Power Scrambles the Brain: How Authority Warps Judgment and Empathy

Power changes everyone. We often associate it with the rich and famous, but anyone in a supervisory, managerial or leadership role or who has influence or control over someone or something has power. And this power does things to us, not just in a skin-deep way. Power changes us neurologically and physiologically—at the level of brain cells and hormones—in ways that affect how we think, feel and act. And while these changes can literally empower us, helping us to be effective as leaders, they can also make the job of being a leader much harder.

Consider, for example, two skills seen as fundamental to leadership: decision-making and connecting with people. Even just feeling powerful has been found to activate a collection of brain regions known as the Behavioural Activation System (or BAS). Once activated, this makes people more focused on goals, more likely to see potential upside and less liable to pay attention to potential constraints. (This helps explain why more powerful CEOs are more likely to pursue exploratory, novel, risky strategies.) An activated BAS also makes people more decisive in deciding what to do and then more likely and quicker to act on this. So, powerholders tend to be more outcome-oriented, optimistic and action-oriented, which is quite a combo.

Where this gets dangerous is that power also tends to increase people’s confidence, and the more power they have and the longer they have it, the more likely they are to become overconfident. This can mean they are likelier to take bold actions that can result in big performance gains. But because they take more risks, the strategies they initiate are also more likely to end badly and destroy value. Thus, their impact becomes more variable over time, and they are both more likely to succeed and fail.

Then, there is connecting with and understanding others. With their BAS activated, powerholders tend to be less likely to notice social cues unless the task they focus on concerns an interpersonal issue. Because they pay less attention to social information, they are less able to gauge what people are thinking and feeling accurately.

In fact, by almost every metric used, outside of tasks that specifically require empathy, powerful people generally have less of it. For example, when someone observes another person’s actions, what typically happens is that their brain produces similar activity, as if they, too, were performing the same actions. It’s a strange kind of unconscious mirroring that we are usually completely unaware of, but nonetheless demonstrates a sort of empathic connection. However, this kind of neurological empathy is reduced in people with higher levels of power. Further evidence shows that people with higher socioeconomic status demonstrate smaller neural responses (less brain activity) when they see others in pain.

So, power changes how our brains work in ways that can fundamentally affect core aspects of leadership. The biggest risk for leaders here is that, for the most part, these changes are silent and subtle shifts that are nearly invisible to us and often become apparent only when things go wrong. Typically, this doesn’t mean leaders failing outright in some dramatic and public way, either, but small mistakes and reductions in effectiveness that gradually accrue over time to undermine performance.

The solution here is simple, though not necessarily easy. If leaders are to be supported in managing the effects of power better, we need to start talking more about it and what power can do to people. The challenge is that in most countries, this is counter-cultural at the moment. It’s just not something we do. And for those already in the most senior roles, it may not always feel safe to open up conversations about how power can affect people. But there is no getting around it. If we want to ensure all the leaders in our organisations have a healthier relationship with the power inherent in their roles, we must start talking more about it.

Nik Kinley is a London-based leadership consultant, assessor and coach with over 35 years of experience working with some of the world’s biggest companies. An award-winning author, he has written eight books, the latest of which is The Power Trap: How Leadership Changes People and What To Do About It.