The powerful are not like the rest of us. That’s a problem.
Picture this: a young Berkeley undergraduate stands at a pedestrian crosswalk near campus, clipboard in hand, ostensibly conducting a routine traffic study. But psychologist Dacher Keltner has designed something far more revealing—a window into the human soul at the moment when material advantage meets moral choice.
The results tell a story that should unsettle anyone who has ever wondered why the world seems to work differently for different people. Every single driver of an inexpensive car stops for pedestrians. Not most of them. All of them. But drivers of luxury vehicles? Nearly half blow through the crosswalk, often after making direct eye contact with the waiting pedestrian. These aren’t reckless teenagers or people rushing to emergencies. They’re ordinary citizens whose BMW or Mercedes has somehow whispered to them that the rules governing everyone else don’t quite apply to them.
There’s something almost absurd about this, until you realize it isn’t absurd at all. It’s a glimpse into one of the most consistent patterns in human behavior: power changes us in ways we don’t recognize and wouldn’t admit if we did.
Paul Piff discovered this in perhaps the most ingenious psychology experiment ever conducted with a board game. His team at UC Berkeley invited pairs of strangers to play Monopoly, but with a twist that would make any game night uncomfortable. They rigged it. A coin flip determined that one player would start with twice as much money, roll two dice instead of one, move around the board twice as fast, and collect double rewards for passing “Go.”
What happened next was theater of the absurd, except it wasn’t theater—it was human nature under a microscope. Within minutes, the advantaged players began what researchers politely called “displays of power.” They moved their pieces more aggressively, adopted more dominant postures, consumed more of the provided snacks, and began treating their opponents with casual disdain.
But here’s the kicker: when the game ended and researchers asked the winners why they had prevailed, not one mentioned the coin flip. Instead, they spoke eloquently about their strategic brilliance, their superior decision-making, their competitive instincts. Fifteen minutes of arbitrary advantage had convinced them that they deserved their success.
This is where neuroscience becomes unsettling. Brain imaging shows that power literally rewires us. The prefrontal cortex—our center for empathy, impulse control, and social awareness—goes quiet. Meanwhile, the reward system becomes hypersensitive to personal gain. We don’t just act less empathetically; we lose the capacity for empathy itself.
Evolution explains why. For millions of years, status and dominance helped our ancestors survive and reproduce. The problem is that these ancient programs now operate in a world where power can accumulate at scales unimaginable to hunter-gatherer bands. The pharmaceutical executive who decides to raise insulin prices operates with the same neural circuitry as the tribal leader deciding how to distribute meat after a hunt, except now the stakes involve millions of lives rather than dozens.
Consider what anthropologists call the “E test”—ask powerful people to draw the letter “E” on their foreheads. Most draw it from their own perspective, making it backwards for anyone looking at them. It’s a perfect metaphor: power impairs our ability to see ourselves as others see us. The wealthy tech executive genuinely puzzled by criticism of his labor practices, the senator baffled by outrage over her stock trades—they’re not being disingenuous. Power has made it neurologically difficult for them to understand how their actions appear to those operating from different positions in the hierarchy.
This might be manageable if we still lived in small communities where everyone knew everyone else—where social reputation provided a crucial brake on misconduct. In hunter-gatherer bands or traditional towns, powerful individuals still had to face the people affected by their decisions at the market, the church, the village green. Antisocial behavior carried immediate social costs because relationships were ongoing and inescapable. But modernity has eliminated what made power tolerable in traditional societies: reciprocal accountability. The BMW driver speeding through the crosswalk will never see that pedestrian again. The pharmaceutical executive raising drug prices has no personal relationship with the diabetics who can no longer afford their medication. We’ve become abstractions to one another, especially across class lines.
Watch our political class and you’ll see this dynamic perfected. Members of Congress routinely accept speaking fees that dwarf most Americans’ annual incomes, spend their days courting donors whose concerns bear little resemblance to those of ordinary constituents, and seem genuinely bewildered when criticized for behavior that would be scandalous in any other profession. They name government buildings after one another with casual assumption that public assets exist to memorialize their service. They craft legislation in consultation with lobbyists, then express surprise when the public suspects their priorities have been captured.
Most revealing is how political discourse has shifted from substantive problem-solving toward performative outrage designed to signal tribal loyalty. The congressman who once might have quietly worked to help struggling farmers in his district now spends his time crafting tweets to enrage his opponents’ supporters. Like Piff’s Monopoly players, they’ve convinced themselves that their advantages—campaign funds, media attention, insider access—reflect superior merit rather than systemic privileges.
The ancient Greeks understood what we’ve forgotten: power corrupts not because powerful people choose evil, but because power itself alters human nature. Their answer was democratic rotation—authority should be temporary and widely distributed. The world’s great religious traditions offered similar wisdom. Christianity’s emphasis on humility directly counters the pride that power generates. Buddhism’s cultivation of compassion works against power’s tendency to diminish empathy. These weren’t abstract theology but practical technologies for managing power’s psychological hazards.
Modern research validates ancient insights while revealing why traditional constraints are failing. Digital technology enables unprecedented isolation of elites from consequences of their decisions. A tech billionaire can live entirely among other billionaires, venture capitalists, and elite professionals, never encountering the workers whose jobs his algorithms eliminate or the communities his platforms fragment. Wealth concentration operates at scales that overwhelm human moral capacity—when individuals control resources affecting millions of lives while remaining psychologically insulated from those effects.
This creates a kind of moral paradox. The very people most capable of addressing society’s problems—those with the most resources and influence—are systematically the least capable of understanding what those problems actually are. Power doesn’t just corrupt individuals; it creates feedback loops that make reform psychologically inconceivable to those most positioned to enact it.
Understanding this suggests a different approach to political reform. Instead of assuming that good intentions and better information will solve our problems, we might design systems that account for power’s inevitable effects on human psychology. This means building accountability mechanisms that can’t be avoided through wealth or status. It means structuring authority so that those who exercise it regularly encounter the human consequences of their decisions. It means creating institutions that assume power will corrupt and plan accordingly.
The uncomfortable truth is that our current arrangements may have created norms of power that exceed human moral capacity to handle responsibly. When individuals can accumulate global influence while remaining neurologically isolated from its effects, traditional solutions—democratic competition, civic virtue, institutional checks—prove inadequate. The powerful operate in self-reinforcing bubbles that technology makes impermeable, while their decisions ripple across millions of lives they never see.
The crosswalk study should haunt us not because it reveals that some people are inherently worse than others, but because it shows how predictably any of us become different people when handed even modest advantages. The BMW driver accelerating through the intersection isn’t a villain—he’s a human being whose brain has been altered by his circumstances in ways he doesn’t recognize. The pharmaceutical executive, the tech billionaire, the senator—they’re all operating with the same cognitive equipment that evolution gave us for managing small-group hierarchies, now deployed in contexts that overwhelm our moral machinery.
This is why appeals to conscience and good intentions miss the mark. The problem isn’t that powerful people need to try harder to be good. The problem is that power systematically undermines the psychological foundations of goodness itself—empathy, perspective-taking, concern for consequences beyond our immediate sphere. You cannot solve a human problem with moral exhortation.
Instead, we need systems that assume power will corrupt and build accordingly. Not systems that hope for virtuous leaders, but systems that make it structurally difficult for anyone to accumulate the kinds of unaccountable influence that transform ordinary people into something they wouldn’t recognize in themselves. Systems that ensure those who make decisions affecting millions of lives cannot insulate themselves from the human consequences of those decisions. Systems that distribute authority widely enough that no one becomes so powerful they lose the capacity to imagine what it feels like to be powerless.
The ancient Greeks knew this. The world’s great religious traditions knew this. Modern neuroscience has simply given us the technical vocabulary to describe what wisdom traditions understood intuitively: unchecked power is fundamentally incompatible with human moral capacity. The question is whether we still possess the wisdom—and the will—to design our institutions around this truth.
