"Muammar Gaddafi continues to hold tightly to power even as NATO bombs rain down on Tripoli. Syrian autocrat Bashar al-Assad has killed more than 1,000 of his own people in an effort to quash protests." - Lit

"...In a new paper called "How Power Corrupts," a Columbia University team of psychologists suggest that power doesn't change the psychology of powerful people but, rather, their physiology. Lead author Dana Carney and her team hypothesize that because power eases so many daily stressors — dictators never have to worry about driving a car or paying a mortgage — powerful people show persistently lower levels of cortisol, a hormone closely associated with stress. Typically, immoral behavior — even routine sins like lying — is stressful. "A lie-teller must actively inhibit and suppress many things including: the truth, internal monitoring of [his or her] moral compass, social norms, fear of consequence, and consideration of others' interests," Carney and her colleagues write. "This suppression leads to negative emotions, decrements in mental function, and physiological stress." But because they have lower levels of cortisol, "the powerful have an abundance of emotional and cognitive resources available to use when navigating stressors as they arise." In this way, dictators may become immune to regret. When the Columbia team tested their hypothesis in a lab setting, they found that study participants who were placed in large offices and informed they were managers made difficult decisions much more easily than those given the role of subordinates. Not only did the high-power group score lower on psychological measures of stress; they also had lower levels of cortisol in saliva samples. Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2011... " - Lit