenants were dumb, not cold. In response to the same problem, one law offers a systemic solution, the other individualises error; one prevents this from happening again by limiting exposure to dangerous conditions, and the other wastes time and money while distracting from the real problem; one is effective prevention, and the other is victim-blaming disguised as usefulness.

It's a stark binary, and one I can no longer unsee.

Jesse Singer is a journalist, who studied at the Arthur L. Carter School of Journalism at New York Uni, and under the wing of the late investigative journalist Wayne Barrett. 

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'Corruption is often easier to see in others than in ourselves'

Mark Knights is Professor of History at the University of Warwick, and author of Trust and Distrust: Corruption in Office in Britain and its Empire, he speaks with The Psychologist on psychology and the history of trust and distrust. 

What got you interested in corruption, trust and distrust?

I have always been interested in the ways in which the past resonates with the present. In previous research I have explored the nature of political partisanship and how new media (in this case, print) fostered cultures of lying and fictionality. Corruption interested me because it is both an important contemporary concern but also one that pre-occupied pre-modern Britain (that is to say, Britain and its growing empire, from about 1600 to about 1850). Curiously there was no book that offered an overview of Britain's history of corruption and anti-corruption, so I decided to write it!

The themes of trust and distrust emerged from the sources I was studying. Public offices and offices in semi-private corporations were routinely referred to as 'places of trust' and allegations of corruption undermined trust in officials; but I also came to appreciate that a level of distrust was also important, since whistle-blowers and the press frequently voiced their distrust of institutions and even of the bodies supposed to prevent or investigate corruption.

What surprised you?

When I began my research I had expected that a lot of the evidence would be 'secret' – buried away in private papers. But in fact there were so many prosecutions of corrupt individuals and investigations into their activities that a lot of the material was in print and in the public domain. This made me aware of the importance of the public discussion about corruption; but it also underlined how a vast, available data-set was not being sufficiently explored by historians, and even less by social and political scientists.

Another thing that surprised me, related to this, was how little the current policy debates are informed by historical data, even though it can tell us much about corruption and anti-corruption. In the case of Britain we have a country that moved move from a state of corruption to one which embraced a whole set of anti-corruption measures, even if it was still not totally 'clean' at the end – and that seems like a really important process to understand! I have written several articles to try to persuade scholars in cognate disciplines that the use of historical data can be useful to them (including 'The History of Corruption and the Benefits of a Historical Approach', in Jane Ellis' Corruption, Social Sciences and the Law, and 'What Can we Learn about Corruption from Historical Case Studies?' in The Oxford Handbook on the Quality of Government).

Have you met / collaborated with psychologists along the way?

I have had conversations with social psychologists earlier in my career when I was working on stereotyping. This led to a number of publications trying to make a bridge between history and your discipline (including Taking a Historical Turn: Possible Points of Connection Between Social Psychology and History', in Integrative Psychological and Behavioural Sciences in 2012; and a chapter on stereotypes in Cristian Teleaga and Jovan Byford's Psychology and History the following year).

I enjoy thinking across disciplines. Indeed, I am convinced that a topic such as corruption is best tackled through a multi-disciplinary approach. I learned a lot from reading work by economists, political scientists, anthropologists and sociologists. The bibliography of my book tries to explain to historians what is useful in this literature, even if it is primarily concerned with 'modern' rather than 'pre-modern' corruption.

You describe corruption as a many headed Hydra; do you think that applies to how people think, feel and behave around corruption, as well as to how we talk about it?

The metaphor of the hydra is interesting because it was used quite extensively in the pre-modern period. The image, from 1784, shows a reformer, Charles James Fox, as the 'Champion of the People' cutting off the hydra's heads – one labelled 'corruption' lies on the ground but the live heads include 'Tyranny', 'Despotism', and 'Oppression', indicating that corruption was seen as part of an oppressive 'monster'. The metaphor of a hydra is useful for us too, as a way of thinking about the interconnections between the various 'heads' that constitute or enable corruption. The hydra is an organic way of thinking about a 'system' of linked fields that may need to be tackled collectively rather than selectively. The hydra is also helpful as an image of how corruption re-grows, in perhaps slightly different ways, so that anti-corruption is necessarily a continuous process as much as a one-off 'big bang' of solutions.

Can you explain how trust and distrust can operate in a cycle?

Trust had a number of meanings, each of which is relevant to the study of corruption. Interpersonal trust is often seen by sociologists as a social glue that binds society together; corruption can be seen as something that often undermines that social glue by creating distrust of other people's motives and of institutions. Those social ties can, however, also contribute to corruption: kinship, gift-giving, patronage and friendship were (and still are) key forms of creating social trust, but they are also prone to abuse and can degenerate into nepotism, bribery and cronyism. So some distrust of the ties that bind us is also useful.

I was interested in the ideas of sociologist Piotr Stompka, who argued that trust and distrust are often in a precarious balance and that the art of government is finding the right balance: too little distrust can enable abuse, but too much can paralyse the system.

Trust in institutions such as government and the police has declined in the UK in recent years, arguably in line with continued reports of corruption. Yet I would have thought that some still view corruption as something that is more rife in other societies. Do you have a historical perspective on that?

It depends what you are measuring! The definition of 'corruption' has always been something that is fluid and contested. What constitutes corruption varies from society to society; so measuring it is extremely difficult. The attempts to do so – by Transparency International for example – are often controversial, since they appear to show a relatively 'clean' West. Yet if we were measuring corrupt financial systems that launder dirty money, or the undue influence of money on political actors, then the West starts to look a lot less squeaky clean. So the issue of measuring corruption forces us to think hard about how to define corruption.

Is there an element of racism/colonialism around how we think of corruption?

My book argues that corruption was an intrinsic part of the imperial system. That relied on semi-private bodies, such as the hybrid public-private East India Company, which was made up of private traders who had a government monopoly on trade and increasingly exercised civil and political as well as economic control. The Company had huge problems with corruption in the 18th century. The colonial system elsewhere often relied on governors who had conflicting roles and conflicting self-interests.

Curiously, little of the secondary literature places imperial corruption alongside domestic corruption. I think it needs to be there. The legacy of the interactions persists, for example in how we view certain colonised peoples as being prone to corruption – that was one of the arguments that emerged in early 19th century India to legitimise colonial rule. There is a tendency in developed countries (often ex-colonial powers) to think of corruption as associated with particular races, religions and even continents, and to forget that European countries had their own very long struggles with corruption. Corruption is often easier to see in others than in ourselves.

I liked 'The Golden Pippin-Pippin Boys on the Branches of State', 'the ladder by which the noble lads ascend'. With rungs such as 'ambition', 'flattery' and 'assurance', is there a psychologically fine line between corruption and climbing that ladder legitimately?

Yes. The boundary between legitimate and illegitimate behaviour was often blurred and vague – there were few laws which specifically defined or banned corruption and even those that existed (such as laws designed to prevent electoral corruption) were often ignored or out of step with public moral outrage. Even today we see that the law/rules and morality/public opinion are not always in step – think of the MPs' expenses scandal. And how many people today still owe jobs or leg-ups to well-placed friends who gave them an advantage over others?

'Ambition' is interesting: the term derives from the Roman process for electioneering ('ambitio') which often involved corruption and in the pre-modern world ambition was often seen as a very negative and even dangerous quality. Today we have a much more positive view of it, though we are also suspicious of people who are 'over-ambitious'.

What concept was hard to get your head around? Are there psychological aspects you'd like to see more research on?

A lot of my key concepts – corruption, office, trust, distrust, the state – were not static in the pre-modern period, but underwent profound evolution and change. I often felt as though I was studying moving targets. I also felt there was little work on how people accused of corruption saw themselves or legitimised what they did. I wrote an article for philosophers about this, Explaining away corruption in pre-modern Britain, in Social Philosophy and Policy.

I think the psychological side of corruption could yield very interesting research. What personality types or traits were most persistent in those accused of corruption? Those accused of corruption, both at home and especially in the empire, often seem to have been risk-takers, people who disregarded rules, entrepreneurs who sought to push boundaries, often with an idiosyncratic moral compass. Are there personality types that can be associated with corruption and indeed with the zeal of anti-corruption too? Can institutions reshape such personality types or can institutions themselves display similar 'personalities'?

Also, there has recently been much interest in the history of emotions. What emotions did corruption charges arouse, both in those being accused and those doing the accusers, and how did 'scandal' work to effect change, in individuals and society more generally? The history of corruption tells us about how individuals and societies drew moral boundaries, and there were often two sides to corruption allegations that forced the public to act as moral umpires. But the process of drawing moral boundaries and deciding on ethical dilemmas could be much better studied, not least because it has implications for how we train today's public and private officials.

You emphasise that trust and distrust have not developed in a linear way as concepts… how do you see our psychological relationship with trust and distrust changing in the future?

As I indicated earlier, trust and distrust have to work in an uneasy tension with one another; but we also know that forms of corruption evolve in ways that upset whatever balance is achieved. In the future, the ways in which the digital world affects trust and distrust are likely to become big issues. The digital both enables new types of corruption and undermines trust in institutions and other people, but it may also be part of the solution to tackling corruption and rebuilding trust. We already glimpse some of these tensions in the way social media enables exposure of corrupt activity but also offers something of a feeding frenzy and provides a form of theatrical politics that does not always result in systemic change.

Has writing on corruption changed the way you think or behave yourself?

Historians very often refract the present in what they choose to write about or how they think; and inevitably their subjects in turn influence their perception of the world around them. My awareness of corruption around the world has undoubtedly been heightened. I ask students to come to class with media reports about corruption today so that we can find parallels with the past, and there is always too much to talk about! But perhaps that heightened sensitivity is itself a corruption of my own sense of proportion?!