If power were a prescription drug, the warning label would be hilarious if it weren’t so true. Side effects may include dizziness, delusions of grandeur, loss of empathy, and a strange belief that you’re as irresistible as Henry Kissinger on a Friday night. (Yes, that Henry Kissinger, who once famously believed his power made him a sex symbol.) In other words, power intoxicates. We’ve all heard that it corrupts, but some science says it might just break your brain too. I’ve written before about the “Power Paradox” – the bizarre phenomenon where climbing the ladder kicks out the very rungs that got you up there. Grab a coffee (get it yourself, though – we’re staying humble today) and let’s explore how leaders gaining power can lose their mind’s touch with reality, and why this is what we are experiencing today. For this post Reference: https://reason.com/2017/07/14/science-power-causes-brain-damage/ & https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/power-causes-brain-damage/528711/
This Is Your Brain on Power (The Power Paradox)
Let’s dig into the science of this power-brain weirdness. Dacher Keltner, psychology professor and professional student-of-people-being-jerks, conducted decades of experiments on folks “under the influence” of power. His findings are jaw-dropping: people who feel powerful start acting like someone with a traumatic brain injury – more impulsive, more reckless, and crucially, less able to see things from other people’s point of view. In short, power can give you a case of “CEO concussion.” You rise to the top by being sharp, but once you’re there, you become a bit dull to others’ feelings. Keltner dubbed this the “power paradox”, because it’s a paradox indeed: once we have power, we lose some of the capacities we needed to gain it in the first place. Mother Nature, it seems, has a twisted sense of humor.
And it’s not just behavior – it’s neural. Neuroscientist Sukhvinder Obhi stuck the heads of high-power and low-power people under a Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation machine (basically a device that maps brain activity). He discovered that power impairs “mirroring,” a specific neural process that’s key to empathy. Mirroring is your brain’s way of playing monkey-see, monkey-do on the inside; it’s why you cringe when you see someone else get a paper cut or why you tear up a bit at the end of Toy Story 3. It helps us feel what others feel. But in Obhi’s lab, the brains of the powerful lit up way less in response to others. It’s like the empathy circuit got dampened – not fully broken, just on low-power mode (pun intended). This gives a neurological basis to Keltner’s power paradox: the coronation comes with a quiet neural lobotomy of your empathy.
In plainer terms, power acts like an anesthetic to the empathy centers. You don’t feel others’ pain as acutely; you stop picking up on subtle social cues. Psychologists have even shown this in delightfully petty experiments. In one study, participants were asked to draw a capital letter E on their forehead so someone across from them could read it. It’s a simple test of perspective-taking: you have to imagine what it looks like from another person’s viewpoint. Guess what? People primed to feel powerful were three times more likely to draw the E backwards, readable to themselves but not to anyone else. In their minds, the world literally revolves around them. Other experiments found that powerful people struggle to identify emotions in others’ facial expressions or estimate how others feel in a given situation. It’s like the more powerful you get, the worse your emotional Wi-Fi signal becomes – just one bar of empathy, if you’re lucky.
Keltner points out another contributor: when you’re the boss, everyone else starts mirroring you (think of how employees laugh a little too hard at the boss’s lame joke). Subordinates aren’t giving the leader honest feedback or emotions – they’re giving back whatever they think the leader wants. So the boss gets even fewer clues. Meanwhile, the boss stops mimicking others altogether. As Keltner says, powerful people “stop simulating the experience of others,” leading to an “empathy deficit”. It’s a perfect storm of miscommunication: one side’s hiding their true feelings, the other side’s not picking any feelings up. No wonder senior leaders can become gaffe-machines; they’re practically flying blind to others’ emotions.
Hubris Syndrome: When Power Becomes a Disease
If all this sounds like a recipe for turning into a Grade-A jerk, well, it is. There’s even a name for the extreme case: Hubris Syndrome. Lord David Owen (a British neurologist-turned-politician) coined this after observing how leaders can literally acquire a disorder from too much power. He defines hubris syndrome as “a disorder of the possession of power, particularly power which has been associated with overwhelming success, held for a period of years and with minimal constraint on the leader.” In plain English: get a big head for long enough, with no one to check you, and you might actually lose your mind (or at least your social marbles). It’s not officially in the medical textbooks, but maybe it should be. The syndrome’s hallmark traits read like the side effects on that power prescription label we joked about, only more serious. Some greatest hits from the list of 14 clinical features include:
- Manifest contempt for others – treating people like peasants or nuisances (because clearly, you’re superior).
- Loss of contact with reality – living in a bubble of yes-people, effectively on your own.
- Reckless or impulsive actions – making huge decisions on gut feeling, convinced you’re infallible.
- Displays of incompetence – oddly enough, all that arrogance leads to screw-ups and basic mistakes.
Sound like any leaders you know? We’ve seen plenty of executives and politicians drift into this la-la land of self-importance. The result is often spectacular missteps. Think of notorious corporate scandals or policy blunders that left onlookers asking, “How could someone so smart do something so dumb?” Easy – their hubris blinded them. When you start believing your own hype, you stop learning, stop listening, and start flunking Reality 101. Hubris syndrome is basically the supervillain origin story for real-world leaders. Some may recall the Villains are primarily the heroes of their own story.
What would Ma say? (Intermission)
Well, it is Mother’s Day today so, I decided to drive this post in a different direction just a bit. My mother had a personality that was very powerful. Her quiet mode was still written in all caps! As I thought about the post today, I reflected on conversations I have had with her over the years. One thing we can say for sure, she would have been very angry about what is happening now. She believed in helping people and healing the world. She believed in peace. She wrote about building domes to protect people from hurricanes and weather events. When she was in the hospital and doctors were trying things never tested before, she said to me that it was worth it because “they were learning.” She believed in shared responsibilities and shared burden. The cognitive dissonance and our social disconnection are against everything she stood for. I sat in front of the blinking cursor, and I asked myself what she would say or do. I believe she would be speaking up and speaking out. She would openly voice her concerns and her opinion about what is going on in the world. Silence is consent. If you don’t speak out on your perspective of right or wrong, no one could join you. When people become powerful and forget themselves and lose their empathy, it is up to us to remind them of their humanity. This is about clarity and love of our fellow human being. If we are diminished in our value as people, we will be treated as things. We can see this through all of human history, and we can see this today. The only difference is that most people in the world have access to knowledge. We also have access to raise our voices. My mom would certainly want us to speak out against the nonsense we are seeing.
Psychologists suggest actively for those who forget to remember what it’s like to be powerless. It is possible that some people don’t have an active recollection of being powerless. These people need either a reminder or some other mechanism of understanding. If they don’t understand, they will continue to build social and physical disconnection from the real world psychologically and still have a real-world impact on those they are meant to serve and support.
Final Thoughts: The Power Paradox, Revisited
The power paradox is real, and it’s equal parts fascinating and frightening. Give someone power and they may start to lose the very empathy and awareness that got them there. It’s like a cruel joke: “Congrats on the promotion! By the way, you’re now far more likely to step on rakes you can’t even see.” This isn’t just a problem for the person in charge – it trickles down to the whole. A boss with an empathy deficit can create a toxic workplace, make tone-deaf decisions, or drive the company into scandalous situations. In the broader sense, leaders losing touch will send societies off course too.
Knowing about this paradox is the first step to fighting it. Power doesn’t have to corrupt absolutely, not if leaders actively cultivate humility and empathy as they gain influence. Knowledge is power – but as one researcher quipped, what good is knowing that power robs you of knowledge if you don’t act on it? The real power move for any executive (or anyone, really) is to guard your mind against hubris as vigilantly as you guard your company’s bottom line. If you self-aware enough to take action and guard against hubris, this is a good opportunity. For those who are not self-aware and cause great damage to the world, we have a responsibility to ourselves and to each other to regulate those who are incapable of self-regulation.
It is very easy to mentally assign ourselves to a particular person in this narrative. To be clear, I have seen this behavior in so many places with many people. If and when we see it, we can try in a kind a clear way to make it apparent. If this doesn’t work, we have to find a way to change things or we must accept the outcomes.