Power Causes Brain Damage

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: Sat, Jul 1, 2017 at 1:37 PM
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Power Causes Brain Damage
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>


[Note:  This item comes from friend David Rosenthal.  DLH]

Power Causes Brain Damage
How leaders lose mental capacities—most notably for reading other
people—that were essential to their rise
By JERRY USEEM
JULY/AUGUST 2017 ISSUE
<
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/power-causes-brain-damage/528711/
>

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 believethat 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 studyasked 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.

[snip]

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