作者|Kamal Tahir

原题|Power Causes Brain Damage

源自|大西洋月刊

基辛格说：“权力是最好的春药。”但是研究表明，权力似乎也是一剂毒药，会给位高权重的人带来脑损伤。历史学家亨利·亚当斯说：“权力是一种以杀死患者的同情心终结的肿瘤。”本文聚焦了权力对大脑和认知能力的不良影响——糟糕的是目前似乎还没有治愈的手段。

如果说权力是一剂处方药的话，这剂药上面得附上长长的一列副作用。权力会导致中毒。权力会带来腐败。权力甚至让基辛格认为自己很有性吸引力。

但是权力会不会导致脑损伤呢？

去年秋天，在一场国会听证会上，当一群国会议员轮番抨击John Stumpf时，每个人似乎都能找到严厉指责这位现已成富国银行前CEO的人未能阻止大概5000名员工给客户设立假账号的新方式。

但是让人印象突出的似乎是Stumpf的表现。这个人已经爬到了全球最有价值银行的高层，但似乎却完全不能洞悉一屋子人的眼色。尽管他做出了道歉，但既没有表现出忏悔或受到斥责的样子，也没有展现出目中无人、自以为是或者甚至不老实。

他看起来似乎已经无法分辨方向，就像一名刚到地球还受时差之苦的太空旅行者，看起来在他的那个Stumpf星球顺从就是自然法则，而5000只是个很小的数字而已。

哪怕是最直接的嘲讽——“你这是在开玩笑吧”（威斯康星州的Sean Duffy）；“我不能相信在这里听到的一些话。”（纽约州的Gregory Meeks）——也没能把他唤醒。

Stumpf的脑子里究竟进了什么？新的研究表明，更好的问题也许是：什么东西没有进去？

历史学家Henry Adams（亨利·亚当斯）在描述权力的时候很有隐喻性而不是医学性：“权力是一种以杀死患者的同情心终结的肿瘤。”

不过这跟加州大学伯克利分校心理学教授Dacher Keltner在数年的实验室和实地实验后得出的结果相差不太远。教授研究的是权力的影响，他在跨度达20年的研究中发现，受试者的行为表现出受到了创伤性脑损伤的迹象——这些人变得更加冲动了，风险意识变低了，关键是，已经不太擅长从他人的视角去审视问题了。

加拿大安大略省麦克马斯特大学神经学家Sukhvinder Obhi最近说的东西也类似。跟研究行为的Keltner不一样的是，Obhi研究的是大脑。当他把比较有权势的人的头部和不那么有权势的人的头部放进经颅磁刺激机器里面的时候，他发现权力对特定的髓突其实是有损害的，这个东西就是“镜像（mirroring）”，是同理心的基石。这使得神经学基础出现了一个Keltner所谓的“权力悖论”：一旦我们拥有了权力，就会丧失我们获得它首先所需要的能力。

有各种富有创意的方式都证明了这种能力的损失。

2006年的一份研究让参与者在自己的前额划出他人视角下的字母E——这项任务需要从观察者的位置去看你自己。那些感觉很有权势的人把E写成对自己是正确的朝向（对其他人来说正好是反过来）的机率比其他人高3倍（这让人想起乔治·布什在2008年奥运会时把美国国旗举反了的那令人难忘的一幕）。其他实验也已经表明有权势的人在识别图中人物感受或者猜测同时如何解释某评论方面表现会比较糟糕。

事实上，大家往往会模仿自己上级的表情和肢体语言还会加重这个问题：下属几乎提供不了可靠的线索给有权势者。

但Keltner说，更重要的是，有权势的人不再模仿别人了。当别人笑的时候笑，或者当别人紧张的时候也紧张，其作用不仅仅只是迎合对方。这可以帮助触动产Keltner说，有权势的人“不再模仿别人的体验了”，这会导致他所谓的“移情赤字”。

镜像是一种微妙的模仿，这完全是在我们头脑中进行的，而且我们完全没有意识。当我们观察我们执行动作的时候，我们大脑用来做同样事情的那部分就会产生共鸣（交感反应）。把它解释成替代性经验可能最好理解。当Obhi和他的团队让受试者观看某人用手挤压橡皮球时，视频这就是他们试图要激活的东西。

对于没有权力的参与者来说，镜像工作得很好：他们会用来指导自己挤压橡皮球的神经通路反应剧烈。但是有权力的对照组呢？反应就没那么强烈。

那他们的镜像反应是不会坏掉了呢？更像是被麻痹了。

没有一个参与者拥有永久的权力。他们是讲述自己曾经负责过的一段经历，让人感觉领导有力的大学生。当产生这种感觉时，这剂麻醉剂的效果大概会慢慢消失——在实验室环境下经过一个下午之后他们的大脑并没有发生结构化损坏。

可是如果这种效应持续很长一段时间的话，比如通过让华尔街日报一个季度接一个季度地传播他们的伟大，董事会再用额外报酬推波助澜，福布斯再表扬他们“表现好又不作恶”的话，他们的大脑可能就会发生医学上所谓的“功能性”改变。

我在想有权势的人有没有可能只是不再尝试换位思考了，但并没有丧失这么做的能力。巧合的是，Obhi进行了一项后续研究也许有助于回答这一问题。这次研究人员告诉受试者什么是镜像并且让他们有意识地增加或者减少他们的反应。他和联合作者Katherine Naish写道：“我们的结果表明没有差别。努力没有帮助。”

这是一个令人沮丧的发现。知识应该是有力量的。但知道力量（权力）会剥夺你的知识有什么好处呢？

似乎最乐观的可能是这些改变只是偶尔会有害。研究称，权力会让我们的大脑筛选外围信息。在大多数情况下，这对于提高效率是有帮助的。但在社交场合，却不幸会有让人变迟钝的副作用。哪怕这对于有权势的人或者他们领导的群体未必就是坏的。正如普林斯顿大学心理学教授Susan Fiske令人信服地指出那样，权力减少了对人观察细致入微的需要，因为它赋予了我们对资源的控制，而后者我们一度必须靠劝诱别人才能获得。不过当然，在现代组织里，维持那种控制要靠一定程度的组织支持。新闻头条上数不胜数反映高管之傲慢的例子说明了很多领导已经突破了这条界线，做出适得其反的蠢事。

因为不大能理解他人的个人特质，他们就得更加严重地依赖于刻板印象。而其他研究认为，他们看的能力越差，就越要靠个人的“视力”去浏览。在John Stumpf眼里富国银行每一位客户都有8个独立账户。他告诉国会说：“交叉销售是深化关系的简称。”

难道就没办法了吗？

答案是既是也否。你很难阻止权力影响大脑的倾向。更容易一点的是不再觉得自己有权力，至少有时候是可以的。

Keltner提醒我说，它对我们思考方式的影响范畴可不是一篇文章或者态度这么简单，而是一种精神状态。他的实验表明，在叙述你感觉不强大的时候，你的大脑就能够跟现实进行交流。

回忆起没有权势的早期经历似乎对某些人有效，而且如果是足够灼痛的经历可能还会提供某种永久性的保护。去年2月发表在《金融杂志》的一项不可思议的研究发现，在童年经历过造成重大伤亡的自然灾难的CEO跟其他CEO相比对风险就没那么大的喜好（不过据此项研究的联合作者，剑桥大学教授Raghavendra Rau的说法，问题是经历过没造成重大伤亡的灾难的CEO会更喜欢冒险）。

不过龙卷风、火山和海啸并不是唯一的约束傲慢的力量。PepsiCo CEO兼主席Indra Nooyi有时候会讲她2001年的一天收到自己获公司董事会任命的消息那件事。志得意满的她回到家后还没来得及宣布她获任命的“好消息”，她妈就问她能不能出去弄些牛奶回来。Nooyi恼火地出去弄牛奶了。等她回来后她妈妈的建议是“把那该死的皇冠扔到垃圾堆去。”

这篇文章的要点其实就是Nooyi讲的这个故事。这个故事充当了一个有用的提醒，提醒再有权势的人也要尽普通的责任，需要接地气。在这个故事中，Nooyi的妈妈充当的是“抓脚趾头的人（toe holder）”，这是政治顾问Louis Howe描述自己跟四届总统罗斯福之间关系的一个词。

对于丘吉尔来说，充当这一角色的人是他的妻子，Clementine，她有勇气写这样的东西：“我亲爱的温斯顿。我必须承认我注意到你行为出现了堕落并且你已经不是过去的你了。”这封信写于希特勒入侵巴黎的那一天，写完又撕掉但最后还是发出去了，这不是抱怨而是警告：她写道，有人向她透露，丘吉尔在会上对下属表现得“太瞧不起人”了，以至于大家对“将会发生什么不管好坏都毫无头绪。”，而相应的危险是“你不会得到最好的结果。”

英国神经学家，曾任外交部长的戴维·欧文（David Owen）爵士在其《疾病与权力》一书中Howe和丘吉尔夫人的故事都讲到了。这本书探究的是自1900年以来影响到英国首相和美国总统表现的各种疾病。欧文指出，尽管一些人得了中风（伍德罗·威尔逊），滥用药物（安东尼·艾登），或者可能患上躁郁症（林顿·约翰逊，西奥多·罗斯福），但至少有其他4位得了一种医学文献未确认但应该承认的疾病。

正如他与联合作者Jonathan Davidson在2009年发表在《大脑》的一篇文章中指出那样：“傲慢综合征，是一种因权力而惹的病，尤其是跟压倒性成功，持有了好几年，并且对领导的约束最小关联到一起的权力。”

它的14种临床特征包括：蔑视他人，失去与现实的接触，焦躁不安或者草率行动，有不称职的表现等。今年5月，英国皇家医学会联合举办了一场Daedalus Trust会议——这是欧文成立的一个研究和预防傲慢的组织。

我问自认为有傲慢的健康倾向的欧文，是不是有什么东西能够帮助他留在现实—里面。他分享了一些策略：回顾一下过去自己的傲慢被驱散的情节；看看关于普通人的纪录片；养成看选民信件的习惯。

不过我推断今天对欧文的傲慢最大的核实也许源自他最近的研究努力。他向我抱怨，企业几乎对研究傲慢毫无兴致。商学院也好不到哪里去。他的声音中隐藏的一股沮丧证实了一定的无力感。不管如何有益于欧文的健康，这都表明了在董事会和管理阶层太过常见的一种病不大可能很快找到治愈的办法。

BUSINESS

Power Causes Brain Damage

How leaders lose mental capacities—most notably for reading other people—that were essential to their rise

JERRY USEEM

JULY/AUGUST 2017 ISSUE

If power were a prescription drug, it would come with a long list of known side effects. It can intoxicate. It can corrupt. It can even make Henry Kissinger believe that he’s sexually magnetic. But can it cause brain damage?

When various lawmakers lit into John Stumpf at a congressional hearing last fall, each seemed to find a fresh way to flay the now-former CEO of Wells Fargo for failing to stop some 5,000 employees from setting up phony accounts for customers. But it was Stumpf’s performance that stood out. Here was a man who had risen to the top of the world’s most valuable bank, yet he seemed utterly unable to read a room. Although he apologized, he didn’t appear chastened or remorseful. Nor did he seem defiant or smug or even insincere. He looked disoriented, like a jet-lagged space traveler just arrived from Planet Stumpf, where deference to him is a natural law and 5,000 a commendably small number. Even the most direct barbs—“You have got to be kidding me” (Sean Duffy of Wisconsin); “I can’t believe some of what I’m hearing here” (Gregory Meeks of New York)—failed to shake him awake.

What was going through Stumpf’s head? New research suggests that the better question may be: What wasn’t going through it?

The historian Henry Adams was being metaphorical, not medical, when he described power as “a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.” But that’s not far from where Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley, ended up after years of lab and field experiments. Subjects under the influence of power, he found in studies spanning two decades, acted as if they had suffered a traumatic brain injury—becoming more impulsive, less risk-aware, and, crucially, less adept at seeing things from other people’s point of view.

Sukhvinder Obhi, a neuroscientist at McMaster University, in Ontario, recently described something similar. Unlike Keltner, who studies behaviors, Obhi studies brains. And when he put the heads of the powerful and the not-so-powerful under a transcranial-magnetic-stimulation machine, he found that power, in fact, impairs a specific neural process, “mirroring,” that may be a cornerstone of empathy. Which gives a neurological basis to what Keltner has termed the “power paradox”: Once we have power, we lose some of the capacities we needed to gain it in the first place.

That loss in capacity has been demonstrated in various creative ways. A2006 study asked participants to draw the letter E on their forehead for others to view—a task that requires seeing yourself from an observer’s vantage point. Those feeling powerful were three times more likely to draw the E the right way to themselves—and backwards to everyone else (which calls to mind George W. Bush, who memorably held up the American flag backwards at the 2008 Olympics). Other experiments have shown that powerful people do worse at identifying what someone in a picture is feeling, or guessing how a colleague might interpret a remark.

The fact that people tend to mimic the expressions and body language of their superiors can aggravate this problem: Subordinates provide few reliable cues to the powerful. But more important, Keltner says, is the fact that the powerful stop mimicking others. Laughing when others laugh or tensing when others tense does more than ingratiate. It helps trigger the same feelings those others are experiencing and provides a window into where they are coming from. Powerful people “stop simulating the experience of others,” Keltner says, which leads to what he calls an “empathy deficit.”

Mirroring is a subtler kind of mimicry that goes on entirely within our heads, and without our awareness. When we watch someone perform an action, the part of the brain we would use to do that same thing lights up in sympathetic response. It might be best understood as vicarious experience. It’s what Obhi and his team were trying to activate when they had their subjects watch a video of someone’s hand squeezing a rubber ball.

For nonpowerful participants, mirroring worked fine: The neural pathways they would use to squeeze the ball themselves fired strongly. But the powerful group’s? Less so.

Was the mirroring response broken? More like anesthetized. None of the participants possessed permanent power. They were college students who had been “primed” to feel potent by recounting an experience in which they had been in charge. The anesthetic would presumably wear off when the feeling did—their brains weren’t structurally damaged after an afternoon in the lab. But if the effect had been long-lasting—say, by dint of having Wall Street analysts whispering their greatness quarter after quarter, board members offering them extra helpings of pay, and Forbes praising them for “doing well while doing good”—they may have what in medicine is known as “functional” changes to the brain.

I wondered whether the powerful might simply stop trying to put themselves in others’ shoes, without losing the ability to do so. As it happened, Obhi ran a subsequent study that may help answer that question. This time, subjects were told what mirroring was and asked to make a conscious effort to increase or decrease their response. “Our results,” he and his co-author, Katherine Naish, wrote, “showed no difference.” Effort didn’t help.

This is a depressing finding. Knowledge is supposed to be power. But what good is knowing that power deprives you of knowledge?

The sunniest possible spin, it seems, is that these changes are only sometimes harmful. Power, the research says, primes our brain to screen out peripheral information. In most situations, this provides a helpful efficiency boost. In social ones, it has the unfortunate side effect of making us more obtuse. Even that is not necessarily bad for the prospects of the powerful, or the groups they lead. As Susan Fiske, a Princeton psychology professor, has persuasively argued, power lessens the need for a nuanced read of people, since it gives us command of resources we once had to cajole from others. But of course, in a modern organization, the maintenance of that command relies on some level of organizational support. And the sheer number of examples of executive hubris that bristle from the headlines suggests that many leaders cross the line into counterproductive folly.

Less able to make out people’s individuating traits, they rely more heavily on stereotype. And the less they’re able to see, other research suggests, the more they rely on a personal “vision” for navigation. John Stumpf saw a Wells Fargo where every customer had eight separate accounts. (As he’d often noted to employees, eight rhymes with great.) “Cross-selling,” he told Congress, “is shorthand for deepening relationships.”

Is there nothing to be done?

No and yes. It’s difficult to stop power’s tendency to affect your brain. What’s easier—from time to time, at least—is to stop feeling powerful.

Insofar as it affects the way we think, power, Keltner reminded me, is not a post or a position but a mental state. Recount a time you did not feel powerful, his experiments suggest, and your brain can commune with reality.

Recalling an early experience of powerlessness seems to work for some people—and experiences that were searing enough may provide a sort of permanent protection. An incredible study published in The Journal of Financelast February found that CEOs who as children had lived through a natural disaster that produced significant fatalities were much less risk-seeking than CEOs who hadn’t. (The one problem, says Raghavendra Rau, a co-author of the study and a Cambridge University professor, is that CEOs who had lived through disasters without significant fatalities were more risk-seeking.)

But tornadoes, volcanoes, and tsunamis aren’t the only hubris-restraining forces out there. PepsiCo CEO and Chairman Indra Nooyi sometimes tells thestory of the day she got the news of her appointment to the company’s board, in 2001. She arrived home percolating in her own sense of importance and vitality, when her mother asked whether, before she delivered her “great news,” she would go out and get some milk. Fuming, Nooyi went out and got it. “Leave that damn crown in the garage” was her mother’s advice when she returned.

The point of the story, really, is that Nooyi tells it. It serves as a useful reminder about ordinary obligation and the need to stay grounded. Nooyi’s mother, in the story, serves as a “toe holder,” a term once used by the political adviser Louis Howe to describe his relationship with the four-term President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom Howe never stopped calling Franklin.

For Winston Churchill, the person who filled that role was his wife, Clementine, who had the courage to write, “My Darling Winston. I must confess that I have noticed a deterioration in your manner; & you are not as kind as you used to be.” Written on the day Hitler entered Paris, torn up, then sent anyway, the letter was not a complaint but an alert: Someone had confided to her, she wrote, that Churchill had been acting “so contemptuous” toward subordinates in meetings that “no ideas, good or bad, will be forthcoming”—with the attendant danger that “you won’t get the best results.”

Lord David Owen—a British neurologist turned parliamentarian who served as the foreign secretary before becoming a baron—recounts both Howe’s story and Clementine Churchill’s in his 2008 book, In Sickness and in Power, an inquiry into the various maladies that had affected the performance of British prime ministers and American presidents since 1900. While some suffered from strokes (Woodrow Wilson), substance abuse (Anthony Eden), or possibly bipolar disorder (Lyndon B. Johnson, Theodore Roosevelt), at least four others acquired a disorder that the medical literature doesn’t recognize but, Owen argues, should.

“Hubris syndrome,” as he and a co-author, Jonathan Davidson, defined it in a2009 article published in Brain, “is a disorder of the possession of power, particularly power which has been associated with overwhelming success, held for a period of years and with minimal constraint on the leader.” Its 14 clinical features include: manifest contempt for others, loss of contact with reality, restless or reckless actions, and displays of incompetence. In May, the Royal Society of Medicine co-hosted a conference of the Daedalus Trust—an organization that Owen founded for the study and prevention of hubris.

I asked Owen, who admits to a healthy predisposition to hubris himself, whether anything helps keep him tethered to reality, something that other truly powerful figures might emulate. He shared a few strategies: thinking back on hubris-dispelling episodes from his past; watching documentaries about ordinary people; making a habit of reading constituents’ letters.

But I surmised that the greatest check on Owen’s hubris today might stem from his recent research endeavors. Businesses, he complained to me, had shown next to no appetite for research on hubris. Business schools were not much better. The undercurrent of frustration in his voice attested to a certain powerlessness. Whatever the salutary effect on Owen, it suggests that a malady seen too commonly in boardrooms and executive suites is unlikely to soon find a cure.

原文地址：https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/power-causes-brain-damage/528711/

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