this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2026
987 points (98.1% liked)
Technology
88825 readers
2866 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Both. Whether you're considering empathy or competency.
Increased power—in pay or in authority—may be followed by decreased empathy (they turn bad). Conversely, dark triad traits have been linked with success like promotion to management (they were bad already). The research on this side has been criticized, mainly for methodology. I think the underlying idea makes intuitive sense.
On the competency side, there's the Peter Principle, originally satirical but subsequently researched. Good employees are promoted to a position of incompetence (they turn bad, or rather, are promoted until they are no longer good). Or, they were incompetent and promoted anyway to get them out of the way (they were bad).
And the mechanisms are not mutually exclusive. E.g., a good employee is promoted, they are bad as a manager, then entrench as their new authority leads to less empathy.