Virtues, not vices, lead to more effective political leadership

Do politicians get more done if they are more prone to virtue or to vice, if they are inclined toward justice and humanity or to a self-serving social strategy?. New research from the University of California, Berkeley, shows that stable virtuous traits enhance the ability to convert power into influence, at least when it comes to the 151 members of the U.S. Senate who served between January 1989 and December 1998. The study, recently published in the journal Psychological Science , concluded that exhibiting virtuous traits was a plus in terms of getting others in Congress to co-sponsor proposed legislation following a senator's ascension to a committee chair role, while the exhibition of vices provided no such boost. The findings contribute to a long-standing debate about the role of morality and ethics in leadership and support the contentions of Greek philosopher Aristotle over his Italian Renaissance counterpart Niccolo Machiavelli, who argued that the manipulative and emotionally detached are more likely to succeed. The researchers who produced the paper, "Virtues, Vices and Political Influence in the U.S. Senate," include Leanne ten Brinke , a forensic psychologist and Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Haas School and UC Berkeley's psychology department; Sameer Srivastava , an assistant professor in the Haas School of Business's Management of Organizations Group; Dacher Keltner , a UC Berkeley psychology professor and co-director of UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center; and Christopher Liu , an assistant professor of strategy at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management.