Dacher Keltner spent two decades studying what power does to the people who hold it. The finding that runs through his research like a thread is not that power corrupts in the moral sense — though the evidence for that is real. It is that power systematically reduces the capacities that genuine influence requires. The powerful person takes less careful note of what others think and feel, processes the perspective of others with less accuracy, and is less likely to adjust their communication based on what they read in the room. These are not character failures. They are the predictable consequences of what sustained power does to the neural substrates of social cognition.