In 2006, a team led by Adam Galinsky asked people to draw a capital E on their own foreheads. Before the drawing, some participants had been nudged into feeling powerful by writing about a time they controlled other people. The rest wrote about a time someone controlled them. The powerful group was almost three times more likely to draw the E so it read correctly to themselves and backwards to everyone looking at them.
It’s a silly task with an uncomfortable point. A few minutes of feeling in charge was enough to make people forget, for a moment, that other people were looking at them from a different angle.
You didn’t get a few minutes of feeling in charge. You got a title, a team, a say in their raises and a calendar full of people who need your approval. The research on what that does to judgment is fairly consistent, and none of it flatters the person holding the power. Here are five changes worth watching for in yourself, and what the same research says about reversing them.
1. You stop seeing the room from where they’re sitting
The forehead task was only the first of several experiments in Galinsky, Magee, Inesi and Gruenfeld’s paper in Psychological Science. In the others, people primed with power were worse at accounting for the fact that others didn’t share their private knowledge, and they were less accurate at reading emotion in other people’s faces.
Translate that into a Tuesday afternoon. You announce a reorg in a 20-minute meeting. You’ve known about it for six weeks; you’ve already worked through the anger, the questions and the acceptance. Your team has known about it for 20 minutes. When the room goes quiet, you read the silence as agreement, because from your side of the table the decision is old news. From theirs, it’s still landing.
The quiet isn’t agreement. It’s people deciding whether it’s safe to say what they think. If your meetings have gone quiet lately, the patterns behind silence in meetings are worth a closer look before you assume everyone’s on board.
2. Your brain mirrors other people less
When you watch someone else do something, the motor areas of your own brain fire a little, as if you were doing it too. Researchers treat that “motor resonance” as a rough proxy for how much attention you’re paying to another person’s experience.
In a 2014 study, Jeremy Hogeveen, Michael Inzlicht and Sukhvinder Obhi put participants into a high-power, low-power or neutral frame of mind, then measured their motor cortex while they watched a video of a hand repeatedly squeezing. The low-power group resonated the most and the high-power group the least, with neutral participants in between.
Two cautions. The study used 45 people and a measure that’s an indirect stand-in for empathy, so treat it as a signal, not a verdict. But it fits the behavioural findings, and it suggests the drift isn’t a moral failing you can simply decide not to have. It shows up below the level of intention, which is exactly why it needs a counterweight you build on purpose.
3. You get more certain and take less advice
Kelly See, Elizabeth Morrison, Naomi Rothman and Jack Soll ran four studies on power and advice. Across all four, more power meant less advice taking, and the reason was confidence: powerful people trusted their own first judgment more. In the fourth study, the higher-power participants also ended up less accurate.
That last part is the trap. If ignoring advice made you sharper, it would be a reasonable trade. It doesn’t. You’re getting surer and worse at the same time, and nothing in your day tells you so, because the people who would tell you are the same people whose advice you’ve started discounting.
A useful check: think back over the last month and count the decisions you changed because someone on your team pushed back. Not decisions where you listened politely. Decisions that came out different. If the number is zero, either you’re remarkably right or the feedback has stopped reaching you. The work of actually receiving feedback as a manager starts with admitting which one is more likely.
4. You talk more, and your team quietly hands you the meeting
This is the finding I’d put in front of every new manager. Leigh Plunkett Tost, Francesca Gino and Richard Larrick published three studies in the Academy of Management Journal on what a leader’s sense of power does to a team’s results.
In the first, teams ran a simulated Everest climb where each member held information the others needed. Teams whose formal leader had been primed to feel powerful reached an average of 59% of their goals, against 76% for the other teams. The mechanism was plain: the powerful leaders talked more, team members talked less, and information that sat with individual members never made it into the plan.
The second study found something that should get every manager’s attention. Power priming only hurt when the person also held a formal leadership role. Teams with no appointed leader simply overrode the dominant talker. Teams with an appointed leader went along with them. Your title is what turns a talkative person into a bottleneck, because it gives everyone else a reason to defer.
The third study is the one that offers hope, and I’ll come back to it below.
5. The skill that got you promoted is the first one to go
Dacher Keltner, the Berkeley psychologist who directs the Greater Good Science Center, has spent years on what he calls the power paradox. His argument is that people mostly gain power through social intelligence: paying attention to others, advancing the group’s interests, being modest about their own role. Once they have it, those same behaviours start to erode. In the experiments he reviews, people given power interrupted more, stereotyped more and took more risks.
For a manager, this is the cruelest version of the problem. Most of us got promoted partly because we were the person who noticed when a colleague was struggling, who asked good questions in meetings, who didn’t need to be the loudest voice. Then the role arrives, and it quietly rewards the opposite: fast answers, visible decisiveness, filling silence. Nobody tells you the trait that earned you the job is the one the job will wear down.
What actually pulls you back
The fair caveat on all of this: many of these are lab studies with students, and power “priming” by writing a short essay has had a mixed record when other labs have tried to repeat it. I wouldn’t hang a policy on any single number above. What makes the picture credible is how many different methods, from forehead drawings to motor cortex readings to team simulations, point the same direction.
The more useful news is that the effect looks reversible with fairly simple moves.
Remind yourself that the team holds information you don’t. In Tost’s third study, groups advised a CEO on which of several candidates to hire as CFO. High-power leaders who got no intervention led their teams to the right answer 0% of the time. High-power leaders who were reminded that every member had distinct insight to offer got there 60% of the time, slightly better than leaders who were never primed at all. A one-line reminder flipped the result. Put that line at the top of your agenda for any decision meeting.
Treat the role as a responsibility, not an opportunity. A 2017 paper by Frank de Wit and colleagues in the Journal of Organizational Behavior found that power holders who saw their power as a responsibility took more advice than those who saw it as an opportunity, whether the advice came from subordinates, experts or peers. The difference wasn’t that they doubted themselves more; they simply valued what others had to say more. How you describe your job to yourself changes how you listen.
Speak last. In any meeting where you want real input, state the question, then go around the table before you say anything that sounds like a position. Once the person with the title has spoken, everyone after them is responding to you, not to the problem.
Count your airtime. For one week, have someone you trust estimate how much of each team meeting you spend talking. If it’s more than a third in a meeting you’re supposed to be listening in, you’re running the Everest experiment on your own team.
Build channels that don’t route through your approval. Skip-level conversations, anonymous pulse questions and a standing “what are we wrong about?” item on the agenda all create ways for information to reach you that don’t depend on someone gathering the nerve to contradict the boss face to face.
None of this means power is the enemy. You need authority to make calls, protect your people and get resources. The point of the research is narrower and more practical: holding power changes how you see, and the change works in only one direction unless you push back on it. The manager who knows that is in a much better position than the one who’s sure it doesn’t apply to them, which, if you take Galinsky’s forehead seriously, is exactly what power would make you think.