There's a strange thing that happens when someone gets promoted, elected, or handed the corner office. Friends start noticing they're a bit more dismissive. Spouses report feeling unheard. Employees sense a growing distance, a feeling that the boss no longer quite gets it.

We tend to explain this as a character flaw—power corrupts, we say, nodding sagely. But the truth is weirder and more troubling. Power doesn't just reveal who someone really was all along. It actively changes their brain, rewiring the neural circuits responsible for understanding other humans. The person you knew might genuinely be disappearing.

Neuroscientist Sukhvinder Obhi discovered something unsettling while scanning the brains of powerful people. When subjects watched videos of someone squeezing a rubber ball, their mirror neurons—the brain cells that fire both when we perform an action and when we watch someone else do it—lit up predictably. But in people primed to feel powerful, these neurons went oddly quiet.

Mirror neurons are essentially our empathy hardware. They're how we instinctively understand what others are feeling, how we wince when someone stubs their toe, how we catch ourselves leaning forward when watching a tightrope walker. When power dampens this system, something fundamental breaks. Powerful people become genuinely worse at reading facial expressions, detecting emotional cues, and understanding what others are experiencing.

This isn't metaphor or exaggeration. Power creates a measurable neurological deficit in the basic machinery of human connection. The person in charge literally cannot feel what you're feeling as accurately as they once could. It's not that they're choosing to ignore you—their brain has quietly stopped doing the work.

Takeaway

Power doesn't make people choose to care less. It degrades the neural equipment they'd need to care at all.

Here's a classic psychology experiment: Put someone in front of a gambling game where the odds are transparently terrible. Most people recognize the bad bet and fold. But give someone a taste of power first—have them recall a time they controlled others, or assign them a leadership role—and suddenly they start taking absurd risks.

Researchers call this the 'disinhibition effect.' Power essentially removes the psychological guardrails most of us rely on. That little voice saying maybe this is a bad idea gets turned down. The calculus shifts from 'what could go wrong' to 'why shouldn't I.' Powerful people overestimate their ability to control outcomes and underestimate the probability of disaster.

This explains so much about corporate meltdowns, political scandals, and the baffling decisions of people who should know better. From the outside, their choices look obviously reckless. But from inside a power-affected brain, those same choices feel bold, decisive, perfectly reasonable. The warning signals everyone else can see simply don't register.

Takeaway

Power doesn't make people brave. It makes them blind to the very risks that seem obvious to everyone watching.

Psychologist Adam Galinsky designed a clever test. He asked people to draw the letter 'E' on their own forehead. Self-oriented people drew it so they could read it themselves—backwards to anyone facing them. Other-oriented people drew it facing outward, readable to observers.

You can probably guess what happened when powerful people took this test. They overwhelmingly drew the E for themselves, not their audience. It's a small thing, but it reveals something profound: power literally makes it harder to adopt another person's viewpoint. The ability to imagine how something looks from the other side—a fundamental social skill—erodes.

This perspective collapse has cascading effects. Leaders stop understanding why their decisions upset people. Politicians lose touch with constituents. Executives can't fathom why employees aren't grateful. They're not being deliberately obtuse. They've lost access to a cognitive function that once came naturally. The world increasingly appears only as they see it, with everyone else becoming a supporting character in their own movie.

Takeaway

Power traps people inside their own perspective, making the view from anywhere else increasingly unimaginable.

The darkest part of this research isn't that power corrupts. It's that the corruption is invisible from the inside. Powerful people don't notice their empathy fading, their risk assessment failing, their perspective narrowing. The very changes that make them worse at understanding others also make them worse at understanding what's happening to themselves.

Knowing this matters for two reasons. If you're dealing with powerful people, expect these deficits—it's not personal. And if you ever find yourself gaining power, surround yourself with people brave enough to tell you what you're no longer able to see.