On Power Dynamics: The Paradox of Influence

Most people become remarkably fluent when something is at stake.

Watch closely. When influence, status, or resources enter a room, something shifts. Posture changes. Language sharpens. People who seemed distracted moments ago are suddenly attuned to every social signal, navigating conversations with precision, aligning themselves with whoever holds the advantage. The nervous system recognizes opportunity before the conscious mind does, and the body responds accordingly.

These are survival instincts refined over millennia, expressing themselves in conference rooms and group chats. The capacity to read a social landscape and position oneself within it is one of the most deeply practiced human skills, almost invisible in its efficiency.

But watch what happens when there is nothing to gain.

The attentiveness fades. The warmth cools. People become indifferent, dismissive, sometimes careless in ways that reveal more than they intend. If you have learned to pay attention to the tone of a room, you will feel the shift before you can explain it. The body registers these changes before the mind assigns them a story.

The science behind it is worth understanding.

Dacher Keltner spent twenty years studying power at UC Berkeley. What he found is that gaining influence produces measurable neurological changes. People in positions of power become less able to read the emotions of others, less responsive to social cues, and more likely to act impulsively. Brain imaging studies show reduced activation in the mirror neuron system, the architecture that allows us to feel what someone else is feeling. Power, in a neurological sense, dampens empathy. It changes the brain’s capacity to register other people as fully real.

Keltner called this the power paradox. The qualities that help a person gain influence, attentiveness to others, generosity, awareness of group dynamics, are precisely the qualities that erode once influence is obtained. The tool that built the position is the first thing the position dismantles.¹

That finding is worth sitting with.

The shift you feel when someone powerful stops paying attention to you is physiological. Their brain is doing less work to track your experience than it was before they held the advantage. And anyone who gains power faces a challenge that most people never name: the sustained, deliberate effort to maintain a capacity that the position itself is working to dissolve.

Robert Sapolsky’s work on primate hierarchies reveals how deep this runs. In baboon troops, cortisol levels and health outcomes are directly shaped by where an individual sits in the social order. The most striking finding, though, is about what happens when hierarchy becomes unstable. When rank is uncertain, stress hormones spike across the entire group. Sapolsky showed that instability of hierarchy, the constant recalculation of who holds power and who does not, produces the greatest physiological cost.²

This maps onto human organizations with uncomfortable precision. The anxiety of a restructuring. The tension in a room after a leadership change. The low-grade vigilance that accompanies office politics. These are the body responding to an unstable dominance landscape exactly as it was designed to.

People are responsive to what they perceive as valuable. And that perception of value is almost always tied to what can be extracted from a relationship. Recognizing this pattern is like learning to read a weather system. It makes navigation possible.

One of the more unsettling discoveries in life is that people can mistake mutual usefulness for genuine connection. The confusion is understandable. The two often wear the same face. I have seen this realization arrive in many forms, but one client captured it perfectly: “I thought that person cared about me. Then I left, and the relationship evaporated. There was no betrayal, no conflict. I had simply stepped out of the role that made the relationship necessary.”

That is a story about a system most people participate in without examining.

Transactional relating is deeply familiar. We are conditioned into it early. The child who learns that affection follows achievement has already internalized the logic. The employee who adjusts their personality depending on who is in the meeting has perfected it. The cost is subtle and cumulative: a slow erosion of trust in the idea that connection can exist outside the exchange of value.

And yet the most effective long-term strategy, even inside this transactional reality, is kindness.

A deliberate practice of treating people well regardless of their apparent usefulness. Power is fluid. Someone who seems peripheral today may hold something essential tomorrow. The dynamics shift constantly, and the person who built goodwill across the full spectrum of relationships is the one positioned to receive what no amount of calculation could predict.

This is where the neuroscience becomes practical. If power reduces the brain’s natural empathy, then empathy in positions of power must be practiced intentionally. It becomes a discipline. The leader who still asks genuine questions after three promotions. The person who treats the intern and the CEO with the same quality of attention. These are practices maintained against a neurological headwind. They are rare enough that when you encounter them, you remember.

Genuine connection, offered without conditions, keeps the channel open. It maintains contact with what is actually happening between people, rather than with a mental model of who matters and who does not.

The mind projects hierarchies, assigns value, runs calculations. The body defaults to familiar patterns of deference or dominance. And between the two, the actual human being in front of you can disappear entirely. The practice is to notice what is happening and respond from that contact, rather than from the story.

The question worth asking is whether your attention shifts based on what you think someone can do for you. Whether warmth arrives and departs with perceived status. Whether you have confused strategic positioning with genuine relationship.

These may be the questions that determine whether the connections you build can survive the inevitable moment when the power shifts, and you find out what was real.

¹ Keltner, D. (2016). The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence. Penguin Press.

² Sapolsky, R. (2004). Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. Third Edition. Holt Paperbacks. See also Sapolsky, R. (2017). Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. Penguin Press.