（作者：杰瑞·尤西姆（JERRY USEEM），《大西洋月刊》 2017年7~8月号）
（格多2017年11月26日译，发于华岳论坛，戴开元校）按：不仅权力会损伤大脑，金钱、知识、名声等任何会导致某种权力的东西，皆会损伤大脑。
神经科学研究：掌握权力会导致脑损伤，领导者失去原本让他们得以成为领导的一种心理能力——设身处地理解他人，也就是共情的能力。
如果权力是一种处方药，它却有一系列已知的副作用。它会使人陶醉，它会使人腐败，它甚至会让亨利·基辛格相信自己具有性吸引力。但它会导致脑损伤吗?
去年秋天在国会的一次听证会上，很多议员痛斥约翰·斯顿夫，每个人似乎都能找到新的方式，来严厉指责这位富国银行的前CEO未阻止其5000名员工为客户建立虚假账户。但斯顿夫的突出表现却是，这个已升至世界最有价值银行最高地位的男人，似乎完全听不懂与会者说的话。
尽管他道歉，但却没有表现出后悔或懊恼。他既未显得目中无人，也未显得自鸣得意，甚至也未显得缺乏诚意。他似乎迷失了方向，像一个从斯顿夫行星（那里的自然法则是顺从他，而且5000只是一个值得称道的微小数字）乘飞行器刚抵达地球，还陷于时差状态的太空旅行者。甚至最直接的冷嘲热讽——“你是在和我开玩笑吧”（威斯康辛的肖恩·达菲）；“我不敢相信我在这里听到的一些话”（纽约的格雷戈里·米克斯）——也没能唤醒他。
斯顿夫的头脑在想什么？新的研究表明，更好的问题应该是，斯顿夫的头脑没有想到什么？
历史学家亨利·亚当斯说权力是“一种最终杀死患者的同情心的肿瘤”，他是在打一个非医学性的比喻。 然而，加州大学伯克利分校心理学教授达彻尔·凯尔特纳（Dacher Keltner），经过多年的实验室和临床实验，得出相似的结论。其长达二十年的研究发现，在权力影响下的受试者，其行为仿佛遭受了撞伤性脑损伤，变得更加冲动，更缺乏风险意识，而且，至关重要的是，更不善于从其他人的角度看问题。
最近，安大略省麦克马斯特大学神经科学家苏克温德·奥博海（Sukhvinder
Obhi）提出类似的看法。与凯尔特纳研究行为不同，他研究的是大脑。当他将有权者和少权者的头脑放在经颅磁刺激机下时，他发现，实际上，权力损害了一种特定的神经过程，即很可能是移情作用基石的“镜映（mirroring）”。这为凯尔特纳提出的“权力悖论（power
paradox）”提供了神经学基础：我们一旦拥有权力，就丧失了导致我们获得权力的某些能力。
这种能力的丧失，已被多种富有创造性的实验所证明。2006年的一项研究，要求参与者在自己额头上写字母E给别人看，这项任务需要从观察者角度观察自己。有权力感的人写的字母E从自己看正确、其他人看却相反的概率，是无权力感的人的三倍，（这让人想起乔治·W·布什在2008年奥运会上醒目地反举着美国国旗）。其他实验表明，有权力感的人更不善于识别照片中人物的感受，或者猜测同事说话的意思。
在现实中，人们模仿上级的表情和肢体语言的倾向会使这个问题更加严重：掌权者很少获得可靠线索去了解下级的想法。但凯尔特纳说，更重要的是掌权者不再模仿他人的这种事实。与他人同喜同悲，远不只是迎合他人，它还有助于触发自己产生与他人相同的感受，从而提供了一个窗口来了解他人产生这种感受的原因。凯尔特纳说，有权势的人“不再模拟他人的体验”，导致他所说的“移情缺乏”。
“镜映”是一种完全在我们头脑中进行的无意识的微妙模拟。当我们看到一个人做出某个动作时，我们大脑的相关部分做出会触发共鸣的同样的事，最好把这理解为替代性经历。这就是奥博海和他的团队，让受试者观看一段某人以手挤压橡皮球的视频，试图激活的东西。
权力感较小的受试者，镜映功能发挥得很好：他们自己挤压球的神经通路被强烈地激活。有权力感较大的人却很少如此。
是镜映反应机制损坏了吗？更像是被麻醉。这些受试者皆不会永久拥有权力，他们仅仅是因叙述某种体验的“刺激（primed）”而觉得自己有权势的大学生。可以想象，在实验室内受试一个下午，他们的大脑不会发生结构性损坏，他们体验到的这种感觉缺失会逐渐消失。但是，如果这种影响长期持续——比如，得到华尔街分析师的连连赞许，董事会提供的额外报酬，或《福布斯》杂志（Forbes）“干得漂亮”的称赞——人的大脑可能会发生医学上所谓的“功能性”变化。
我想知道有权势的人，是否只是不再努力让自己站在别人的立场，但自己并没有失去这样做的能力。事实上，奥博海做了一项有助于回答这个问题的后续研究。这次，奥博海告诉受试者什么是镜映，并要求他们有意识地增加或减少他们的反应。“结果，”他和他的合著凯瑟琳·奈什写道，“显示没有区别。个人努力不起作用”。
这是个令人沮丧的发现。拥有知识被认为会获得权力。但如果权力会剥夺人的知识，获得知识又有什么意义?
看起来，最乐观的可能性是，这些变化只是偶尔才有害。研究表明，权力刺激我们大脑去屏蔽边缘信息，在大多数情况下，这会导致某种有用的效率提高。但在社会实践中，它具有令人遗憾的副作用：使我们变得更加迟钝。即使如此，这对掌权者或他所领导的组织的前景未必有害。 普林斯顿大学心理学教授苏珊·菲斯克（Susan Fiske）的研究令人信服地证明，权力会减少我们细致入微理解他人的需要，因为权力使我们掌握了本来需要依靠哄骗他人才能获得的资源。当然，在现代组织中,
这种掌握的维持依赖于某种程度的组织化的支持。但见诸报端的大量的高管的傲慢事件表明，很多领导者越过底线，变成起反作用的蠢人。
掌权者如果无法识他人们的个性化特征，就会更加依赖刻板印象。其他研究表明，人能看到的越少，就越依赖自己的“视力”导航。约翰·斯夫顿看到的是每个客户都有八个独立账户的富国银行。（正如他常对员工说，八重韵很棒）。 “交叉销售”，他告诉国会，“简称深化关系。”
难道不能避免权力带来的大脑变化吗？
既不能，但也能够。很难阻止权力影响大脑的倾向。我们比较容易做的是，至少有时候使自己不再觉得自己拥有权力。 凯尔特纳提醒我说，就权力影响我们的思维方式而言，权力不是一种职位或地位，而是一种精神状态。实验显示，假如一段时间你不觉得拥有权力，你的大脑就可以与现实沟通。
回忆过去的无权经历，对某些人似乎有效，而且足够的经验可以提供一种永久保护。去年二月《金融》杂志（Finance）发表的一项惊人研究发现，童年时经历过发生重大伤亡的自然灾难的CEO们，比没有这种经历的CEO们，其冒险行为少很多。（但问题在于，这项研究的共同作者、剑桥大学教授拉格黑文卓·劳（Raghavendra Rau）说，经历过没有重大伤亡的自然灾难的CEO们更爱冒险。）
但是龙卷风、火山喷发和海啸并不是唯一能抑制傲慢的力量。百事公司董事会主席兼首席执行官因德拉·努伊（Indra Nooyi），有时会讲述她在2001年获知公司董事会对她的任命消息那天的故事。她回家时，沉浸在自己的重要性和活力感中，她母亲要她在公布“好消息”前，出去买些牛奶。努伊怒气冲冲出去买了牛奶。她返回时她母亲忠告她：“把那顶该死的皇冠留在车库里”。
实际上，这个故事的关键在于讲述者是努伊。它是一个关掌权者的通常职责以及需要保持冷静的有益提醒。努伊的母亲在故事中是个“脚趾夹”——这是政治顾问路易·豪（Louis Howe）用来描述他与曾任四届总统的富兰克林·罗斯福关系的术语，豪一直叫他富兰克林。
对温斯顿·丘吉尔而言，充当这个角色的人是他的妻子克莱门泰。她大胆地在信中写道：“亲爱的温斯顿，我必须承认，我已在你的习惯中发现某种堕落；而且你没有过去那么善良。” 这封信写于希特勒进入巴黎那天，她写好后先撕毁，然后又寄出去。这封信不是抱怨，而是一个警告。她写道，有人向她透露，丘吉尔在会议上的举止，对下属“极为轻蔑”，以至于与会者“不会提出任何好或坏的建议”，而且随之而来的危险是会议“得不到最佳的结论”。
在成为男爵之前曾任英国外交大臣的国会议员、神经学家戴维·欧文勋爵（Lord David Owen），在2008年的著作《在疾病和权力之中》（In Sickness and in Power）中，详述了豪和克莱门泰·丘吉尔两人的故事。该书分析1900年以来影响英国首相和美国总统表现的各种疾病。 除一些人患有中风（伍德罗·威尔逊）、药物滥用（安东尼· 伊顿）或可能的双相情感障碍（林登·B·约翰逊、西奥多·罗斯福）之外，至少其他四人患有医学文献不承认但欧文认为应该存在的神经疾病。
根据他和共同作者乔纳森·戴维森2009年在《大脑》杂志（Brain）上发表的一篇文章中的定义：“傲慢综合征（Hubris syndrome）”，“是一种掌权者的疾病，尤其是获得极大成功而带来的掌权、长期的掌权以及领导者受约束最少的掌权。”它的14项临床症状包括：明显轻视他人、失去与现实的联系、焦躁不安或行为鲁莽，以及表现无能。 今年5月，英国皇家医学会，与欧文为研究和防止权力傲慢而建立的组织“代达罗斯信任基金会（Daedalus
Trust）”，共同主办了一次会议。
我问欧文，一个人承认自己有权力傲慢的健康问题，是否有助于他了解实际真相，并引发其他掌权的大人物的效仿。 他提出了几个办法：回忆自己没有权力傲慢的过去；观看关于普通人的纪录片；养成阅读选民来信的习惯。
但我猜测，今天欧文的研究遇到的最大阻碍，可能与他最近的遭遇有关系。他抱怨说，企业对权力傲慢的进一步研究毫无兴趣。商学院也好不到哪去。他话音中展示的挫败情绪，证实了某种无能为力感。无论欧文会受到什么样的影响，这表明，在董事会和行政办公室里常见的这种疾病，不太可能很快找到治疗方法。
Power Causes Brain Damage
How leaders lose mental capacities—most notably for reading
other people—that were essential to their rise
By Jerry Useem，The Atlantic，
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. A 2006 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 Finance
last 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.)
“Hubris syndrome,” Owen writes, “is a disorder of the
possession of power.”
But tornadoes, volcanoes, and tsunamis aren’t the only
hubris-restraining forces out there. PepsiCo CEO and Chairman Indra Nooyi
sometimes tells the story 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 a 2009 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.
