Power does strange things to people. Psychology papers are littered with examples of people behaving awfully – even unlawfully – when they feel powerful or consider themselves to be high-status.
One famous paper, by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, reported the results of seven experiments that observed the behaviour of people with higher or lower power and social status. To summarise the findings: powerful people are the worst.
The team found that high-power individuals were more likely to lie during negotiations and cheat to increase their chances of winning a game. They were more likely to endorse unethical behaviour and even take sweets from a jar that they were told was meant for children in a lab next door.
The lead author of the paper is Prof Dacher Keltner, co-director of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. He says there’s no shortage of evidence that power is a corruptive force.
“One of my favourite findings is that rich kids in the US are more likely to shoplift than poor kids,” he says.
“When we’re powerful, we don’t share. We’re greedy. We eat cookies that were meant for other people. We even found that BMW drivers are more likely to drive through pedestrian zones [compared with people who drive ‘lower status’ vehicles].”
Power shift
Every time you turn on the news these days, there is another story about ruthless, powerful people and their unscrupulous deeds.
With each passing day, this select group of people are obtaining more wealth and political influence. CEOs of failing companies are still pocketing six-figure bonuses. And it’s hard to keep up with the number of celebrities and business leaders accused of sexual assault.
There’s also a sense that something is shifting in the way people hold or wield power. To take an obvious example, the re-election of Donald Trump prompted many political commentators to observe that the era of American ‘soft power’ is over.
(Soft power is the influence one country can have on another indirectly, through shared values, culture and goals – rather than directly, through military action or economic measures like tariffs or trade deals. In other words, soft power is to co-opt others rather than coerce them.)
Trump’s style of leadership, marked by aggressive international policies and a demand for loyalty, is divisive.
Whether you describe Trump as ‘strong’ or ‘authoritarian’ might depend on where your political affiliations lie. In any case, America is hardly the only nation with a forceful leader in charge. Political scientists at King’s College London published a study in 2022 that charted an increasing tolerance for authoritarian leaders around the world.
“The shift is towards more coercive power,” says Keltner. “If you look at people who veer towards the alt-right, for example, they’re Machiavellian. They don’t care about caring. They don’t care about justice. They care about authority.”
It was the 19th-century politician and writer Lord Acton who famously warned of the dangers of authoritarian power. “Power tends to corrupt,” he wrote, “and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
But how true is that in the modern world? Do the perversive effects of power explain why certain styles of leadership are becoming more popular, or why Big Tech CEOs wield ever more influence? Is it why some drivers ignore the rights of pedestrians on the road, or why certain children rule the playground with an iron mitten?
Power exists everywhere. It permeates not just boardrooms and political offices but every classroom, every workplace, every marriage. It crackles in virtually all human interactions and relationships, underpinning the social hierarchies that govern much of human behaviour.
“Hierarchy evolved as the most efficient and effective way of organising people,” says Adam Galinsky, professor of leadership and ethics at Columbia Business School in New York. “And the reason why hierarchy is such a powerful organising mechanism for groups is because it solves so many needs that groups have.
“It has division of labour, creates coordination and reduces conflict. Because people who are higher in the hierarchy get more rewards, that creates motivational mechanisms for people to contribute to the group in order to move up.”
For any hierarchy to function, however, there must be an imbalance of power, Galinsky says. It means some people have more power, while others have to “know their place”.
“We can show that people, in some cases, would prefer to be in a lower-status situation, a lower-power situation, if they’re in a stronger hierarchy,” Galinsky says. “That’s one of the reasons why authoritarian leaders are most likely to emerge in times of social and economic unrest.”
That goes some way to explain our need for power on a social level, but it doesn’t tell us what happens to someone when they become powerful.
The effects of power
Power is quite the tonic. Attaining it doesn’t just affect a person’s behaviour or decision making. It has a biological effect, leading to changes in a person’s brain and the flux of hormones in their body.
“Research shows that when people are put into positions of power, especially in non-crisis situations, their testosterone goes up, but their cortisol [a stress hormone] goes down,” Galinsky says. “It’s very disinhibiting. It allows people to move forward, but without stress or fear.”
In a lot of psychology experiments on power, participants are simply asked to remember a time when they were powerful. This technique, which Galinsky pioneered in 2003, can change a person’s physiology, their behaviour and performance in a task, even their voice.
Galinsky’s research showed that, when you ask someone to recall a time when they had power, their voice becomes more steady and louder, and fluctuates less in pitch.
“Other research has shown that before a stressful situation like giving a speech, if you recall a time of power, your heart rate drops and you actually deliver a better speech,” he says.
“It helps people write better job applications and do better in job interviews. It boosts people’s optimism, confidence. It helps them see the big picture, helps them be more visionary.”
In other words, power can be positive. In one of Galinsky’s papers, he and his colleagues argued that power leads to action because it releases the psychological brakes that sometimes prevent us doing what we want.
It makes failure seem less probable or painful, meaning the perceived risks of action are lower.
But then comes the dark side. When the brakes are off, people are more impulsive. Other people’s perspectives and feelings can become shrouded, or the social costs of a particular action or behaviour might be minimised.
One example is people who cheat on their romantic partners. In 2024, a study published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior looked at power dynamics in relationships and how they affect infidelity.
In line with previous studies, researchers found that people with higher perceived power in a relationship are more likely to fantasise about other partners and pursue them.
Why? Because feeling powerful increases a person’s self-perception as a desirable partner. They believe they bring more to the table within the relationship and are more desirable to more people outside it.
“In interpersonal relationships or romantic relationships, the person who is more dominant tends to design the goals of the couple and so the other is more submissive,” says Ana Guinote, professor of social cognition, who studies power at University College London.
“Someone who is more committed to a relationship is more dependent and may set fewer goals for the couple."
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More power, less empathy
Powerful people are more likely to be self-centred in general, not just in romantic relationships. Research has shown that high-power individuals are less empathetic and compassionate, with some displaying less distress at the suffering of others.
In one of Galinsky’s studies, he showed that high-power individuals literally struggle to see the world from other people’s perspectives. He and his colleagues asked people to draw the letter E on their foreheads.
People with more power were more likely to write the letter in a self-oriented direction, meaning it would read backwards to other people.
There’s even evidence from the field of neuroscience that power affects parts of the brain that are linked to empathy.
Motor resonance is a phenomenon that happens when we watch another person’s actions or experience. As we watch, our brain activity becomes very similar to what would happen if we were performing those same actions or having the same experiences.
It’s thought that motor resonance helps us understand each other, and empathise with other people’s experiences and emotions. But guess what? Motor resonance – a fundamental part of what makes us social animals – is lower in high-power individuals.
Researchers at McMaster University, in Canada, used transcranial magnetic stimulation (a process that stimulates nerve cells in the brain connected to mood control) to show that, when people feel powerful, this mechanism is reduced.
For a lot of the scientists who study the effects of power, this is important. Power leads to real biological changes – to our brains, our cognition, our hormones. So, the old adage of power as something that corrupts us is perhaps too simplistic.
“I don’t fully agree with the assumption that power corrupts,” says Guinote. “I think that power can reveal who people are, and there are some biases, such as over-confidence, or inflated self-perceptions, that are more accentuated when people have power.”
She notes that when people are asked to rank themselves on positive traits compared with other people, we tend to describe ourselves as better than average. That’s, of course, impossible.
Not everyone can be above average.
We self-enhance, and these kinds of self-serving biases are exacerbated when people are in power, as we become more confident and our self-esteem increases.
“That doesn’t mean that power corrupts directly,” Guinote says. “There’s a risk of corruption, but it depends on the person. It depends on culture. So it just reveals who the person is and what their current goals might be.”
To put it another way, if power makes us more impulsive, then what happens next depends on what our impulses are. This might explain why some billionaires give away their fortunes while others don’t.
There are other effects that might explain why power makes people less empathetic, too. Some of Guinote’s research looks at the cognitive function of people in power. One effect is that powerful people become more goal-focused, she says.
“Setting a goal or pursuing a goal becomes easier for individuals in powerful roles, even if it is temporary or situational power. They tend to prioritise the task at hand or the goal that’s currently active. They’ll multitask less.”
In some cases, powerful people become so task-focused that they fail to notice the contributions or perspectives of other people. They’re also, often, under time pressures – and urgency can profoundly affect our behaviour.
A famous study in the 1970s offered a stark demonstration of this effect.
Trainee priests at Princeton University were told to deliver short speeches on the Parable of the Good Samaritan in a different building on the university campus. Some were told they had plenty of time to get there, others were told they were late.
On their way, they all encountered a stranger slumped in a doorway who clearly looked in distress and in need of help (the stranger was planted by the experimenters). Over 60 per cent of the participants who had enough time stopped to help the stranger.
Of the trainee priests who were told to hurry, only 10 per cent stopped to help.
Does this mean we should go easy on the billionaires, politicians and authoritarian middle-managers amassing power in the real world? Definitely not, researchers say. Power may not corrupt, but it can certainly enable – and a bad actor with a lot of power is more likely to behave unscrupulously or selfishly.
“Not everybody gains power. There’s a tendency for narcissists and people with a more dominant personality to rise to [the upper echelons of] power,” Guinote says. “People with those personalities have more self-centred tendencies, they’re more prone to corruption and self-serving behaviour.”
She notes that other people with different personality traits can also attain power and often see it as a responsibility, rather than an opportunity to achieve personal gains.
Likewise, in one of Keltner’s books, The Power Paradox, he points to research that shows how displays of empathy and social intelligence are often required to gain trust and be appointed a leader. The paradox comes, he argues, once power is attained.
It begins to erode those people-centric skills that helped people get to power in the first place. That’s why power needs checks and balances, researchers say.
“Accountability is very important,” Guinote adds. “Corruption is more frequent when there isn’t accountability, but enforcing transparency can decrease corruption.”
In most organisations, from businesses to governments, transparency and accountability exist in the form of rules and committees. Politicians are beholden to laws and the people who elect them. CEOs lead at the behest of boards and shareholders. In science, there’s peer review.
But if it’s true that authoritarian styles of leadership are on the rise, it’s worth remembering that the most powerful people are rarely the ones we study in psychology labs.
“All of our work in this field is with people like you or me, or young college students,” Keltner says. “We don’t get CEOs and spiritual leaders in the lab.”
He recalls giving talks for CEOs, investment bankers and even world leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
“I’ve taught executives for a long time,” he says. “They wheel me out and I’m a long-haired, Berkeley guy giving them this thesis on power and corruption. And they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, the last guy did that.’
“We’re the entertainment for these guys. There are even certain audiences like that who openly like the idea that you get to abuse the laws of society if you’re in power. The highest power people – they’re just laughing.”
About our experts
Prof Dacher Keltner is the co-director of the Greater Good Science Center and professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, in the US. His work has been published in the likes of Cognition and Emotion, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Psychological Bulletin.
Adam Galinsky is a professor of leadership and ethics at Columbia Business School in New York, US. He is published in various scientific journals including Current Opinion in Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes and Social Psychological and Personality Science.
Ana Guinote is a professor of social cognition, who studies power at University College London, UK. She has been published in the Annual Review of Psychology, Journal of Experimental Psychology and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
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