Historian Henry Adams said "power is a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim's sympathies". It turns out this is somewhat true.

Sukhvinder Obhi, a neuroscientist at McMaster University, in Ontario, 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. Dacher Keltner calls it the "power paradox". By gaining power we lose the capacities we had that led us to obtain it: empathy, perspective taking, compromise, etc..

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. 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.

What's to be done?

First, awareness brings choice. Having an awareness of this cognitive bias sets up those in power to work with it accordingly. Second, humble yourself by putting occasionally reminiscing or putting yourself into states where you once felt powerless. Third, practice gratitude.

REFERENCES

• Losing Touch: Power diminishes perception and perspective in KelloggInsight https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/losing-touch
• Obhi, Hogeveen & Inzlicht Power Changes How the Brain Responds to Others https://www.oveo.org/fichiers/power-changes-how-the-brain-responds-to-others.pdf
• The Power Paradox by Dacher Keltner in Greater Good Magazine (by UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center) https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/power_paradox