The research on this is now extensive and consistent.
People in positions of significant power become less empathetic, less accurate in reading others' emotional states, more likely to take risks, more likely to act on their own impulses, and less likely to consider others' perspectives before acting. This is not selection effect — it is not that only less empathetic people reach positions of power. It is a consequence of the position itself, measurable in controlled experimental conditions, reversible when the power is removed.
The mechanism is the removal of friction. Ordinary social life is full of feedback — the reactions of others, the consequences of misjudging a situation, the natural correctives that come from being embedded in relationships of genuine reciprocity. Power reduces this feedback. The person with significant authority receives less honest reaction, less natural consequence for social misjudgment, less reciprocal pressure from the relationships around them. The calibrating frictions of ordinary life are smoothed away — and without them, the self tends toward the specific distortions that the power research documents.
Chanakya identified this in the fourth century BCE with characteristic directness. The king who is not continuously checked — by counsel, by ritual, by the specific practices that force the encounter with what power obscures — becomes, progressively, less fit to govern. Not through moral failure but through the structural removal of the feedback that governance requires. The practices Chanakya prescribed were not spiritual exercises. They were mechanisms for reinstating, artificially, the frictions that power had removed.
Marcus Aurelius's Meditations — written at the apex of Roman power, by a man who was by every measure the most powerful person in the known world — are the record of a person doing exactly this work. Every entry is, in some form, a reinstatement of friction: a reminder of mortality, a reminder of the ordinariness of what presents itself as extraordinary, a reminder of the limits of his own judgment, a deliberate reduction of the inflation that power continuously produces. He wrote these notes to himself every day — not for publication, not for posterity — because without the daily practice of deflation, the daily experience of absolute power would have done to him what it does to everyone it is not actively resisted.
The specific distortions to watch for — and that the people around you are unlikely to tell you about:
The shortening of the time between impulse and action. Power removes the social friction that creates the pause between having an impulse and acting on it. The high-authority person acts on impulse faster than they did before the authority — and often does not notice.
The progressive inaccuracy of self-assessment. The feedback that corrects self-perception has been reduced. The self-image inflates gradually, without the external correctives that once kept it proportionate.
The increasing difficulty with genuine perspective-taking. The neural pathway for modelling others' experience — empathy, in the neurological sense — weakens without use. And power reduces the situations in which it is used.
These are not character failures. They are the predictable consequences of holding power without the practices that counteract what power does. The practices exist. The question is whether the authority is accompanied by the discipline to apply them.