Saturday, May 1, 2010

Power and Morality

After a tough day of grading (the least favorite part of the job) I decided to noodle around the blogosphere. Much to my pleasure I became reacquainted with Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational blog and there was this little treasure about the relationship between power and morality. The upshot of the research by a pair of social psychologists was that a position of power led to a sense of entitlement. This entitlement then leads to judging others more severely than ourselves. But, when people consider that their power was illegitimate (in other words they didn't earn it) then they judged themselves more harshly than others.

I'm certain there is a message here for Christians about the source of our salvation. We should not be so proud of our salvation or righteousness because of anything that we did, our relationship with God was not something we earned rather a grace we are proud to partake of.

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