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Who Gets Power — and Why It Can Corrupt Even the Best of Us

Shankar Vedantam: Call it adulation, adoration, idolization. Humans are prone to suck up to the rich and powerful. But this turns out to be only one side of our psychology. On the other side is something entirely different. Many of us hate the rich because they’re rich. We want to see the powerful topple from their pedestals. We enjoy seeing the glamorous fall and fail. The lure of celebrity tours is rivaled only by the popularity of tabloid magazines detailing the rehab trips and broken marriages of those same celebrities. Today on the show, we’ll explore our ambivalence towards power and what happens to us when we get power ourselves.

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