15/11/2025
HEARTS, MINDS & DEVOLUTION.
Research shows power literally impairs the part of your brain responsible for empathy, the ability to understand and connect with communities. Once people gain authority, they become more impulsive, less aware of risks, and dangerously out of touch with residents' real concerns.
With Norfolk's devolution deal creating a new tier of governance and concentrating power in fewer hands, this matters more than ever.
The skills that helped leaders rise, listening, understanding different perspectives, start to fade once they're in charge. They stop needing to read the room because they have the power to push things through anyway.
When decision-making moves further from villages like Hoveton & Wroxham, when accountability weakens, when consultation becomes a tick-box exercise, this brain effect gets worse.
This is exactly why we need:
✅ Genuine community consultation, not rubber-stamping
✅ Transparent decision-making processes
✅ Real accountability mechanisms
Power doesn't just corrupt. It changes your brain. And Norfolk is about to hand out a lot more of it.
🔗 https://www.npr.org/2013/08/10/210686255/a-sense-of-power-can-do-a-number-on-your-brain
If your boss is a jerk, there might be a scientific reason for it. A new study suggests feeling powerful dampens the part of the brain that helps us connect with others.
