Do the Powerful Lack Empathy?

Why do Stanford, Northwestern and NYU researchers have experimental subjects scribbling letters on their foreheads? It's a study in power--and the possibility that powerful people lose the ability to see things from someone else's perspective.

After being randomly assigned to high or low power groups, subjects were asked to draw the letter E on their foreheads. Researchers found that individuals from the high-power group drew the letter in a self-oriented direction (backwards to everyone else) at three times the rate of subjects from the low-power group. Further experiments showed that the high-power group had also a harder time identifying others' emotional expressions and, when given privileged information, were more likely to forget that others did not share this knowledge.

The study's authors say this is because "power leads individuals to anchor too heavily on their own vantage point, thus leaving them unable to adjust to another person's perspective and decreases one's ability to correctly interpret emotion"--possibly helping to explain the actions of business and political leaders across history.

Read more: Study gives us a new perspective on the powerful

ABSTRACT: Power and Perspectives Not Taken