Reference: Becoming Powerful Makes You Less Empathetic

Last year, I worked with a senior executive — let’s call him Steve — who had received feedback from his boss that he was wearing the power of his new title in an off-putting way. Steve’s boss told him that he had developed a subtle way of being right in meetings that sucked all the oxygen out of the room.  No one wanted to offer ideas once Steve had declared the right answer.  Since his promotion, Steve had become less of a team player and more of a superior who knew better than others.  In short, he had lost his empathy.

Why does this sort of shift in behavior happen to so many people when they’re promoted to the ranks of management?  Research shows that personal power actually interferes with our ability to empathize. Dacher Keltner, an author and social psychologist at University of California, Berkeley, has conducted empirical studies showing that people who have power suffer deficits in empathy, the ability to read emotions, and the ability to adapt behaviors to other people. In fact, power can actually change how the brain functions, according to research from Sukhvinder Obhi, a neuroscientist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada.

The most common leadership failures don’t involve fraud, the embezzlement of funds, or even sex scandals.  It’s more common to see leaders fail in the area of every day self-management — and the use power in a way that is motivated by ego and self-interest.

How does it happen?  Slowly, and then suddenly.  It happens with bad mini-choices, made perhaps on an unconscious level.  It might show up as the subtle act of throwing one’s weight around.  Demands for special treatment; isolated decision-making; and getting one’s way. Leaders who are pulled over by the police for speeding or driving drunk become indignant and rail, “Do you know who I am?!” Suddenly the story hits social media and we change our minds about the once-revered personality.

The recent story about NBC’s disgraced Brian Williams points to a bigger story about power and fame.  How do people start out in pursuit of a dream and wind up aggrandizing themselves instead?  They reach a choke point, where they cross over from being generous with their power to using their power for their own benefit.

Take the case of former Charlotte, North Carolina, mayor Patrick Cannon. Cannon came from nothing.  He overcame poverty and the violent loss of his father at the age of 5.  He earned a degree from North Carolina A&T State University and entered public service at the age of 26 — becoming the youngest council member in Charlotte history. He was known for being completely committed to serving the public, and generous with the time he spent as a role model for young people.

But last year, Cannon, 47, pleaded guilty to accepting $50,000 in bribes while in office.  As he entered the city’s federal courthouse last June, he tripped and fell. The media was there to capture the fall, which was symbolic of the much bigger fall of an elected leader and small business owner who once embodied the very essence of personal achievement against staggering odds.  Cannon now has the distinction of being the first mayor in the city’s history to be sent to prison. Insiders say he was a good man, but all too human, and seemed vulnerable as he became isolated in his decision-making.  And while a local minister argued that Cannon’s one lapse in judgment should not define the man and his career of exceptional public service, he is now judged only by his weakness — his dramatic move from humility and generosity to corruption. And that image of Cannon tripping on his way into court is now the image that people associate with him.

What can leaders do if they fear that they might be toeing the line where power turns to abuse of power? First, you must invite other people in. You must be willing to risk vulnerability and ask for feedback. A good executive coach can help you return to a state of empathy and value-driven decisions. However, be sure to ask for feedback from a wide variety of people. Dispense with the softball questions (How am I doing?) and ask the tough ones (How does my style and focus affect my employees?).

Preventive maintenance begins with self-awareness and a daring self-inventory:

• Do you have a support network of friends, family, colleagues who care about you without the title and can help you stay down to earth?
• Do you have an executive coach, mentor, or confidant?
• What feedback have you gotten about not walking the talk?
• Do you demand privileges?
• Are you keeping the small, inconvenient promises that fall outside of the spotlight?
• Do you invite others into the spotlight?
• Do you isolate yourself in the decision-making process? Do the decisions you’re making reflect what you truly value?
• Do you admit your mistakes?
• Are you the same person at work, at home and in the spotlight?
• Do you tell yourself there are exceptions or different rules for people like you?

If a leader earns our trust, we hold them to non-negotiable standards. Nothing will blow up so much as a failure in walking the talk, or the selfish abuse of power. We all want our leaders to be highly competent, visionary, take-charge people. However, empathy, authenticity and generosity are what distinguish competence and greatness. The most self-aware leaders recognize the signals of abuse of power and correct course before it’s too late.

COMMENTS:

Julie Erickson 4 years ago
I've seen abuse of power happen, and experienced the lure of power myself despite my strong efforts to resist. Other people treated me as special and I began to believe it. The process is subtle, and even my executive coach didn't spot it. As I read the questions here, I realized they would have been quite helpful for me to see what was happening to me. One thing I notice in hindsight is that I stopped wanting to hear any criticism from people I perceived as not supporting me. Now I see that my very resistance to the criticism was an indication that there was a problem that deserved close examination. My emotions - anger, fear, pride - got in the way of my willingness to engage in self-examination, even through a 360! Today I remember what Spiderman says: "With great power comes great responsibility." I focus more now on how I can serve others, rather than what I can achieve.

Sai Bhupalam 5 years ago
Lack of empathy and compassion along with an increase in hubris are commonplace for people in power. In my experience, group-think and inner circle politics are what enable autocratic attitudes which in turn deplete empathy and compassion. It is similar to corruption. The people who offer bribes to get their work done through a shortcut are the ones who are actually corrupting the officers in charge and so it is in management/leadership. Those who want to fawn the leaders to protect their own vested interests also contribute to this malaise. Great article - I am curious about the related neuroscience on this - thank you for the link and the article.

Václav Dekanovský 5 years ago
Hello. It reminds me what British author David Gemmell wrote in his books. Evil doesn't walk the world having horns and spitting fire around. It creeps in one small step at a time.
Great advise to keep some friends and advisers around. It's worth even without being in power.

Lou Solomon, "Becoming Powerful Makes You Less Empathetic" (Harvard Business Review, April 21, 2015)

Reference: Power Causes Brain Damage

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’s sexually magnetic. But can it cause brain damage?

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’s performance that stood out. Here was a man who had risen to the top of the world’s most valuable bank, yet he seemed utterly unable to read a room. Although he apologized, he didn’t 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—“You have got to be kidding me” (Sean Duffy of Wisconsin); “I can’t believe some of what I’m hearing here” (Gregory Meeks of New York)—failed to shake him awake.

What was going through Stumpf’s head? New research suggests that the better question may be: What wasn’t going through it?

The historian Henry Adams was being metaphorical, not medical, when he described power as “a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.” But that’s 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—becoming more impulsive, less risk-aware, and, crucially, less adept at seeing things from other people’s point of view.

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, “mirroring,” that may be a cornerstone of empathy. Which gives a neurological basis to what Keltner has termed the “power paradox”: Once we have power, we lose some of the capacities we needed to gain it in the first place.

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—a task that requires seeing yourself from an observer’s vantage point. Those feeling powerful were three times more likely to draw the E the right way to themselves—and 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.

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 “stop simulating the experience of others,” Keltner says, which leads to what he calls an “empathy deficit.”

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’s what Obhi and his team were trying to activate when they had their subjects watch a video of someone’s hand squeezing a rubber ball.

For nonpowerful participants, mirroring worked fine: The neural pathways they would use to squeeze the ball themselves fired strongly. But the powerful group’s? Less so.

Was the mirroring response broken? More like anesthetized. None of the participants possessed permanent power. They were college students who had been “primed” to feel potent by recounting an experience in which they had been in charge. The anesthetic would presumably wear off when the feeling did—their brains weren’t structurally damaged after an afternoon in the lab. But if the effect had been long-lasting—say, 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 “doing well while doing good”—they may have what in medicine is known as “functional” changes to the brain.

I wondered whether the powerful might simply stop trying to put themselves in others’ 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. “Our results,” he and his co-author, Katherine Naish, wrote, “showed no difference.” Effort didn’t help.

This is a depressing finding. Knowledge is supposed to be power. But what good is knowing that power deprives you of knowledge?

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.

Less able to make out people’s individuating traits, they rely more heavily on stereotype. And the less they’re able to see, other research suggests, the more they rely on a personal “vision” for navigation. John Stumpf saw a Wells Fargo where every customer had eight separate accounts. (As he’d often noted to employees, eight rhymes with great.) “Cross-selling,” he told Congress, “is shorthand for deepening relationships.”

Is there nothing to be done?

No and yes. It’s difficult to stop power’s tendency to affect your brain. What’s easier—from time to time, at least—is to stop feeling powerful.

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.

Recalling an early experience of powerlessness seems to work for some people—and 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’t. (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.)

But tornadoes, volcanoes, and tsunamis aren’t 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’s board, in 2001. She arrived home percolating in her own sense of importance and vitality, when her mother asked whether, before she delivered her “great news,” she would go out and get some milk. Fuming, Nooyi went out and got it. “Leave that damn crown in the garage” was her mother’s advice when she returned.

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’s mother, in the story, serves as a “toe holder,” 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.

For Winston Churchill, the person who filled that role was his wife, Clementine, who had the courage to write, “My Darling Winston. I must confess that I have noticed a deterioration in your manner; & you are not as kind as you used to be.” 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 “so contemptuous” toward subordinates in meetings that “no ideas, good or bad, will be forthcoming”—with the attendant danger that “you won’t get the best results.”

Lord David Owen—a British neurologist turned parliamentarian who served as the foreign secretary before becoming a baron—recounts both Howe’s story and Clementine Churchill’s 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’t recognize but, Owen argues, should.

“Hubris syndrome,” as he and a co-author, Jonathan Davidson, defined it in a 2009 article published in Brain, “is 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.” 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—an organization that Owen founded for the study and prevention of hubris.

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’ letters.

But I surmised that the greatest check on Owen’s 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.

Jerry Useem, Power Causes Brain Damage (The Atlantic, August 2017)

The missing half

I’ve been ruminating for months and months about what psychology really is. It’s treated like a science - most psychologists (including Jung!) want it to be a science. The reason Freud is still discussed in psychology classes, even though he was clearly full of shit, is because Freud shared this desire. Even Jung had some tendencies in this direction but, as a thoroughgoing empiricist, he knew when to give up this lifesaver and actually swim in the water. In fact, I think this was his whole point: his theory is based on reality... however, that reality includes spirituality! By refusing a priori to even look at the possibility that psychology has a spiritual aspect, these people are denying what is actually true, which is why they can never find out how to create deep, fundamental change in people.

What I’ve been struggling with is: how much of psychology is spiritual? This morning, as I was waking up, I realized that of course psychology is spiritual, because everything is spiritual! Psychology, even Jungian psychology, isn’t spirituality, but when you go deep enough it is. But this isn’t something unique to psychology alone. For example, go far enough into physics and again, you come to spirituality.

The thing is... everything is spiritual at its deepest place. Art, ecology, politics, farming, wood-working, cooking, everything. This is, in fact, our disease, the fact that we’ve forgotten this. Jung wrote about the “infrared” and “ultraviolet” ends of the archetypes; that is, our instincts and the spiritual archetypes that both live within us. The thing is, the entire world, all of reality and every part of it, has an infrared and an ultraviolet end. It’s just more obvious in psychology.

Until recently religion served to regulate the psyche. When religion lost its place of importance, we needed psychology to fill that gap. And the reason that modern psychology fails us over and over is that spirituality is a uniquely large and fundamental part, at every level, of the process of psychological healing, which is really actually spiritual healing. Instead, it’s techniques fail to create fundamental change in us but rather merely clean up the most shallow parts of our wounds (stick bandaids on them one might say). But what's not unique about psychology is the fact that it has a fundamental spiritual component. And how can that not be the case, since reality itself is spiritual, or ultraviolet, as well as infrared.

The illnesses of our time are caused by the lack of awareness of this spiritual side of reality. In fact, the illness of our time is at root this lack; everything else - the wars, the social and racial unrest, the looming nuclear destruction and actual ecological devastation - are just symptoms of this fundamental disease. The fact that we have forgotten this whole half of reality is the cause of everything wrong, not only in our individual lives but in the world at large. Just as our lives would fall apart if we failed to grasp the physical side, so it is falling apart because we have forgotten the spiritual side. Our world is reflecting this illness back on us. And as nothing in our individual lives will truly improve until we grasp this, so too will nothing fundamentally improve in the world until we come to understand both its halves.

Jung Was Not a Mystic, and Jungianism Is Not Mysticism

Laura London: And it’s important to look at [Wolfgang] Pauli’s dreams because you mention that creative discoveries are usually preceded by the processes appearing in dreams.

Gary Sparks: That’s a whole nother discussion right there. One of the things he tried to do – I’m taking that question and making it a little more specific – the idea that we’re dealing with here is “Is there a way to live that is not based on imposing our will on somebody else?” Technology is basically about imposing our will on matter. And he was interested in seeing is there a way we can live without imposing the will. I think what his dreams are articulating is the critical importance of doing that.

LL: You said that our way of looking at things is going to go through another development.

GS: Yeah, I think it has to. We’ve got to find another way to live, other than the imposition of will; the imposition of will over matter or nature.

LL: And that science and spirituality are going to have to come together. The unconscious says that they’re the same, and that’s where we get stuck. What do you mean by that?

GS: Well, for example Pauli dreamt of going into his lab and a mass was being conducted. Or going into a church and the priest was doing a scientific experiment. In the unconscious there’s no difference between science and religion. I think for me the answer has to do with symbolic living.

The error is thinking that science is a linear, logical process on the scientific side; and on the religious side, that it’s a metaphysical experience beyond rational critiquing. But what Pauli showed, getting back to your earlier question as well, scientific ideas start with an image. He wrote an essay trying to show how some of his theories came out of dream images. So that the symbolic life can be seen at the foundation of science. And a genuine religious life is not belief, but it’s religious experience, based on images that appear within the psyche. So that giving up the idea of science as rational and that religion is metaphysically unarguable, both have to change for the adoption of the symbolic life.

LL: You said that Pauli had a foot in both worlds. Would you say that the same was true of Jung?

GS: Yes, definitely. More toward the end of his life, I think. As I mentioned he would necessarily have devoted his attention to the psyche. At the end of his life... you now they have that tower down in Bollingen? He added the tower, the highest point in the structure, because he realized he hadn’t given enough credence to the ego. He worked intensely on the inner world and then, toward the end of his life, realized the crucial point is how that relates to the outer world. But he needed to focus on the inner world because that was where his research could bear the most fruit, but then toward the end of his life, as I mentioned in that quote of von Franz, said, “Now, how does that relate to the outside material world?”

LL: One of Pauli’s dreams that you look at in your book is his dream of the world clock. You say that the dream was trying to show Pauli that he could not understand life without accepting it’s complexities. .

GS: There’s a [heart] and a vision in the dream of a clock which is on a horizontal plane, and there’s a clock which is on a vertical plane, and they intersect… I think the two are resting on the back of a bird. The Greeks had that all figured out, and we’ve forgotten it, but I think Pauli was dreaming of it. Time has both a qualitative and a quantitative aspect. We’ve lost the idea of the qualitative aspect. That’s what a synchronicity is. And the complexity is revealing we have to both have our feet firmly in time and space; deal with the problems that we’re facing, deal with emotions, deal with conflict. Deal with rage, lust, problems, conflicts. On the one hand that is the horizontal clock. And yet there is a timeless dimension of that, which is the vertical clock would represent.

There are qualitative moments in our life which, if we don’t understand them, we will lose the meaning of everything that happens in that horizontal circle. And the art of living is living with the knowledge of the importance of time and space, and also what transcends time and space.

LL: You said of that dream, “It has been suggested that Pauli looked very closely at the events of his life, and took responsibility for his role in them. This is what ego development is about; absorbing behavior and taking responsibility for it.”

GS: That’s the horizontal clock. That’s why Jung was not a mystic. You know; paying rent, paying mortgages, getting your car fixed, arguing with the car mechanic. As Jung said, I wonder what Christianity would be like if Jesus had three kids to put through college? All of that is very important. It’s only when we are living responsibly to those demands that spirituality really can reach it’s full extent.

LL: And that dream of Pauli’s that we were just speaking of, the one of the world clock, is in a section of the book called “Dual Mandala”.

GS: Yes.

LL: You said, “A dual mandala is a living image which portrays that a single life is made up of two parts: the here and now, and something else.”

GS: Yeah, that something else is that vertical clock. It’s those kairos moments in which we are guided toward our own development, in a way which we cannot rationally understand. Until we can recognize the tension between the two – or similarity between the two – the synching between X, Y, and Z, between the two, we’re only living half a story. Or a very split story.

  - Speaking of Jung, Episode #2: J. Gary Sparks,  38:22 (Laura London)

The 4 ways of being playful

Here's yet another quaternity in human life. An interesting article popped up in my FaceBook feed; psychologists have apparently identified 4 different type of playfulness in adults.

The psychologist has identified four basic types of playful adults: "There are people who like to fool around with friends and acquaintances. We describe this as other-directed playfulness. By contrast, light-heartedly playful people regard their whole life as a type of game," says Proyer. Another category includes people who like to play with thoughts and ideas -- this describes intellectual playfulness. These people are able to turn monotonous tasks into something interesting. The psychologist describes the final group as being whimsically playful. "These people tend to be interested in strange and unusual things and are amused by small day-to-day observations."

Psychology: Playful people are at an advantage (ScienceDaily)


It's important to remember that the four functions aren't some kind of Platonic template that everything in our lives fits. A more accurate way to look at it is that there is a Platonic template for fourness in human psychology, and Jung's four psychological functions fit into that framework. However, while it's generally a bad idea to try to force every quaternity into the four functions, it seems to hold water in this instance.

The people who like to play with people are clearly primarily or secondarily feeling types, and those who like to play with ideas are clearly thinking types. I'm not sure about the other two; the people who regard their whole life as a game, and those who are interested in strange, unusual, and day to day things. My feeling is that the second is the sensation type (especially since sensation types tend to become fascinated by strange and spooky things, as their inferior function is intuition.) Intuitives, especially extroverted intuitives, seem to fit the final category; that of those who see their whole lives as a game. So, in this case it does seem to map onto the four functions!

It's pretty cool how Jung's ideas constantly pop up in our lives. Now if we could only get some researchers to see if there are any correlations between these things and Jung's functions!