Nov. 12
Scientists Have Measured How Power Changes the Brains of Mice, the Blood of Monkeys, the Speech of Prime Ministers and the Spending of CEOs
The same research shows the change fades when the power does, and that the people closest to a leader can limit it.
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Author's note: this article is long. Maybe a ten minute read. You can listen to it in the Substack app by tapping the play button at the top right of the post.
What does holding power do to the person who accepts or seeks it? Researchers have measured the answer in the brain circuits of mice, the blood of monkeys, the speech of British prime ministers and the prices chief executive officers, CEOs, paid in 106 corporate takeovers. So I read those studies, along with the psychology experiments on power, two famous failures included.
Below, we go through the science on the mice, the monkeys, the prime ministers and the CEOs in that order, then the psychology, and finally the cases where people limited the change or reversed it. Then we look at what practical lessons might be found from what we just learned.
Tingting Zhou and colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Zhejiang University reported in the journal Science in 2017 that a history of winning changes a specific circuit in a mouse's brain. In their test, two mice enter a narrow tube from opposite ends and the dominant one forces the other to back out. Repeated wins remodeled the connection from the thalamus to the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, a region at the front of the brain, and when the researchers switched that region's neurons on with light, a mouse beat a previously dominant opponent 90 percent of the time. Mice given more than six of those light-assisted wins all kept their new rank afterward with no stimulation, and most mice given fewer than five returned to their old rank.
Michael Raleigh and Michael McGuire, psychiatry researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine, reported in the Archives of General Psychiatry in 1984 that dominant male vervet monkeys have about twice the blood serotonin of subordinate males, and that the higher level is a consequence of holding the top position. In 1991 the same researchers removed the dominant male from each of 12 groups and gave one of the two remaining males tryptophan or fluoxetine, the drug sold as Prozac, both of which raise serotonin activity, and the treated male became dominant in all 12 groups. When the same males were given drugs that lower serotonin activity, their untreated cage mates became dominant.
David Owen, a physician who served as Britain's foreign secretary from 1977 to 1979, and Jonathan Davidson, a psychiatry professor at Duke University, studied American presidents and British prime ministers across 100 years for a 2009 paper in the neurology journal Brain. They named the condition they found hubris syndrome and called it "a disorder of the possession of power," one tied to power that has brought overwhelming success and that a leader has held for years with minimal constraint.
By their criteria, the British prime ministers who developed the syndrome include Margaret Thatcher, who governed from 1979 to 1990, and Tony Blair, who governed from 1997 to 2007. George W. Bush was the only definite case among American presidents, and Owen and Davidson place the high point of his case at his 2003 speech declaring major combat in Iraq over, delivered on an aircraft carrier under a banner reading "Mission Accomplished." Thatcher used the royal "we," one of the signs on their list, in 1989, when she told reporters outside her office, "We have become a grandmother." Owen describes the syndrome as "evoked by a specific trigger (power), and usually remitting when power fades."
Peter Garrard, a neurologist at St George's, University of London, then looked for the syndrome in language. In a 2013 study in the journal Cortex, he and three co-authors, Owen among them, compared transcripts of Thatcher's and Blair's spoken remarks with those of John Major, the prime minister who served between them and did not meet the criteria. In Blair's speech, the words "I" and "me" grew more frequent the longer he held office, and the complexity of both Thatcher's and Blair's language rose during the periods when their hubristic behavior was recorded.
The Maudsley Philosophy Group, a charity of psychiatrists and philosophers based at London's Maudsley Hospital, wrote in their summary of the study that Thatcher's hubris first appeared during the celebrations of Britain's 1982 victory over Argentina in the Falklands War and then subsided, "possibly the result of the influence of Deputy Prime Minister, William Whitelaw." Whitelaw resigned in January 1988, and the group wrote that Thatcher showed increasing evidence of the syndrome afterward. She resigned in November 1990, after her own cabinet ministers told her one by one that she would lose a vote to remain her party's leader.
Mathew Hayward and Donald Hambrick, management researchers, measured what a CEO's hubris costs shareholders. In a 1997 study in the journal Administrative Science Quarterly, they examined 106 large acquisitions and the premium each buyer paid above the target company's market price. The premium rose with recent media praise for the acquiring company's CEO and with a measure of the CEO's self-importance. The link was stronger when company insiders made up a high proportion of the board and when the CEO also chaired it. Shareholders of the acquiring companies lost money on average, and they lost more as the premium rose.
John Antonakis, a professor of organizational behavior at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, and three colleagues ran experiments in which volunteers held power over real money. The volunteers played leaders who divided cash between themselves and their followers and could shrink the group's total to enlarge their own share. In the first study, with 478 participants, leaders took more as they were given more followers and more choices. The authors also measured each leader's honesty beforehand, and they reported in The Leadership Quarterly in 2015 that "honesty did not shield leaders from the corruptive effect of power." Antonakis said when the paper came out that "strong governance mechanisms and strong institutions are the key to keeping leaders in check."
What happens in the mind of a person who gains power? Dacher Keltner, the University of California, Berkeley psychologist who wrote the 2016 book The Power Paradox, proposed with two colleagues in 2003 that power brings a better mood, more attention to rewards, faster and more automatic thinking, and less inhibited behavior. Four management researchers tested that theory in the journal Psychological Bulletin in October 2025 by pooling 813 samples with 269,534 participants, and they concluded that "the theory is well-supported."
Adam Galinsky, now a professor at Columbia Business School, found in a 2006 study that participants prompted to feel powerful were more likely to draw an E on their own forehead so that it read correctly to themselves and backward to anyone facing them, and that they were less accurate at reading emotions in other people's faces. Katherine DeCelles, a management professor at the University of Toronto, found with colleagues in 2012 that a person's character decides the direction: power made people with a weak moral identity more self-interested and people with a strong moral identity less. Robert Caro, who won Pulitzer Prizes for his biographies of the New York planner Robert Moses and President Lyndon Johnson, told The Guardian in 2012, "What I believe is always true about power is that power always reveals."
The Stanford Prison Experiment and power posing, two of the best-known findings in the psychology of power, both failed later checks. Thibault Le Texier, a researcher at the University of Nice, read the archives of the 1971 Stanford study, in which students played guards and prisoners, and interviewed 15 of the participants. He reported in American Psychologist, the American Psychological Association's journal, in 2019 that the guards "received precise instructions regarding the treatment of the prisoners."
Power posing came from a 2010 paper reporting that two one-minute poses raised testosterone and lowered cortisol. A 2015 study with four times as many participants found no hormonal or behavioral effects, and in 2016 the paper's lead author, Dana Carney, wrote, "I do not believe that 'power pose' effects are real." The findings on mice, monkeys, prime ministers and CEOs came from brain recordings, blood samples, transcripts and takeover prices.
Can the change be undone? Dr. Robert Sapolsky, the Stanford University neurobiologist who wrote the 2017 book Behave, documented one case in a troop of olive baboons in Kenya that he had studied since 1978. From 1983 to 1986, tuberculosis killed 46 percent of the troop's adult males, the ones aggressive enough to fight a neighboring troop for food at a tourist lodge's garbage pit, where infected meat carried the disease. The surviving males were unusually unaggressive, and the troop developed what Dr. Sapolsky and his co-author, Lisa Share, called a "relaxed" dominance hierarchy, with more grooming and without the elevated stress hormones that low-ranking males show in other troops.
Male baboons leave the troop they were born into and join another, so by 1993 none of the adult males from the outbreak years remained, and the males who had arrived since behaved the same way. The troop's females groomed each newcomer sooner than females in a comparison troop did.
Christopher Boehm, the anthropologist who directed the Jane Goodall Research Center at the University of Southern California, found that people in egalitarian societies restrain their leaders on purpose. He surveyed 48 societies, from hunting bands to chiefdoms, for a 1993 study in the journal Current Anthropology and attributed their equality to the "domination of leaders by their own followers," who use public opinion, criticism and ridicule, disobedience and, at the extreme, removing or killing a leader who tries to dominate them.
Historians and constitution writers described the same pattern without measurements. The English historian Lord Acton wrote in an 1887 letter to the historian Mandell Creighton, "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." James Madison, a principal author of the U.S. Constitution, had designed a government around that premise a century earlier, writing in Federalist 51 in 1788 that "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition."
Power changes whoever holds it for as long as they hold it, and the people nearest that person can limit how far the change goes. Thatcher's hubris subsided during the years Whitelaw was her deputy and grew after Whitelaw resigned in 1988, and her own cabinet ministers ended her time in office in 1990. In the 106 takeovers, a CEO's hubris raised the price more when company insiders filled much of the board and the CEO chaired it. The baboon troop kept its relaxed hierarchy after every adult male from the outbreak years was gone, and Boehm's 48 societies restrained would-be bosses with ridicule and disobedience. For an elected official, the people nearest include the voters.
The lessons for all of this?
Who our elected officials surround themselves with has a profoundly impactful effect on their decision making. They choose their staff, then a feedback loop between the various parties starts impacting fluid personality and behavioral traits.
Power is corrupting, and it then follows logically that power is best entrusted at the levels closest to voters. That means into county, city, tribal, and state offices. Otherwise we risk continuing the current “unitary executive” and Epstein class/oligarch problems that we currently face.
If you check out the free PDF or purchasable physical copies of my book The American Reformation: How States Can Use the Constitution to Break Authoritarian Capture, you'll find the tools that state and local governments already hold and the precedent behind each one.
If this subject interests you, I recommend CGP Grey's 2016 video "The Rules for Rulers," on how rulers keep power.
CALL TO ACTION
Who you're contacting and how: Reach out to one of your state legislators. You can do that by email, phone, FaxZero or even a printed letter. You could even go to their office during business hours, bring donuts, and tell the staff you're going to talk to them about an issue you care about if the legislator isn't there.
Find your legislators by clicking on this sentence.
What you're asking for: Ask them to publicly commit to at least four open, in-person town halls in the district every year, with the dates posted in advance, and to take unscreened questions from the floor at each one. The researchers in this article found that power changes the people who hold it and that the people closest to them can limit the change. For a state legislator, those people are constituents. You can read a summary of the experiment in which honesty did not protect leaders from power, even print it out and share it if you like, by clicking on this sentence.
Let them know who you are, what you want, and why you care. Offices count identical messages once, so write it in your own words.
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