A newly elected politician enters a meeting room and discovers that people now wait for them to speak.
The jokes receive more laughter. Suggestions begin to sound like instructions. Calls are returned quickly. Disagreement becomes more carefully worded. The person may not have changed overnight, but the social environment around them has.
Before gaining power, most people must negotiate with resistance. They need permission, cooperation, approval or goodwill. They learn to soften an opinion, explain a decision and anticipate how others might respond.
Power alters that calculation.
It does not eliminate consequences, but it can postpone them. It gives a person greater control over decisions and resources while making other people more dependent on their judgement. At the same time, it can reduce the amount of honest information reaching them.
This is why the familiar claim that power reveals character contains some truth. A person with greater freedom can express preferences that previously remained restrained.
But the claim is incomplete.
Power does not merely reveal the person. It changes the psychological and social conditions under which the person thinks, decides and acts.
To understand what political power reveals, four changes deserve attention: permission, amplification, distance and insulation.
These are not the components of a validated psychological test. They form an editorial framework for connecting several established areas of research and translating them into questions that can be used before and during public office.
1. Permission: what becomes possible?
We often judge character by behaviour observed under ordinary conditions.
That evidence has limits.
A considerate person may behave well because they genuinely value other people. They may also behave well because rudeness carries immediate social costs. A cautious person may respect rules because they believe in them—or because they lack the authority to ignore them.
Behaviour reflects both the person and the situation. Power changes the situation.
It can reduce dependence on other people, increase access to rewards and create more opportunities for action. It may also weaken some of the restraints that previously kept self-interest, impatience or aggression in check.
In their influential approach–inhibition theory, Dacher Keltner, Deborah Gruenfeld and Cameron Anderson proposed that elevated power tends to activate approach-related processes. Powerful people may become more attentive to rewards, more inclined towards action and less constrained by the threat of punishment. Reduced power, by contrast, tends to increase vigilance and inhibition.
The theory does not establish that every powerful person becomes impulsive or selfish. It helps explain why authority can make existing priorities easier to pursue. Keltner, Gruenfeld and Anderson
Power, in this sense, is a form of permission.
The revealing question is not whether a person changes when permission expands. It is what they were waiting for permission to do.
Someone may finally challenge an institution that has resisted reform. Another may begin overruling colleagues because negotiation now feels unnecessary. A third may use authority to protect people who previously lacked influence.
The office supplies capacity. Character helps determine how that capacity is used.
2. Amplification: which goal becomes louder?
Ana Guinote’s review of research across social psychology, management and neuroscience describes power as an intensifier of goal-directed behaviour. Power can energise thought and action, directing people towards goals made salient by their roles, predispositions and opportunities.
This produces a more complicated picture than the statement “power corrupts”.
If a person’s central goal is self-enrichment, power can make that goal easier to pursue. If the goal is institutional reform, authority may strengthen persistence and provide the means to overcome resistance. If recognition matters above everything else, public office offers a continuous supply of status information: invitations, media attention, seating arrangements, access and proximity to influential people.
Power does not supply everyone with the same goal. It can increase a person’s ability to pursue whichever goal already occupies the foreground. Guinote’s review
That is one reason similar authority can produce markedly different behaviour.
Research by Katherine DeCelles and colleagues found that the relationship between power and self-interested behaviour depended partly on moral identity. In their studies, power was associated with greater self-interest among people for whom moral identity was weaker, but with less self-interest among those with a stronger moral identity.
The researchers did not divide humanity into “good” and “bad” people. Their findings suggested that power can affect what receives moral attention. Under power, some participants became more aware of the moral implications of their choices; others became less so. DeCelles and colleagues
Other research points in a similar direction. Stéphane Côté and colleagues found that prosocial orientation was more strongly associated with empathic accuracy when power was high. Under some motivational conditions, power did not reduce social understanding. It strengthened the expression of an existing concern for other people. Côté and colleagues
Power can therefore amplify both sides of character.
It may make a self-interested person more capable of pursuing personal advantage. It may also give a morally committed or prosocial person greater capacity to act on those commitments.
This does not mean that character is fixed before authority arrives. Political roles create new incentives, habits and loyalties. People can learn to misuse power just as they can learn to exercise it responsibly.
But the evidence makes one conclusion difficult to avoid: what a person brings into power matters.
The problem with authenticity
Research by Michael Kraus, Serena Chen and Dacher Keltner found that experiences of power were associated with greater consistency in how people described themselves across different social settings. That consistency was linked to stronger feelings of authenticity.
In simple terms, people who feel powerful may feel more able to be themselves.
This can sound reassuring. Authenticity is commonly treated as a leadership virtue. Yet authenticity cannot be the final standard for public conduct.
A leader may sincerely express impatience, vanity, suspicion or contempt. The fact that the behaviour is authentic does not make it responsible.
Political office does not require a person to display every unfiltered reaction. It requires judgement about which reactions deserve expression and which must be governed.
The meaningful question is not:
Am I being completely myself?
It is:
Which part of myself am I giving authority?
3. Distance: whose reality becomes harder to see?
The psychological effects of power are only part of the problem. Authority also changes the relationship between the decision-maker and the people affected by the decision.
People become more cautious when disagreement carries costs. Employees adjust their language. Party colleagues calculate risk. Advisers learn which information receives a welcome and which produces irritation.
A leader may continue to ask for honest opinions while unintentionally training everyone around them not to provide any.
This can happen without explicit threats. A sharp response may be enough. So can interrupting an unwelcome argument, excluding a difficult colleague from the next discussion or rewarding the person who consistently confirms what the leader already believes.
Over time, the absence of disagreement can be mistaken for the presence of wisdom.
Research by Adam Galinsky and colleagues associated power with reduced perspective-taking across four experiments and a correlational study. Participants placed in higher-power conditions showed less inclination to adopt another person’s visual perspective. In one experiment, high-power participants were also less accurate than control participants in identifying emotional expressions.
These findings do not prove that every political leader loses empathy. The studies examined specific psychological tasks and often used temporary experimental manipulations rather than real political authority. They nevertheless identify a credible risk: when people become less dependent on others, they may invest less effort in understanding how those people see and experience the situation. Galinsky and colleagues
Power can therefore create a disturbing combination.
The person feels freer to express an internal viewpoint while becoming less likely to recognise what that viewpoint excludes.
Distance is not always indifference. Senior political roles involve large systems, competing interests and information that must be compressed. No leader can personally experience every consequence of every decision.
The danger begins when necessary distance becomes comfortable blindness.
4. Insulation: who can still correct you?
Before holding authority, a person receives correction from many directions.
A manager can refuse a proposal. A colleague can withdraw cooperation. A group can reject the idea. Friends can respond negatively to arrogance or disrespect.
Once power increases, these mechanisms become less reliable.
The politician still receives criticism, sometimes brutally and publicly. But criticism from opponents can be dismissed as political hostility. Media scrutiny can be interpreted as bias. Internal disagreement can be labelled disloyalty. Public resistance can be blamed on misinformation.
Power does not eliminate correction. It supplies more explanations for refusing it.
The leader can gradually build a protected account of reality:
- opponents criticise because they are threatened;
- colleagues disagree because they lack courage;
- experts object because they do not understand political realities;
- journalists investigate because they want a scandal;
- the public resists because change is always uncomfortable.
Any one of these explanations may occasionally be true. When every criticism is absorbed into the same self-protective story, correction becomes almost impossible.
This is insulation: not the absence of information, but the construction of a system in which unwelcome information loses permission to matter.
Research on leader accountability shows that such insulation is not inevitable. Across three studies, Daniela Rus and colleagues found that accountability mitigated the relationship between power and self-serving leadership behaviour. Powerful leaders who expected to justify their decisions behaved less self-servingly than powerful leaders without the same accountability. Rus and colleagues
A more recent experimental study found that transparency substantially reduced abuse in a high-power condition, although it did not have the same effect under lower power. Laboratory settings cannot reproduce the full complexity of public office, but the result reinforces an important institutional principle: constraints matter most where discretion is greatest. Hoeft and colleagues
Character is revealed not only by what a person does with authority, but by the systems of correction they preserve once they have the ability to weaken them.
Why “power corrupts” is not enough
Experimental evidence gives us reasons to take the risks of power seriously. It does not support a deterministic conclusion.
Not every person with authority becomes exploitative. Not every leader loses perspective. Not every institution collapses into deference.
In experimental games, Samuel Bendahan and colleagues found that greater discretionary power could increase self-serving behaviour among leaders. The effect was also associated with testosterone levels. But allocation games are not the same as governing a country, running a council or leading a public institution. They isolate possible mechanisms; they do not reproduce the complete moral, legal and institutional world of political leadership. Bendahan and colleagues
The responsible conclusion is narrower.
Power can create opportunities for self-serving behaviour. It can reduce certain inhibitions and allow a leader to impose choices on people who carry fewer consequences for them. Individual motives and moral identity influence what happens next. Accountability, transparency and institutional limits alter the environment in which that choice is made.
Power operates through three elements:
- the person;
- the role;
- the system surrounding the role.
Focusing only on character makes institutions appear unnecessary. Focusing only on institutions pretends that every person will behave identically under the same rules.
Both claims are inadequate.
Strong character does not make safeguards unnecessary. Safeguards do not make character irrelevant.
Small power is still evidence
Candidates are often evaluated through speeches, interviews, biographies and policy positions. These reveal preparation, intelligence and political judgement. They offer less evidence about how the candidate will behave once other people depend on them.
For that, smaller experiences of power may be more useful.
Most people exercise some form of authority before entering high office. They manage a budget, chair a meeting, supervise staff, select volunteers, control access to information or decide whose contribution receives recognition.
The scale may be limited. The behavioural evidence is not.
How does the person treat someone who cannot advance their career?
What happens when a junior colleague notices a mistake?
Do they credit the person who produced the idea?
Can they change a decision without rewriting history to suggest it was their plan all along?
Do rules remain important when they become inconvenient?
The person who uses minor authority to humiliate, exclude or appropriate credit does not need a larger platform for us to understand the pattern.
Power rarely begins with a ministerial office. It begins with a door the person can open for one individual and keep closed for another.
The five-test character audit
No questionnaire can predict with certainty how somebody will behave in office. Past conduct, however, provides better evidence than a declaration of good intentions.
The inconvenience test
What happens when ethical conduct becomes personally inconvenient?
Values are easy to display when they support the preferred outcome. They become informative when they demand delay, explanation, restraint or loss.
The correction test
How does the person react when challenged by someone with less status?
Verbal acceptance is not enough if it is followed by punishment, exclusion or a long memory for embarrassment.
The credit test
What happens when another person produces the decisive idea?
Leaders reveal something important when recognition can be shared without making them feel that their own authority has been diminished.
The discretion test
How does the person behave when the rules leave room for choice?
Strict rules test compliance. Discretion tests judgement.
The exit test
Can the person imagine no longer holding the role?
Power becomes especially dangerous when office is absorbed into identity. Leaving then feels less like a normal democratic transition and more like personal erasure.
A person who cannot imagine life after authority may eventually treat every threat to the position as a threat to the self.
A practical power audit for institutions
The person is only half of the assessment. Before granting significant authority, a political organisation should also examine the conditions surrounding the role.
Permission
Which decisions can the officeholder make alone? Where is consultation mandatory, and where is it merely customary?
Amplification
What incentives does the role reward: public value, loyalty, visibility, short-term victory or personal control?
Distance
How will the decision-maker encounter people who experience the consequences of the policy rather than merely those who design it?
Insulation
Who can challenge the officeholder without risking their career, access or membership of the group?
These questions turn an abstract warning about power into institutional design.
A role with wide permission, incentives for personal visibility, little contact with affected communities and weak protection for dissent is not simply testing character. It is creating conditions in which poor judgement becomes easier to express and harder to correct.
Character needs architecture
Political leadership is often discussed as though everything depends on finding the right individual.
That expectation is unrealistic.
Even thoughtful leaders become tired, defensive, isolated or overconfident. They work inside groups with their own incentives and blind spots. They make decisions with incomplete information, under time pressure, surrounded by people whose careers may depend on remaining useful.
Character needs institutional support.
A leader serious about protecting judgement can create deliberate channels for disagreement, separate loyalty from agreement, request evidence that challenges the preferred option and protect the people expected to deliver unwelcome information.
Institutions can reinforce this through transparent decisions, independent oversight, clear limits on discretion, protected reporting mechanisms and the genuine possibility of losing office.
None of these practices guarantees wisdom. They reduce the likelihood that authority will construct a sealed environment around the person exercising it.
The deeper principle is simple:
Never rely entirely on a powerful person to notice what power is doing to them.
What power finally reveals
Power can reveal character because it expands choice.
A person with more authority has more opportunities to distribute benefits, avoid scrutiny, reward loyalty, punish resistance, share credit or keep it. Behaviour under those conditions gives us information that behaviour under constraint cannot provide.
But power also changes attention, motivation and social feedback. It can intensify goals, make self-expression easier and increase the distance between a decision-maker and those affected by the decision.
For that reason, the claim that power reveals the “true person” is too simple.
Power reveals what a person does with greater permission. It amplifies the goals they are prepared to pursue. It exposes the distance they are willing to tolerate and the degree of insulation they construct against correction.
It also reveals the quality of the institution around them.
The most important evidence may not appear in the grand decision announced from a podium. It may appear earlier: in the interrupted colleague, the inconvenient report, the uncredited idea, the rule treated as optional or the adviser who slowly stops telling the truth.
Character in public life is not demonstrated by possessing good intentions.
It is demonstrated by what remains of those intentions once obedience becomes easier to obtain.
ALTIUS Note
This article belongs to the ALTIUS editorial library: evidence-based essays on Human Performance, Leadership and Society.
Topics
Power and Character · Political Psychology · Leadership · Accountability · Public Life
Selected Research Foundations
Bendahan, S., Zehnder, C., Pralong, F. P., and Antonakis, J. “Leader Corruption Depends on Power and Testosterone.” The Leadership Quarterly, 26(2), 101–122 (2015).
Côté, S., Kraus, M. W., Cheng, B. H., Oveis, C., van der Löwe, I., Lian, H., and Keltner, D. “Social Power Facilitates the Effect of Prosocial Orientation on Empathic Accuracy.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(2), 217–232 (2011).
DeCelles, K. A., DeRue, D. S., Margolis, J. D., and Ceranic, T. L. “Does Power Corrupt or Enable? When and Why Power Facilitates Self-Interested Behavior.” Journal of Applied Psychology, 97(3), 681–689 (2012).
Galinsky, A. D., Magee, J. C., Inesi, M. E., and Gruenfeld, D. H. “Power and Perspectives Not Taken.” Psychological Science, 17(12), 1068–1074 (2006).
Guinote, A. “How Power Affects People: Activating, Wanting, and Goal Seeking.” Annual Review of Psychology, 68, 353–381 (2017).
Keltner, D., Gruenfeld, D. H., and Anderson, C. “Power, Approach, and Inhibition.” Psychological Review, 110(2), 265–284 (2003).
Kraus, M. W., Chen, S., and Keltner, D. “The Power to Be Me: Power Elevates Self-Concept Consistency and Authenticity.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(5), 974–980 (2011).
Rus, D., van Knippenberg, D., and Wisse, B. “Leader Power and Self-Serving Behavior: The Moderating Role of Accountability.” The Leadership Quarterly, 23(1), 13–26 (2012).
