On the subject of leaders behaving badly -- this is from the "Cults, Sex and New Religious Movements" Board, "Sex/Sexuality Within Cults" thread.
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forum.culteducation.com]
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Let us look at Professor Deborah Gruenfeld's experiment--what I term
the Stanford Cookie Experiment. I believe that scholars of cults and dysfunctional organizatins need to place this experiment alongside Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority Experiment and Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment.
This experiement demonstrates how a leadership role, randomly assigned, has a tendency to trigger swinish bad manners in otherwise normal persons. The way the experiment worked (and it was replicated a number of times)
subjects were assembled into a group to do a shared task.
*At random, one subject in each group was assigned the role of overseeing and evaluating the others' work--randomly assigned to a leadership role.
During the experiment, a plate of cookies/biscuits was brought in.
Time and again, those subjects randomly assigned to the leadership role, tended
to do the following:
Took more cookies (greed)
Chewed with mouths open (lapses of ordinary good manners)
Got crumbs on their faces and left crumbs on the table (messes for others to clean up)
Thus, random assignment to a brief, time limited leadership role had a potent effect--increasing the probability that the promoted subject's manners would deteriorate. --------------------------------End of Quote----------------------------------------------------------------
These individuals had just been assigned the leadership position at random -- and were just in it briefly...and yet it still had a strong effect on their behavior. If someone is the kind of person who wants, and seeks power over others, just imagine how much more their behavior will be affected. And if someone is in a leadership position for years -- that'll affect their behavior even more.
Someone posted in this thread about meeting a Japanese Young Women's Division member who had worked in Ikeda's house. The American members were saying, "Oh, that's great, you were so lucky, tell us about him!" The Japanese girl wouldn't talk about it...and seemed very uncomfortable when the subject came up. Given the Stanford Cookie Study, we can imagine how Ikeda's manners might have deteriorated over the years.
There was a video on Youtube of a big SGI meeting years ago, showing Ikeda mocking the then-SGI leader, Fred Zaitsu's speech and pounding on the table. I couldn't believe how rude he was to Zaitsu...but then again, why not? Who was going to stop him?
As with Ikeda, some leaders behave badly simply because they can. There seems to be this culture in SGI that you don't question leaders. They're just flabbergasted if anyone does; they don't know what to do with you. I see this a lot in Japanese leaders, but white, or African-American leaders also develop that mindset.
There is this mystique about leaders -- some senior leader comes into town, and they're treated like a movie star. Everyone is encouraged to get guidance from this person. They're not a doctor, a lawyer, a therapist, a financial advisor, or a career counselor. They may not even have finished high school. They don't know you at all. Their own family, finances, health may be a mess! Yet, somehow, they've got some special wisdom that qualifies them to advise you on any kind of problem -- medical, family, financial, school. The local leaders act as if this is your last chance to ever get any help for your problem, whatever it is. Superleader can help you when doctors, accountants, trained therapists can't....and they can probably leap over the kaikon in a single bound too.