power manners

Researchers led by the psychologist Dacher Keltner took groups of three ordinary volunteers and randomly put
one of them in charge. Each trio had a half-hour to work through a boring social survey. Then a researcher came
in and left a plateful of precisely five cookies. Care to guess which volunteer typically grabbed an extra cookie?
The volunteer who had randomly been assigned the power role was also more likely to eat it with his mouth open,
spew crumbs on partners and get cookie detritus on his face and on the table.
It reminded the researchers of powerful people they had known in real life. One of them, for instance, had
attended meetings with a magazine mogul who ate raw onions and slugged vodka from the bottle, but failed to
share these amuse-bouches with his guests. Another had been through an oral exam for his doctorate at which
one faculty member not only picked his ear wax, but held it up to dandle lovingly in the light.