Power and disinhibition
Gaining power tends to activate approach (pursuing rewards and goals) and reduce inhibition (attention to threats and to others' views). Powerful people become more action-oriented, more likely to stereotype, less likely to take others' perspectives and more likely to act on impulses.
What drives it
Power reduces dependence on others, so attending to them becomes less necessary. It feels like freedom and clarity from the inside and looks like carelessness from the outside.
How it shows
Work
A newly promoted manager who interrupts more, makes jokes at others' expense, forgets names, and starts treating meetings as their own. Senior leaders who reply to emails in one line and expect detailed answers. Leaders who take risks with company money or behave sexually inappropriately because the usual brakes have gone. Over years, it can harden into hubris.
Relationships
The partner who earns more or controls the money and starts making unilateral decisions. Parents who lose interest in a teenager's view once they 'pay the bills'.
Self
You notice you have become impatient, that you speak first more and listen less, and that people's reactions matter less. The feeling is often pleasant: freedom from worrying what others think.
What tells it apart
Hubris syndrome: Power disinhibition appears quickly after gaining power and reverses when power goes; hubris syndrome builds over years of power and includes grandiosity and contempt for advice.
Grandiose narcissism: Grandiose narcissism is visible before the person has power; power disinhibition shows as a change from how the person behaved before promotion.
Dominance and prestige: Dominance is a strategy for gaining rank; disinhibition is a side effect of holding it, and can occur in prestige-based leaders too.
A test
Compare the person's behaviour before and after gaining power, especially towards those with less; a clear change points to power-related disinhibition rather than a stable trait.
Questions to carry
- Since gaining power, how has the person's treatment of those with less changed?
- When I have had the upper hand, whose view did I stop bothering to imagine?
How strong the research is
mixed. Correlational and field findings that power reduces attention to others and increases approach behaviour hold up reasonably, but several lab effects from recall-based power priming have failed to replicate.
Where it comes from
David Kipnis, 1972; Dacher Keltner, Deborah Gruenfeld and Cameron Anderson, 2003; Adam Galinsky and colleagues, 2006