Power and Empathy: Perspective Taking, Social Distance, and Emotional Accuracy
Updated: 4 days ago
Author: Ukrainian Psychological Hub · Published: September 24, 2026 · Editorial Policy
Power can make it easier to act while making it less necessary to understand the people affected by that action. That asymmetry is one reason power has repeatedly been linked to reduced perspective taking, greater social distance, and lower accuracy in reading other people. Yet the strongest conclusion from contemporary research is more precise than the popular claim that “power destroys empathy.” Power changes social attention and motivation. Under some conditions, it weakens other-focus; under others, responsibility, prosocial goals, dependence awareness, and relationship motives can preserve or even improve interpersonal sensitivity.
The distinction matters because empathy is not a single psychological ability. Researchers separate perspective taking, empathic concern, sharing or resonating with another person’s emotion, emotion recognition, and empathic accuracy. These processes can move together, but they do not have to. A person may correctly infer what someone feels without sharing that emotion, feel concern without accurately reading a specific expression, or understand another person’s viewpoint while disagreeing with it. Reviews of empathy therefore treat it as multidimensional and strongly shaped by context and motivation (Zaki, 2014).
This article examines the specific relationship between power and those empathy-related processes. It treats social power as asymmetric control over valued outcomes and resources, keeps power distinct from status, dominance, authority, and personal control, and asks what the evidence actually supports about perspective taking, social distance, compassion, emotion recognition, and empathic accuracy.
For the broader question of how power affects morality, self-interest, accountability, confidence, and behavior beyond empathy-related processes, see Does Power Corrupt? Psychology, Morality, Behavior, and the Power Paradox.
What Does Research on Power and Empathy Actually Show?
A useful starting point is that the evidence is directional but conditional. Several influential experiments found that experimentally activated or dispositionally experienced power was associated with less spontaneous perspective taking, more egocentric anchoring, and worse recognition of others’ emotions. Galinsky and colleagues’ classic series found that high-power participants were less likely to adopt another person’s visual perspective, were less likely to adjust for what another person did or did not know, and were less accurate at identifying facial expressions (Galinsky et al., 2006).
Other work extended this pattern beyond faces. In two studies of emotional prosody, higher social power was associated with lower accuracy in recognizing emotion from a speaker’s tone of voice (Uskul et al., 2016). In face-to-face conversations about suffering, higher-power participants showed lower distress and compassion toward the person disclosing a painful experience, along with physiological patterns consistent with greater emotional regulation (van Kleef et al., 2008).
Those findings are important, but they are not a universal law. A review focused specifically on power and social information processing concluded that powerholders are not simply more or less accurate across all circumstances. Accuracy depends on how power is construed, whether the position is stable, and what goals are active in the interaction. Power understood as responsibility tends to produce better interpersonal accuracy than power understood primarily as opportunity (Schmid Mast et al., 2020).
A broader meta-analysis of “verticality” — studies involving power, status, dominance, and related forms of rank — likewise found no single simple accuracy effect across measures. Relations differed depending on what kind of vertical position was measured, how accuracy was defined, and whether dominance was empathic/responsible or egoistic/aggressive (Hall et al., 2015). Because that meta-analysis combines constructs that contemporary hierarchy research increasingly separates, it should not be read as an effect size for social power alone. Its value is in showing why “higher rank means lower empathy” is too crude.
Empathy Is Not One Thing: Five Processes That Power May Affect
The phrase “power reduces empathy” compresses several different questions. Separating them makes the evidence clearer.
• Perspective taking is the attempt or ability to represent another person’s viewpoint, thoughts, knowledge, or beliefs. It is primarily a cognitive form of other-understanding.
• Affective empathy or experience sharing refers to emotional resonance with another person’s state. It concerns what the observer feels in response to another person, rather than whether the observer has correctly inferred the target’s state.
• Empathic concern and compassion are other-oriented responses to another person’s need or suffering. They can motivate care without requiring the observer to feel the same emotion as the target.
• Emotion recognition concerns identifying affective information from faces, voices, bodies, or other cues. It is a perceptual judgment task, not a complete measure of empathy.
• Empathic accuracy concerns how accurately one person infers another person’s actual thoughts or feelings, usually against a criterion supplied by the target. It is more demanding than simply endorsing a self-report item such as “I am an empathic person.”
These distinctions also explain why apparently contradictory studies can all be informative. Power could reduce spontaneous perspective taking while leaving early affective responses to another person’s pain intact; it could lower attention to subtle emotional cues while increasing accuracy when an important goal makes those cues useful; or it could amplify a prosocial motive in one person and a self-focused motive in another. The mechanisms need not produce one global “empathy level.”
Why Power Can Reduce Perspective Taking
1. Reduced dependence can reduce the need to attend
One of the oldest psychological explanations is motivational rather than moral. People who depend on others have strong reasons to monitor them. They need to anticipate decisions, moods, preferences, and intentions because those signals may affect access to valued outcomes. People who control those outcomes often face less reciprocal dependence. Susan Fiske’s attention-based account of power and stereotyping argued that this asymmetry can make the powerless highly attentive to the powerful while reducing the powerful person’s need to individuate those who depend on them (Fiske, 1993). The dedicated stereotyping article develops this attention–individuation evidence in detail: Power and Stereotyping: Attention, Individuation, and Social Judgment.
This does not mean that people in power are incapable of careful social perception. It means the ordinary incentives for careful perception can be asymmetric. If another person controls something important to you, understanding that person becomes instrumentally valuable. If you can obtain your goals without their cooperation, social attention may be easier to redirect elsewhere.
2. Power can increase reliance on one’s own vantage point
The Galinsky experiments made this mechanism unusually concrete. High-power participants were more likely to behave from an egocentric visual perspective and were less likely to correct for differences between their own knowledge and another person’s knowledge (Galinsky et al., 2006). The authors interpreted the pattern as reduced perspective taking: power increased the weight given to the self’s point of view and reduced adjustment toward the perspective of others.
A later critical review of this literature emphasized that many studies support a negative power–perspective-taking relation, while also recognizing contradictory findings and an important moderator: a sense of responsibility can reverse or weaken the pattern (Galinsky, Rucker, & Magee, 2016). That is a stronger scientific summary than the claim that power mechanically causes egocentrism.
3. Power changes approach, inhibition, and goal pursuit
The approach–inhibition theory of power proposes that greater power tends to activate approach-related processes — attention to rewards, positive affect, more automatic cognition, and disinhibited behavior — whereas low power more strongly activates inhibition, threat monitoring, and constraint (Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003). This framework became one of the dominant theories of the psychological consequences of power.
A 2025 Psychological Bulletin meta-analysis provided the first large-scale synthesis of this theory, analyzing 1,712 effect sizes from 813 independent samples and 269,534 participants. It found overall support for approach–inhibition predictions, with stronger approach than inhibition associations and indirect links from power to behavior through attention, cognition, and affect (Sabey et al., 2025). This meta-analysis is evidence for the broad power framework, not a direct meta-analysis proving that every form of empathy falls under a single negative effect.
For empathy, the relevance is motivational: power can make the powerholder’s currently active goals more behaviorally consequential. If a goal is self-focused, other people’s inner states may become peripheral. If understanding another person is central to the goal, the same increased goal focus can work in the opposite direction.
Social Distance: Why Power Can Make Other People Feel Farther Away
The social distance theory of power offers a complementary explanation. Power relationships are built on asymmetric dependence: the low-power person needs the high-power person more than the reverse. Magee and Smith proposed that this asymmetry produces asymmetric psychological distance. High-power individuals tend to feel more socially distant from low-power individuals, and that distance influences mental-state inference, responsiveness, emotion, and the level of abstraction used to represent other people and events (Magee & Smith, 2013).
A later review of the evidence concluded that higher power is often associated with reduced attunement and attention to others, greater objectification and dehumanization, and greater privilege for the high-power partner’s goals within dyads (Magee, 2020). Social distance is therefore one plausible bridge between structural asymmetry and empathy-related outcomes: when another person is psychologically distant, their moment-to-moment perspective can carry less weight.
Social distance is not the same as hostility. A manager can feel distant from an employee without disliking the employee; a clinician can occupy a powerful expert role while caring deeply about a patient; a parent may control important outcomes while remaining emotionally close to a child. The theory concerns relational distance and dependence, not an inevitable absence of warmth.
Emotional Accuracy: Faces, Voices, and Real Interactions
Facial emotion recognition
In the Galinsky series, participants experimentally placed in a high-power condition were less accurate than control participants in identifying facial emotional expressions (Galinsky et al., 2006). This finding is often cited as evidence that power reduces empathy. More precisely, it shows reduced performance on one form of emotion recognition under a particular power manipulation.
Vocal emotion recognition
Uskul, Paulmann, and Weick tested another channel: emotional prosody. Across a correlational study and an experiment, high power was associated with lower accuracy in recognizing emotions from vocal tone (Uskul et al., 2016). The result is useful because it suggests that power-related changes in social perception are not limited to facial-expression tasks.
Empathic accuracy in interaction
Empathic accuracy research asks whether an observer can correctly infer another person’s thoughts or feelings during an interaction. Here the evidence becomes more conditional. Côté and colleagues found that power strengthened the relationship between prosocial orientation and empathic accuracy. In one experiment, inducing a prosocial orientation increased accuracy in judging a stranger’s emotions specifically among participants made to feel powerful (Côté et al., 2011).
The implication is important: power may increase the behavioral impact of what a person already wants to do. When the goal is prosocial and accurate understanding serves that goal, power can support rather than obstruct interpersonal accuracy. This is one reason contemporary reviews have moved away from a one-direction model in which power is assumed to uniformly degrade social perception.
Research in romantic relationships reaches a similar conclusion. Across experiments and daily-experience studies, power reduced perspective taking and empathic accuracy most reliably among relatively self-focused individuals; the effect was weaker or absent among those who were more other-focused (Gordon & Chen, 2013). The relationship context therefore matters, as do gratitude, relational self-construal, and social value orientation.
Power, Compassion, and the Emotional Response to Suffering
Understanding another person and emotionally responding to that person are related but distinct. Van Kleef and colleagues examined what happens when people discuss actual experiences of suffering face to face. Higher-power participants reported less distress and less compassion in response to the other person’s disclosure, and showed greater autonomic emotion regulation (van Kleef et al., 2008).
That study supports the idea that power can dampen emotional responsiveness in some contexts, but it does not establish that powerful people lack empathic capacity. The authors themselves framed the findings in terms of social power, affiliation motivation, and emotional response. A state produced in a specific interaction should not be converted into a personality diagnosis or a claim about someone’s permanent emotional architecture.
Neuroscientific measures add another caution. An ERP study of empathy for pain found that both high- and low-power states showed enhanced early N2 responses to others’ pain, while differences emerged later in the P3 component. The authors interpreted the pattern tentatively as evidence that power may affect later cognitive evaluation more than the initial emotional response (Galang et al., 2021). Single neurophysiological studies do not justify popular claims that power simply “switches off” an empathy circuit.
Why Power Does Not Always Reduce Empathy
Responsibility can change what power means
A power position can be experienced as opportunity — freedom to pursue one’s own goals — or as responsibility — obligation to consider the outcomes of people who depend on one’s decisions. Reviews of social information processing consistently identify this construal as a major boundary condition. Power understood as responsibility is associated with greater attention to others and better interpersonal accuracy than power understood mainly as opportunity (Schmid Mast et al., 2020).
Organizational research provides a structural version of the same idea. In three preregistered experiments and a field survey, Tost and Johnson found that structural power over subordinates could activate responsibility through benevolent-power norms and awareness of subordinates’ dependence. That responsibility was associated with solidarity and behavior that prioritized subordinates’ interests (Tost & Johnson, 2019). The effects were tied to structural power in a cooperative organizational setting rather than simply to a psychological feeling of power.
Goal relevance can improve attention
Powerholders can be highly attentive when another person is relevant to an important goal. Overbeck and Park found that high-power participants in decision-making roles sometimes individuated low-power targets more accurately than low-power participants did. When responsibility was redirected away from interpersonal concerns toward broader organizational concerns, that advantage was impaired (Overbeck & Park, 2001). The study is a useful counterexample to any theory that treats inattention as an automatic property of power.
Prosocial motivation can be amplified by power
Because power can facilitate goal-consistent action, it can magnify a prosocial orientation as well as a self-focused one. Côté and colleagues’ findings are especially important here: high power strengthened the positive link between prosocial orientation and empathic accuracy (Côté et al., 2011). In other words, power did not add a fixed amount of empathy or subtract a fixed amount; it changed how strongly motives translated into social perception.
Relationship motives alter the effect
In close relationships, power operates inside an existing system of attachment, gratitude, commitment, conflict, and mutual dependence. Gordon and Chen’s work found that self–other focus moderated whether relationship power harmed perspective taking and empathic accuracy (Gordon & Chen, 2013). This is one reason findings from short laboratory power primes should not be treated as complete models of marriages, families, workplaces, clinical relationships, or institutions.
Power, Dominance, Status, Authority, and Control Are Different
One of the biggest sources of confusion in research and popular writing is treating every form of hierarchy as “power.” The constructs overlap, but the differences matter for empathy.
Power refers to asymmetric control over valued outcomes or resources. The scientific construct is explained in detail in Social Power: Definition, Types, French and Raven, Keltner, and Modern Psychology.
Status refers primarily to respect, esteem, and social value granted by others. A person can be admired without controlling other people’s outcomes, or control important outcomes without being respected. See Power vs Status: Social Power, Prestige, Dominance, and Hierarchy.
Dominance is a route to influence or rank based more on force, threat, intimidation, or assertive imposition. It should not be substituted for power in general. Research that combines dominance, socioeconomic status, status, and power under one “verticality” variable can answer useful broad questions, but it cannot establish the unique psychological effect of each construct.
Authority is power regarded as legitimate within a role, rule system, institution, or relationship. Authority may invite compliance because people recognize the right to direct action, not merely because the authority holder controls rewards or punishments. The distinction is developed in Power vs Authority: Weber, Legitimacy, Influence, and Obedience and Authority in Psychology: Legitimacy, Expertise, Trust, and Obedience.
Power dynamics describe the changing structure of influence and dependence among people rather than a stable property of one person. For the broader relational model, see Power Dynamics: Psychology of Influence, Dependence, Status, and Control.
These distinctions help explain why a study of aggressive dominance may find low empathy while a study of legitimate leadership responsibility finds greater other-focus. The studies are not necessarily contradicting one another; they may be studying different social structures and psychological motives.
Does Power Make People Less Empathetic? A Better Answer
The evidence supports a conditional answer. Power can reduce perspective taking, attention to other people, emotion recognition, empathic concern, and compassion in contexts where dependence is asymmetric, social distance is high, other people are not relevant to the powerholder’s goals, or power is experienced chiefly as freedom from constraint. Those effects have been demonstrated across multiple laboratory paradigms and some real-interaction designs.
At the same time, power can leave social perception unchanged or improve it when accurate understanding serves an important goal, when power is construed as responsibility, when the powerholder has a prosocial orientation, or when relational motives keep attention focused on the other person. Contemporary reviews therefore reject a global rule that powerholders are simply inaccurate perceivers (Schmid Mast et al., 2020).
The most useful psychological question is not “Does power erase empathy?” It is “What does this form of power make the person attend to, depend on, value, and feel responsible for?” That formulation captures both the robust evidence for reduced other-focus and the equally important evidence for moderators.
What the Evidence Does Not Show
Research on power and empathy is often translated into stronger claims than the studies justify. Several limits are especially important.
First, a temporary power manipulation is not the same as years of occupying a powerful institutional role. Recall primes, assigned roles, and laboratory resource-control tasks are valuable for testing causal mechanisms, but they do not reproduce the full ecology of organizational, family, political, medical, or economic power.
Second, lower accuracy on one emotion-recognition task is not evidence of a global empathy deficit. Facial labeling, vocal prosody recognition, perspective taking, empathic concern, compassion, and empathic accuracy are different outcomes.
Third, correlation between dispositional sense of power and an empathy measure cannot by itself show that power caused the difference. Personality, social role, culture, selection into high-power positions, relationship structure, and reverse causation can contribute.
Fourth, the literature contains genuine heterogeneity. Hall and colleagues’ meta-analysis found different associations depending on how hierarchy and accuracy were operationalized (Hall et al., 2015), while later reviews emphasize responsibility, stability, and interaction goals as moderators (Schmid Mast et al., 2020).
Fifth, broad theoretical support does not validate every specific mechanism. The 2025 approach–inhibition meta-analysis strongly supports the larger theory across hundreds of manuscripts (Sabey et al., 2025), but its conclusions should not be restated as if it were a dedicated meta-analysis of empathy, perspective taking, or emotional accuracy.
Finally, empathy is itself motivated and regulatable. Zaki’s review argues that people approach or avoid empathic engagement depending on incentives, costs, affiliation, competition, and other motives (Zaki, 2014). Power enters that motivational system; it does not operate outside it.
A Note on Recent Evidence
Newer studies continue to test power–empathy mechanisms rather than settling on a single trait-like effect. A 2026 pair of experiments found that situational power primes were associated with lower state empathy in one study and that trait empathy moderated the relation between implicit power activation and implicit evaluations of violence in another (Guo & Yun, 2026). These results are consistent with the idea that empathy can mediate or constrain some effects of power, but they are recent primary findings and should be treated as one contribution to an evolving literature rather than as a definitive endpoint.
Practical Implications: Designing Power So Attention to Others Remains Useful
The research suggests that empathy under power is partly a problem of incentives, attention, and role construction. That makes the practical implications more specific than telling leaders to “be more empathic.”
Make dependence visible. Structural power can obscure how strongly other people depend on a decision maker. Research on power as responsibility suggests that awareness of subordinates’ dependence can activate obligation and solidarity rather than mere freedom of action (Tost & Johnson, 2019).
Create reasons to obtain accurate information from lower-power people. When the powerful can succeed without listening, attention to others becomes optional. Feedback systems, consultation routines, dissent channels, and decision processes that make local knowledge consequential can increase the instrumental value of perspective taking. This is an evidence-informed organizational implication, not a guarantee that any single procedure will create empathy.
Frame power as responsibility as well as opportunity. The social-information-processing literature repeatedly finds different outcomes when people focus on duties to affected others rather than only on the freedoms power provides (Schmid Mast et al., 2020).
Do not confuse confidence with interpersonal accuracy. Feeling certain can be useful for action, but confidence is not evidence that one has correctly inferred another person’s feelings, priorities, or knowledge. Where decisions affect people with less power, direct information from those people is generally superior to assuming that status or experience automatically produces insight.
Preserve contact across power differences. Social-distance theory predicts that asymmetric dependence can increase psychological distance (Magee & Smith, 2013). Structures that repeatedly remove decision makers from the people affected by their decisions can therefore create conditions in which perspective taking becomes less practiced and less necessary.
Separate empathy from agreement and leniency. A powerful person can understand another person accurately while still setting a boundary, making an unpopular decision, or enforcing a rule. Empathy is information about another person’s inner state; it is not a requirement to surrender one’s own judgment.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does power make people lose empathy?
Power can reduce several empathy-related processes under some conditions, especially spontaneous perspective taking, attention to others, emotion recognition, and compassion. It does not reliably erase empathic capacity. Motivation, responsibility, relationship orientation, goal relevance, and the type of power all matter.
Why would powerful people take other people’s perspectives less often?
One explanation is asymmetric dependence. Lower-power people often need to understand those who control important outcomes; higher-power people may be able to act without equivalent attention. Power can also increase reliance on one’s own viewpoint and increase psychological distance from people who depend on the powerholder.
Is perspective taking the same as empathy?
No. Perspective taking is usually treated as a cognitive process of representing another person’s viewpoint, beliefs, knowledge, or feelings. Empathy is broader and may include emotional resonance, empathic concern, and accurate understanding. Researchers increasingly distinguish these components rather than using the terms interchangeably.
What is empathic accuracy?
Empathic accuracy is the degree to which one person correctly infers another person’s actual thoughts or feelings, often during a recorded or live interaction. It differs from self-reported empathy because the judgment is compared with information supplied by the target person.
Can power improve empathy or social perception?
Yes, under some conditions. Powerful people can become more accurate when understanding another person is important to an active goal, when they are strongly prosocial or other-focused, or when power is construed as responsibility. Research therefore supports moderation rather than a universal negative effect.
Is dominance the same as power?
No. Dominance is one possible route to influence or rank and often involves assertive, threatening, or coercive behavior. Power is broader: it concerns asymmetric control over valued outcomes. Prestige, authority, expertise, and institutional roles can all produce influence without being equivalent to dominance.
Is status the same as power?
No. Status is primarily respect and esteem; power is control over valued outcomes. They often correlate, but a person can have one without much of the other. This distinction is essential when interpreting studies that combine several forms of hierarchy.
Does power permanently change the brain’s empathy system?
Current evidence does not justify that broad claim. Some studies report neural or physiological differences during temporary power states, but such findings concern specific tasks and signals. They do not establish a permanent loss of empathy or a single brain mechanism by which power universally suppresses social understanding.
Does low empathy mean someone is powerful, authoritarian, or manipulative?
No. Empathy measures cannot diagnose a person’s social position, motives, personality, or clinical condition. Power, authoritarianism, manipulation, dominance, and empathy are distinct constructs that require their own evidence and measurement.
Key Takeaways
• Power can reduce spontaneous perspective taking and increase reliance on one’s own vantage point, but the effect is context dependent.
• Social distance is one important mechanism: asymmetric dependence can make high-power people feel less psychologically connected to those who depend on them.
• Emotion recognition and empathic accuracy are not interchangeable with affective empathy or compassion. Studies of faces, voices, and live interaction therefore answer different questions.
• Powerholders are not globally inaccurate social perceivers. Responsibility, prosocial goals, relationship orientation, role demands, and target relevance can preserve or improve interpersonal sensitivity.
• Power, status, dominance, authority, and personal control should be separated when interpreting evidence. Combining them can hide meaningful psychological differences.
• The strongest contemporary interpretation treats power as a context that changes attention, motivation, distance, and goal pursuit rather than as a force that automatically removes empathy.
Related Articles
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