Power turns good people into bad people. Science proves it.

Sorry to make you look at Elon Musk. The man who paid $44 billion for a social network and ran it into the ground now shapes federal policy from inside the White House. If nothing else, his existence proves you can have more money than anyone on Earth and still be a bigger loser than anyone on Earth. That combination raises a question worth taking seriously: does the money cause the personality, or just attract it?

The answer, according to several decades of research, is both. And understanding how that works changes what we should be fighting for.

A psychologist at UC Berkeley named Paul Piff set up a rigged game of Monopoly. A coin flip determined who got to be the rich player. The rich player started with twice as much money, collected double when passing Go, and rolled both dice while their opponent rolled one. Everyone in the room knew exactly how arbitrary this was. They watched the coin flip happen.

Within minutes, the rich players started behaving differently. They ate more from a shared bowl of pretzels. They moved their pieces more loudly around the board. They began narrating their brilliant strategy to no one in particular. When the game ended and researchers asked why they won, the rich players talked about what they did. The choices they made. The properties they bought. They had watched the coin flip. They knew the whole thing was rigged. But when they explained their success, they credited themselves.¹

So advantage changes behavior quickly, even when everyone knows the advantage is fake. But what happens in the brain when someone feels powerful?

A neuroscientist at McMaster University named Sukhvinder Obhi wanted to find out. He had participants recall a time they held power over someone else, then scanned their brains while they watched videos of other people performing simple actions. Humans have neurons that fire both when we do something and when we watch someone else do the same thing. These mirror neurons help us understand what others experience. In participants who had been primed to feel powerful, that neural system showed reduced activity. Feeling powerful literally dampened how much their brains engaged with other people’s experiences.²

Adam Galinsky at Northwestern found a way to watch the same effect play out in real time. He asked participants to draw the letter E on their foreheads. You can draw it so it reads correctly from your own perspective, backwards to anyone facing you, or you can draw it so someone facing you can read it, which means drawing it backwards from your own point of view. People who had been primed to feel powerful drew the self-oriented E nearly three times more often. They simply were not taking the other perspective.³

Here is what makes this research useful rather than just depressing: the effects reverse easily.

In one of Piff’s studies, wealthy participants watched a 46-second video about childhood poverty. Forty-six seconds. Less than a minute. Afterward, they showed the same generosity as lower-income participants. The wealth gap in prosocial behavior disappeared.⁴ In another study, people who spent a few minutes listing three benefits of treating others as equals showed reduced entitlement and narcissism.⁵ A brief writing exercise altered measurable personality traits.

These findings matter because they reveal something crucial about what we’re up against. The cruelty and entitlement we see in the powerful are not fixed features of who those people are. They are responses to circumstances. Change the circumstances and the behavior changes with it. This means intervention works, but it also means the wrong circumstances will keep producing the same results no matter who we put in power.

Think about what these studies imply for anyone who holds office for a decade or more. Every day, people treat them as though their opinions matter more than other people’s opinions. Staff members anticipate their needs. Lobbyists flatter them. Constituents approach them with deference. The neural systems that process other people’s experiences gradually get less exercise. The cognitive habit of taking other perspectives atrophies. This does not require malice. It does not require a character flaw. It happens automatically, the way muscles weaken when you stop using them.

Now add wealth to the equation. The official salary is the smallest part of it. The real compensation comes in access, in future earnings, in the social capital that converts to board seats and consulting fees. A member of Congress who serves three terms leaves office with relationships worth millions. They spend the rest of their career surrounded by people who have every incentive to make them feel important. The psychological effects Piff and Obhi documented do not diminish after the swearing-in ceremony. They intensify every year.

Some people resist this. The human trafficking survivor who took office to change the laws that failed her does not immediately forget what powerlessness feels like. The nurse who won a school board seat still remembers patients who couldn’t afford their medications. Personal history can insulate against the corrosive effects of power, at least for a while. But we cannot build a political strategy around finding enough of these people to staff every level of government. They exist, but they are exceptions. The position itself applies pressure in the other direction, and the pressure never stops.

This is why the answer cannot be to simply elect better people. The position degrades the capacity for empathy. Give someone enough power and their brain processes other people differently than it did before. Selecting for good character at the beginning does not prevent the transformation that follows. We keep trying to vote out the cruelty and finding that new cruelty keeps showing up, because we are not fighting individual bad actors. We are fighting what the structure does to almost everyone who enters it.

The actionable insight here is about design, not redemption. Police officers have too much power and too little accountability. Billionaires have too much money and too much influence over public policy. These are not complaints about fairness, though the unfairness is real. These are observations about what concentration produces. Consolidate enough power in any position and that position will warp whoever holds it. Concentrate enough wealth in any individual and that individual will lose the neural capacity to understand people who have less.

If we want fewer people who behave the way Musk behaves, we need fewer positions that create them. That means breaking up concentrated wealth through taxation and antitrust enforcement. It means distributing political power through stronger local institutions and shorter terms and more aggressive ethics enforcement. It means building systems that assume the people inside them will be corrupted by the power those systems confer, because the research says that assumption is almost always correct.

The structure shapes the psychology. Change the structure and we change what kind of people our institutions produce. Keep the structure intact and we will keep producing exactly what we have: people who watched the coin flip, know the game is rigged, and still believe they earned everything they have.

Why do so many Trump supporters share psychological traits with incarcerated populations? Why does cruelty poll well on the American right? My book with retired clinical psychologist D. Carl Brown, Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder, connects neuroscience and moral psychology to the policy fights tearing America apart. From immigration to climate denial to bodily autonomy, a measurable inability to feel what others feel explains what ideology alone cannot. 314 pages, peer-reviewed sources, no punches pulled. Download the PDF free. If it resonates, consider supporting The Existentialist Republic.

No formal call to action today. But if restlessness strikes and some old magazines happen to be lying around, individual letters could theoretically be cut out, glued onto paper to read “your policies are not very good dude,” and mailed to Senator Ted Cruz at 167 Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, DC 20510. I am told he enjoys correspondence.

References

Galinsky, A. D., Magee, J. C., Inesi, M. E., & Gruenfeld, D. H. (2006). Power and perspectives not taken. Psychological Science, 17(12), 1068-1074.

Hogeveen, J., Inzlicht, M., & Obhi, S. S. (2014). Power changes how the brain responds to others. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(2), 755-762.

Piff, P. K. (2014). Wealth and the inflated self: Class, entitlement, and narcissism. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 40(1), 34-43.

Piff, P. K., Kraus, M. W., Côté, S., Cheng, B. H., & Keltner, D. (2010). Having less, giving more: The influence of social class on prosocial behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99(5), 771-784.

Piff, P. K., Stancato, D. M., Côté, S., Mendoza-Denton, R., & Keltner, D. (2012). Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(11), 4086-4091.

No formal call to action today, folks. But if you’re feeling restless and happen to have some old magazines lying around, you could always cut out individual letters, glue them onto a piece of paper so it reads “your policies are not very good dude,” and mail it to:

Senator Ted Cruz

167 Russell Senate Office Building

Washington, DC 20510

I’m told he enjoys correspondence.