The XX Factor: What women really think.

Power and Empathy

I'm a fan of Shankar Vedantam's "Department of Human Behavior" column in the Washington Post, which reported yesterday on some recent social psychology research that perhaps sheds new light on tough Hillary, and the spectacle of the candidates in general. The experience of being powerful erodes empathy, a study published in Psychological Science (which I haven't actually seen) seems to suggest. Volunteers who were made to feel like top dogs, in contrast to those who were primed to recall situations of powerlessness, very quickly lost the capacity to see things from other people's perspectives. The experiment (which involves drawing the letter E on foreheads) sounds rather ridiculous, but has a certain explanatory, well, power. Here may be another reason that the same candidates who are so exquisitely attuned to the views of others while they're desperately chasing votes become more blinkered once they're in office-and a reason that toughness can eclipse sensitivity in the front-runner in the race, regardless of gender. (So much for femaleness as a vaunted incubator of empathy; here's grist for the notion that the experience of subordinate status, not two X chromosomes, may be a key influence.) The result, as the researchers observe, is a paradox: The very quality that often draws us to support leaders-their ability to see beyond themselves-is all too likely to fade once we've anointed them.