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Big Think is the leading source of expert-driven, actionable, educational content -- with thousands of videos, featuring experts ranging from Bill Clinton to Bill Nye, we help you get smarter, faster. Get actionable lessons from the world’s greatest thinkers & doers. Our experts are either disrupting or leading their respective fields. We aim to help you explore the big ideas and core skills that define knowledge in the 21st century, so you can apply them to the questions and challenges in your own life.
4 reasons leaders seem worse than regular people | Brian Klaas
Big Think
9 minutes
1 day ago
4 reasons leaders seem worse than regular people | Brian Klaas
University College London professor Brian Klaas exposes the ugly truth about world leaders.
Political scientist Brian Klaas uses philosophical thought experiments like the "trolley problem" to explore the moral complexities faced by leaders when making decisions under immense uncertainty.
According to Klaas, Winston Churchill's World War II choices serve as real-life examples of such dilemmas. Klaas identifies four factors—dirty hands, learning, opportunity, and scrutiny—that may falsely appear as corruption in leaders. "Dirty hands" refers to leaders making harm-inflicting decisions when all options are bad. "Learning" means leaders becoming more efficient at causing harm over time. "Opportunity" signifies the increased chances of those in power to cause harm, while "scrutiny" refers to heightened public examination of leaders' actions.
Klaas asserts that misinterpretations of these factors can lead to incorrect problem diagnoses and solutions. While these factors should not absolve leaders from accountability, they do provide a nuanced understanding of leadership complexities.
0:00 Cracking the Enigma code: Churchill’s WWII trolley problem
2:07 Why all leaders make bad decisions
2:42 4 factors of the corruption illusion
3:12 #1 The dirty hands problem
3:38 #2 The idea of learning
4:09 #3 The problem of opportunity
4:30 #4 The problem of scrutiny
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About Brian Klaas:
Associate Professor of Global Politics at University College London, Contributing Writer for The Atlantic, author of Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us, and Creator/Host of the award-winning Power Corrupts podcast.
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Big Think
Big Think is the leading source of expert-driven, actionable, educational content -- with thousands of videos, featuring experts ranging from Bill Clinton to Bill Nye, we help you get smarter, faster. Get actionable lessons from the world’s greatest thinkers & doers. Our experts are either disrupting or leading their respective fields. We aim to help you explore the big ideas and core skills that define knowledge in the 21st century, so you can apply them to the questions and challenges in your own life.
