More power leads to more dehumanization, says study

"People assigned to positions of power tend to dehumanize those in less powerful positions even when the roles are randomly assigned, according to a new study by the University of Colorado Boulder....

"I think a lot of us have the intuition that some powerful people can be pretty dehumanizing," said Jason Gwinn, a doctoral student in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and lead author of the study. "But our goal was to test if power, when randomly assigned to ordinary students, would have that effect. That would say something about power itself rather than about the sort of people who have the drive to take power."...

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-03-power-dehumanization.html