When people feel powerful or feel powerless, it influences their perception of others," said Yap, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at MIT. According to their understanding, we judge the power of others relative to our own: When we feel powerful, others appear less so --and powerlessness and smallness often go together in our minds.
It is true that CEOs tend to be taller than the average person, and there are estimates that for each inch a person is above average height, they receive $789 more a year. Sure enough, in the study, the powerful people judged others to be shorter than they really are.
Yap's conclusion nicely illustrates what we've always known anecdotally: Power gets to our heads. A decade of research on power and behavior show there are some predictable ways people react to power, which can be simply defined as the ability to influence others. While power in governments and across the world can come at incredible costs, in a lab, it's surprisingly simple. Asking a person to recall a time he or she felt powerful can get them in the state of mind. There's also the aptly named "dictator game," in which a participant is made powerful by putting them charge of doling out the compensation for another participant.