An interesting couple paragraphs from a provacatively titled Atlantic article, Power Causes Brain Damage,
The historian Henry Adams was being metaphorical, not medical, when he described power as “a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.” But that’s not far from where Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley, ended up after years of lab and field experiments. Subjects under the influence of power, he found in studies spanning two decades, acted as if they had suffered a traumatic brain injury—becoming more impulsive, less risk-aware, and, crucially, less adept at seeing things from other people’s point of view.
Sukhvinder Obhi, a neuroscientist at McMaster University, in Ontario, recently described something similar. Unlike Keltner, who studies behaviors, Obhi studies brains. And when he put the heads of the powerful and the not-so-powerful under a transcranial-magnetic-stimulation machine, he found that power, in fact, impairs a specific neural process, “mirroring,” that may be a cornerstone of empathy. Which gives a neurological basis to what Keltner has termed the “power paradox”: Once we have power, we lose some of the capacities we needed to gain it in the first place.
Sukhvinder Obhi is listed as one of the co-authors on Power Changes How the Brain Responds to Others, which used TMS to attempt to measure the affect of power on the brain. According to the paper’s abstract,
Power dynamics are a ubiquitous feature of human social life, yet little is known about how power is implemented in the brain. Motor resonance is the activation of similar brain networks when acting and when watching someone else act, and is thought to be implemented, in part, by the human mirror system. We investigated the effects of power on motor resonance during an action observation task. Separate groups of participants underwent a high-, neutral, or low-power induction priming procedure, prior to observing the actions of another person. During observation, motor resonance was determined with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) via measures of motor cortical output. High-power participants demonstrated lower levels of resonance than low-power participants, suggesting reduced mirroring of other people in those with power. These differences suggest that decreased motor resonance to others’ actions might be one of the neural mechanisms underlying power-induced asymmetries in processing our social interaction partners.
First, those are some interesting experiments.
Second, notice the subtle difference between the way the mechanism is described in the abstract vs. The Atlantic. The actual scientific papers notes that what is being measured is motor resonance, and that motor resonance “is thought to be implemented, in part, by the human mirror system.”
The Atlantic version implies that Obhi and his fellow researchers are directly measuring the mirror system when, at best (given present knowledge), they are measuring what is thought to be one part of that mirroring system.
Along with a discussion of some of the scientific discussion over the relationships between mirroring and motor resonance, their paper also includes an 700+ word section subtitled simply “Limitations” which delineates several factors that potentially limit the veracity of their findings.