Turn to page 101 to choose your role and get ready to present it.

Unit 4. Corporate Morals.

The Psychology of Power

Lead-in

Exercise 1. Starting up:

1. How can you comment on Lord Action’s dictum that says “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”?

2. Is there any space for moral values and pursuing high ideals in politics or is it only about striving for unlimited power and trying to maintain it? Illustrate your view by the examples from the modern political history of our country and abroad.

Listening

Exercise 2. You are going to listen to the report on the problems of corruption (part 1). Study the definitions of some English phrases from the report and translate the examples into Russian:

· extramarital affair - married person's sexual relationship with someone who is not their husband or wife;

· family values - beliefs people have about what is right and wrong and what is most important in family life;

· private gain - something you gain for personal use (Reports of politicians who have extramarital affairs while complaining about the death of family values, or who use public funding for private gain despite condemning government waste, have be­come so common in recent years that they hardly seem surprising anymore);

· travel expenses - money that your employer pays to you because you are spending that amount on travel which is necessary for your work (Half were asked to rate, on a nine-point morality scale (with one being high­ly immoral and nine being highly moral), how objectionable it would be for other people to over-report travel expenses at work);

· morally questionable activity - actions wrong from the moral point of view (Dr Lammers and Dr Galinsky explicitly contrasted attitudes to self and other peo­ple when the morally questionable activi­ty was the same in each case);

· moral pliability – willingness to easily change your moral values depending on the situation (They tested those volun­teers' moral pliability).

Exercise 3. Match the words from the report with their definitions:

1. to over-report	заслуживать
2. common	допустимый
3. objectionable	доброволец
4. a volunteer	завышать
5. acceptable	осуждать
6. to deserve	спорный
7. to condemn	распространенный

Exercise 4. Translate the following words from the report into Russian, think of possible collocations: a) to corrupt, corruption, corruptible, corrupted, corrupting, corruptibility, corruptly; b) power, powerful, powerfully, powerless, powerfulness, powerlessness, powered, to empower, empowered, empowerment, high-power, low-power; c) moral, immoral, morally, moralistic, morality, moralities, to moralize, d) hypocrisy, hypocritical, hypocritically, hypocrite, e) to entitle, entitlement; f) legitimate, legitimately, legitimateness.

Exercise 5. Listen to the report on the problems of corruption and answer the questions (“The Economist” January 23^rd 2010):

1. Who does power corrupt?

2. What experiments did Dr Lammers and Dr Galinsky conduct?

3. Did their experiments confirm Lord Acton’s dictum?

4. What were the details of the first study? What were the volunteers asked to do?

5. How did the scientists test the point further? What situations did they ask the participants to analyze?

Exercise 6. Listen to the report again and complete the following statements:

1. Power corrupts, but it corrupts only those who think they ___________ it.

2. The connection between pow­er and _______________ looks obvious.

3. The scientists have conducted a series of experiments which attempted to elicit states of powerfulness and powerlessness in the minds of _____________.

4. In their first study, Dr Lammers and Dr Galinsky asked ________ university students to write about a momentum in their past when they were in a position of high or lower power.

5. Taken together, these results do indeed suggest that power tends to __________ and to promote a hypocritical tendency to hold other people to a higher standard than oneself.

6. Dr Lammers and Dr Galinsky explicitly contrasted attitudes to self and other peo­ple when the morally _____________ activi­ty was the same in each case.

7. Еhey asked some members of each group how acceptable it would be for someone else to break the speed limit when late for an appointment and how ______________ it would be for the participant himself to do so.

Reading

Exercise 7. Read the second part of the report on the problems of corruption and decide if the following statements are true (T) or false (F):

1. The results showed that the powerful seldom behave hypocritical­ly.

2. Powerful people who have been caught out often show little sign of contrition.

3. 105 participants were asked to write about a past experience in which they had legitimately been given a role of high or low power.

4. "Legitimate" low-power individuals assigned themselves a score of 5.1 if they stole a bicycle and gave others a 4.3.

5. The sense of entitlement is crucial to understanding why people misbehave in high office.

6. Perhaps the lesson, then, is that corruption and hypocrisy are the price that societies pay for be­ing led by alpha males.

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