How Power Dulls Empathy — and What Your Inner Narrator Has to Do With It
We love to talk about the perks of power. More resources, more security, more respect. But there is a quieter cost that shows up again and again in psychology research and history alike: the higher people climb, the harder it becomes for them to feel what others feel.
This is the paradox at the heart of the power-empathy tradeoff. People who start out sensitive, attuned, and collaborative often become more self-focused, blunter, and emotionally detached the more power they gain. This is not just a character flaw. It is a shift in the brain’s wiring. And in my view, the best way to make sense of it is to understand how our default mode network — the seat of the “inner narrator” — evolved as an engine for social rank.
The Evidence: Power Turns Down Empathy
Psychologists have known for decades that power can change how people respond to the emotions of others. A famous set of experiments by Dacher Keltner and his team found that people primed to feel more powerful were worse at reading subtle facial cues. They interrupted more, made more direct eye contact, and showed less mirroring — a core process where our brains light up in sync with someone else’s feelings.
Think about high-profile examples. In politics, business, and entertainment, you see a pattern of people who come in as consensus-builders and leave out of touch. Take Elon Musk, whose early reputation as a visionary collaborator at PayPal and Tesla has shifted as his wealth and status soared. Today, he is widely seen as brash, impulsive, and at times blind to the human fallout of his decisions. Or look at political leaders who start as “of the people” figures but drift into insulated circles, surrounded by flatterers and echo chambers.
It is not that power instantly corrupts everyone. But it predictably makes us less able to tune in to the people we depend on to stay there.
The Inner Narrator: A Story Engine for Status
So where does the inner narrator fit into this? The default mode network, or DMN, is the brain system that fires up when we are not focused outwardly. When your mind wanders, replays conversations, rehearses future scenarios, or runs self-talk loops — that is the DMN in action.
Decades of research have shown the DMN’s main role is weaving together a coherent sense of self over time. But I argue its deeper evolutionary function is to keep you competitive in your social environment. It compares your standing, anticipates threats, imagines your audience, and scripts the best possible version of you to show the tribe.
This is why the same brain network handles everything from remembering social interactions to moral reasoning and gossip. The inner narrator is status management on autopilot.
Why More Power Means Less Empathy
When you are lower in a hierarchy, you rely on empathy as a tool for survival. You need to read the room, build alliances, and stay aware of threats. The DMN keeps you vigilant, always scanning for shifts that might help you move up or avoid getting knocked down.
But when you have power, your dependence on others drops. You can afford to stop tuning in so closely. The DMN recalibrates its priority from reading others to defending and projecting the best version of you. It may even dampen the mirroring circuits that make empathy possible.
Studies using fMRI show that people with higher self-perceived power show less activation in brain regions tied to perspective-taking and affective mirroring. The inner narrator does not waste energy on signals that no longer protect your rank. From an evolutionary standpoint, this is efficient. From a relational standpoint, it is a liability.
The Isolation Trap
What does this look like day to day? A boss stops checking in on how decisions land for employees. A political leader dismisses dissent as disloyalty. A celebrity insulates themselves with yes-people because the unfiltered truth stings. The more power they have, the more they rely on a self-serving narrative that they alone hold the answers.
And this is not just about bad actors. It is the natural consequence of a brain system whose main job is to manage position, not connection for its own sake.
Why It Matters
In therapy, I see this play out with clients who have climbed to leadership roles. Many feel confused by their growing sense of distance. They wonder why they no longer care as deeply about what used to move them, or why they feel misunderstood by the people they lead. It is not that they have become villains. It is that their inner narrator is doing its job — protecting their status — at the cost of turning down their ability to feel with others.
This is not an excuse for bad behavior. It is a prompt to stay aware of the ways our wiring can backfire on us. Power can free us from the constraints of the group, but it can also cut us off from the empathy that made us trustworthy leaders in the first place.
A Better Story
If the DMN’s inner narrator is always running a status story, the goal is not to shut it off. That is not possible. But we can watch the story it tells. We can check how much our own position might be distorting our ability to feel what others feel. We can remember that the same system that helps us climb also makes it easy to lose touch with the ground we are standing on.
When you understand that your mind evolved to keep you climbing, you can start to question whether every rung is worth the cost — and whether you can hold your position without losing the human connection that made it possible in the first place.
Noah Antieau, LLPC
Antieau & Co. | On hierarchy, empathy, and the mind’s restless status game