Why power corrupts

In Adam D. Galinsky, Joe C. Magee, M. Ena Inesi, and Deborah H Gruenfeld, Power and Perspectives Not Taken, Psychological Science, 17:12, 1068-1074 2006 researchers primed a group of test subjects by asking them to write down a memory where they held power over other people, while another group were asked to write about a time when others had power over them. Then the subjects were asked to quickly write the letter 'E' on their forehead.
High-power subjects were about three times as likely as low-power subjects to draw the letter oriented so it would be readable by themselves rather than readable by others.
In follow-up experiments it was found that high-power subjects also tended to assume other people had the same information that they had (the "telepathic boss" problem - the boss assumes that everybody knows what he knows and want). They were also less accurate than low-power subjects at judging emotional expressions. There were also anticorrelations between reports of general feelings of being in power in one's life and tendency to take other's perspective. Overall high-power people seem to anchor too heavily on their own vantage point and this impairs their ability to consider what others see, think and feel.
People with less power likely have to consider other people’s intentions and views more strongly, so perhaps the power bias is actually the real baseline and powerless people concentrate more on mind reading. But given the increase in errors in emotion reading the power mode people had compared to people primed neither with being powerful or powerless, this seems unlikely.

from overcoming bias