In psychology, power is defined as the capacity to influence other people’s thoughts, feelings, or behavior, and to control your own outcomes. It’s not about physical strength or formal authority alone. Psychologists study power as a psychological state that fundamentally changes how people think, feel, and act, often in ways they don’t notice.
Two Types of Power
Researchers at Stanford distinguish between two core forms. Social power is the ability to get others to do things they wouldn’t otherwise do, even in the face of resistance. A boss who can fire you has social power. So does a parent who controls a teenager’s curfew. Personal power, by contrast, is the ability to control your own outcomes independent of others. It comes from how you behave and the impact you have on people, not from your ability to force compliance. A person with deep expertise, strong self-discipline, or emotional resilience has personal power even without a formal title.
This distinction matters because the two types produce different psychological effects. Social power over others can distort perception and empathy. Personal power tends to produce confidence and autonomy without the same cognitive downsides.
How Power Changes Your Brain and Behavior
One of the most influential frameworks in this area is the approach-inhibition theory, proposed by psychologist Dacher Keltner and colleagues in 2003. The core idea is simple: having power activates the brain’s approach system, while lacking power activates the inhibition system.
When you hold power, you experience more rewards and more freedom. Your brain responds by making you more action-oriented, more willing to take risks, and more focused on goals. You become less attentive to social threats and less worried about what other people think. When you lack power, the opposite happens. You face more threats, more punishment, and more social constraints. Your brain shifts into a vigilant, cautious mode. You pay closer attention to other people’s emotions and intentions because you depend on them.
This explains a pattern that shows up across dozens of studies: powerful people act more, hesitate less, and take bigger risks. Less powerful people watch, wait, and read the room carefully.
Power Reduces Empathy and Perspective-Taking
One of the most consistent findings in power research is that holding power makes it harder to see the world through someone else’s eyes. In a well-known series of experiments led by Adam Galinsky, participants who were primed to feel powerful showed measurably less ability to take other people’s perspectives.
In one experiment, high-power participants were asked to draw the letter E on their foreheads. They were significantly more likely to draw it so it appeared correct from their own viewpoint but backward to anyone facing them. It’s a small gesture, but it reveals something telling: power made them default to their own vantage point without considering how others would see it.
Other experiments in the same series found that powerful participants assumed other people had access to the same information they did, failing to account for what others didn’t know. They were also less accurate at reading other people’s emotional expressions. Across all five studies, power was associated with a reduced tendency to understand how other people see, think, and feel. This isn’t because powerful people are inherently selfish. The approach system that power activates narrows attention toward goals and away from social cues, making empathy require more deliberate effort.
The Hormonal Side of Power
Power dynamics also show up in the body’s hormonal systems. The dual hormone hypothesis proposes that dominance-seeking behaviors like competitiveness and aggression are shaped by the interaction between testosterone and cortisol (the body’s primary stress hormone).
Higher testosterone promotes competitiveness and dominance. Lower cortisol reduces stress and increases approach tendencies, lowering inhibition. When someone has high testosterone and low cortisol simultaneously, they’re more likely to seek status, take risks, and in some cases behave aggressively. Research in clinical settings has confirmed this pattern in men: those with high testosterone and low cortisol were significantly more likely to display aggressive behavior compared to men with high testosterone but also high cortisol. The stress hormone essentially acts as a brake. When cortisol is high, it tempers the dominance-seeking effects of testosterone.
This interaction wasn’t significant in women in the studies examined, suggesting the hormonal pathways underlying power-related behavior may differ by sex.
Power in Close Relationships
Power isn’t just a workplace or political phenomenon. It operates in friendships, romantic partnerships, and families. The dyadic power-social influence model describes how power works between two people in a relationship. It defines power in two directions: the ability to change your partner’s thoughts, feelings, or behavior to match your preferences, and the ability to resist your partner’s influence attempts on you.
One of the model’s most interesting insights is that the more powerful person in a relationship often doesn’t need to use overt influence tactics at all. Over time, the less powerful partner tends to either give in or gradually shift their opinions to align with the more powerful partner’s views. Power, in this sense, reshapes relationships quietly. It operates through accumulated patterns of who defers to whom, who controls shared resources, and whose preferences are treated as the default.
When Power Becomes Pathological
Sustained power can change personality in lasting ways. Researchers have proposed a condition called hubris syndrome: a non-organic personality change that develops after someone gains substantial power or achieves overwhelming success. It’s not a formal diagnosis in current classification systems, but a growing body of work argues it should be.
The syndrome is characterized by exaggerated pride, contempt for others, and a diminished sense of reality. Specific traits include an inflated sense of entitlement, attention-seeking behavior, lack of empathy, impulsivity, recklessness, and grandiosity (which researchers consider the defining trait). People with hubris syndrome become contemptuous of advice, overambitious in their goals, and reckless in their decisions. The key diagnostic criterion is that these traits must emerge or sharply intensify after the person acquires power, not before. Someone who was always grandiose doesn’t qualify. The syndrome specifically captures what power itself does to a person over time.
Power and Group Hierarchies
On a broader social level, psychologists measure how much people prefer power hierarchies to exist in society using a trait called social dominance orientation. This is an individual difference: some people are naturally more comfortable with group-based inequality than others.
Recent research breaks this into two components. The first is a preference for dominance, where high-status groups forcefully oppress lower-status groups. The second is a preference for subtle, systemic inequality maintained through ideologies and policies rather than direct force. Both reflect a comfort with hierarchy, but they predict different kinds of attitudes and political preferences. People high in social dominance orientation tend to support policies that maintain existing power structures and oppose efforts to redistribute resources or equalize status between groups.
Overconfidence and the Illusion of Competence
Power also inflates self-assessment. Overconfidence, where people rate their own abilities higher than they actually are, has been described as an evolutionarily advantageous strategy. In competitive environments with high stakes and uncertainty, organisms that overestimate their abilities are more likely to pursue resources and less likely to back down from conflicts. This served our ancestors well in some contexts, but in modern decision-making it creates predictable errors.
The connection to power is intuitive: the approach-oriented, goal-focused mindset that power creates naturally reduces self-doubt. Powerful people are less likely to second-guess themselves, less responsive to negative feedback, and more prone to assuming their judgment is correct. Combined with the empathy deficits described above, this creates a situation where the people with the most influence over decisions are often the least aware of their own blind spots.
Power Posing: What Held Up and What Didn’t
The idea that adopting expansive body postures (“power poses”) could increase feelings of power gained enormous public attention after a 2010 study suggested these poses raised testosterone, lowered cortisol, and increased risk tolerance. Later replication attempts told a more complicated story. The hormonal effects on cortisol and testosterone did not replicate reliably, and one of the original authors publicly distanced herself from those claims.
Some research still suggests power poses may have modest effects on feelings of confidence and approach-oriented behavior in social situations, but the field remains unsettled. Early studies mixed different types of body positions despite their different meanings, making it hard to draw clean conclusions. The current scientific stance is cautious: there may be something real about how body posture affects psychological states, but the original claims were overstated, and stronger replication is needed before drawing firm conclusions.