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If power were a prescription drug, it would come with a long list of known side effects. It can intoxicate. It can corrupt. It can even make Henry Kissinger believe that he\u2019s sexually magnetic. But can it cause brain damage?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When various lawmakers lit into John Stumpf at a congressional hearing last fall, each seemed to find a fresh way to flay the now-former CEO of Wells Fargo for failing to stop some 5,000 employees from setting up phony accounts for customers. But it was Stumpf\u2019s performance that stood out. Here was a man who had risen to the top of the world\u2019s most valuable bank, yet he seemed utterly unable to read a room. Although he apologized, he didn\u2019t appear chastened or remorseful. Nor did he seem defiant or smug or even insincere. He looked disoriented, like a jet-lagged space traveler just arrived from Planet Stumpf, where deference to him is a natural law and 5,000 a commendably small number. Even the most direct barbs\u2014\u201cYou have got to be kidding me\u201d (Sean Duffy of Wisconsin); \u201cI can\u2019t believe some of what I\u2019m hearing here\u201d (Gregory Meeks of New York)\u2014failed to shake him awake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What was going through Stumpf\u2019s head? New research suggests that the better question may be: What wasn\u2019t going through it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The historian Henry Adams was being metaphorical, not medical, when he described power as \u201ca sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim\u2019s sympathies.\u201d But that\u2019s not far from where Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley, ended up after years of lab and field experiments. Subjects under the influence of power, he found in studies spanning two decades, acted as if they had suffered a traumatic brain injury\u2014becoming more impulsive, less risk-aware, and, crucially, less adept at seeing things from other people\u2019s point of view.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sukhvinder Obhi, a neuroscientist at McMaster University, in Ontario, recently described something similar. Unlike Keltner, who studies behaviors, Obhi studies brains. And when he put the heads of the powerful and the not-so-powerful under a transcranial-magnetic-stimulation machine, he found that power, in fact, impairs a specific neural process, \u201cmirroring,\u201d that may be a cornerstone of empathy. Which gives a neurological basis to what Keltner has termed the \u201cpower paradox\u201d: Once we have power, we lose some of the capacities we needed to gain it in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That loss in capacity has been demonstrated in various creative ways. A 2006 study asked participants to draw the letter E on their forehead for others to view\u2014a task that requires seeing yourself from an observer\u2019s vantage point. Those feeling powerful were three times more likely to draw the E the right way to themselves\u2014and backwards to everyone else (which calls to mind George W. Bush, who memorably held up the American flag backwards at the 2008 Olympics). Other experiments have shown that powerful people do worse at identifying what someone in a picture is feeling, or guessing how a colleague might interpret a remark.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The fact that people tend to mimic the expressions and body language of their superiors can aggravate this problem: Subordinates provide few reliable cues to the powerful. But more important, Keltner says, is the fact that the powerful stop mimicking others. Laughing when others laugh or tensing when others tense does more than ingratiate. It helps trigger the same feelings those others are experiencing and provides a window into where they are coming from. Powerful people \u201cstop simulating the experience of others,\u201d Keltner says, which leads to what he calls an \u201cempathy deficit.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mirroring is a subtler kind of mimicry that goes on entirely within our heads, and without our awareness. When we watch someone perform an action, the part of the brain we would use to do that same thing lights up in sympathetic response. It might be best understood as vicarious experience. It\u2019s what Obhi and his team were trying to activate when they had their subjects watch a video of someone\u2019s hand squeezing a rubber ball.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For nonpowerful participants, mirroring worked fine: The neural pathways they would use to squeeze the ball themselves fired strongly. But the powerful group\u2019s? Less so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Was the mirroring response broken? More like anesthetized. None of the participants possessed permanent power. They were college students who had been \u201cprimed\u201d to feel potent by recounting an experience in which they had been in charge. The anesthetic would presumably wear off when the feeling did\u2014their brains weren\u2019t structurally damaged after an afternoon in the lab. But if the effect had been long-lasting\u2014say, by dint of having Wall Street analysts whispering their greatness quarter after quarter, board members offering them extra helpings of pay, and Forbes praising them for \u201cdoing well while doing good\u201d\u2014they may have what in medicine is known as \u201cfunctional\u201d changes to the brain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I wondered whether the powerful might simply stop trying to put themselves in others\u2019 shoes, without losing the ability to do so. As it happened, Obhi ran a subsequent study that may help answer that question. This time, subjects were told what mirroring was and asked to make a conscious effort to increase or decrease their response. \u201cOur results,\u201d he and his co-author, Katherine Naish, wrote, \u201cshowed no difference.\u201d Effort didn\u2019t help.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is a depressing finding. Knowledge is supposed to be power. But what good is knowing that power deprives you of knowledge?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The sunniest possible spin, it seems, is that these changes are only sometimes harmful. Power, the research says, primes our brain to screen out peripheral information. In most situations, this provides a helpful efficiency boost. In social ones, it has the unfortunate side effect of making us more obtuse. Even that is not necessarily bad for the prospects of the powerful, or the groups they lead. As Susan Fiske, a Princeton psychology professor, has persuasively argued, power lessens the need for a nuanced read of people, since it gives us command of resources we once had to cajole from others. But of course, in a modern organization, the maintenance of that command relies on some level of organizational support. And the sheer number of examples of executive hubris that bristle from the headlines suggests that many leaders cross the line into counterproductive folly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Less able to make out people\u2019s individuating traits, they rely more heavily on stereotype. And the less they\u2019re able to see, other research suggests, the more they rely on a personal \u201cvision\u201d for navigation. John Stumpf saw a Wells Fargo where every customer had eight separate accounts. (As he\u2019d often noted to employees, eight rhymes with great.) \u201cCross-selling,\u201d he told Congress, \u201cis shorthand for deepening relationships.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Is there nothing to be done?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
No and yes. It\u2019s difficult to stop power\u2019s tendency to affect your brain. What\u2019s easier\u2014from time to time, at least\u2014is to stop feeling powerful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Insofar as it affects the way we think, power, Keltner reminded me, is not a post or a position but a mental state. Recount a time you did not feel powerful, his experiments suggest, and your brain can commune with reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Recalling an early experience of powerlessness seems to work for some people\u2014and experiences that were searing enough may provide a sort of permanent protection. An incredible study published in The Journal of Finance last February found that CEOs who as children had lived through a natural disaster that produced significant fatalities were much less risk-seeking than CEOs who hadn\u2019t. (The one problem, says Raghavendra Rau, a co-author of the study and a Cambridge University professor, is that CEOs who had lived through disasters without significant fatalities were more risk-seeking.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But tornadoes, volcanoes, and tsunamis aren\u2019t the only hubris-restraining forces out there. PepsiCo CEO and Chairman Indra Nooyi sometimes tells the story of the day she got the news of her appointment to the company\u2019s board, in 2001. She arrived home percolating in her own sense of importance and vitality, when her mother asked whether, before she delivered her \u201cgreat news,\u201d she would go out and get some milk. Fuming, Nooyi went out and got it. \u201cLeave that damn crown in the garage\u201d was her mother\u2019s advice when she returned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The point of the story, really, is that Nooyi tells it. It serves as a useful reminder about ordinary obligation and the need to stay grounded. Nooyi\u2019s mother, in the story, serves as a \u201ctoe holder,\u201d a term once used by the political adviser Louis Howe to describe his relationship with the four-term President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom Howe never stopped calling Franklin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For Winston Churchill, the person who filled that role was his wife, Clementine, who had the courage to write, \u201cMy Darling Winston. I must confess that I have noticed a deterioration in your manner; & you are not as kind as you used to be.\u201d Written on the day Hitler entered Paris, torn up, then sent anyway, the letter was not a complaint but an alert: Someone had confided to her, she wrote, that Churchill had been acting \u201cso contemptuous\u201d toward subordinates in meetings that \u201cno ideas, good or bad, will be forthcoming\u201d\u2014with the attendant danger that \u201cyou won\u2019t get the best results.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lord David Owen\u2014a British neurologist turned parliamentarian who served as the foreign secretary before becoming a baron\u2014recounts both Howe\u2019s story and Clementine Churchill\u2019s in his 2008 book, In Sickness and in Power, an inquiry into the various maladies that had affected the performance of British prime ministers and American presidents since 1900. While some suffered from strokes (Woodrow Wilson), substance abuse (Anthony Eden), or possibly bipolar disorder (Lyndon B. Johnson, Theodore Roosevelt), at least four others acquired a disorder that the medical literature doesn\u2019t recognize but, Owen argues, should.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHubris syndrome,\u201d as he and a co-author, Jonathan Davidson, defined it in a 2009 article published in Brain, \u201cis 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.\u201d Its 14 clinical features include: manifest contempt for others, loss of contact with reality, restless or reckless actions, and displays of incompetence. In May, the Royal Society of Medicine co-hosted a conference of the Daedalus Trust\u2014an organization that Owen founded for the study and prevention of hubris.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I asked Owen, who admits to a healthy predisposition to hubris himself, whether anything helps keep him tethered to reality, something that other truly powerful figures might emulate. He shared a few strategies: thinking back on hubris-dispelling episodes from his past; watching documentaries about ordinary people; making a habit of reading constituents\u2019 letters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But I surmised that the greatest check on Owen\u2019s hubris today might stem from his recent research endeavors. Businesses, he complained to me, had shown next to no appetite for research on hubris. Business schools were not much better. The undercurrent of frustration in his voice attested to a certain powerlessness. Whatever the salutary effect on Owen, it suggests that a malady seen too commonly in boardrooms and executive suites is unlikely to soon find a cure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n