Can You Know How Humble You Are Before You Have Power?

A friend once described the person he would become when he made more money.

He would help people more.

He would be generous.

Money would not change him in the embarrassing ways money changes other people in stories. It would simply give his existing goodness a larger operating budget.

He meant it.

Over time, his career improved and the money began to arrive. So did some things he wanted, including a new Xbox and a board game.

This is the point where a cruel version of the story calls him a hypocrite.

I do not think he was.

An Xbox is not evidence of moral collapse. I do not know everything he did with his money, what new obligations appeared or whether he helped people privately. A person can be generous and still buy something that requires a suspicious number of evening hours.

What stayed with me was the prediction.

My friend had sincerely forecast how a future version of himself would behave under conditions he had never experienced.

He had not necessarily lied.

He had made a prediction about a person who did not exist yet.

Money is not identical to power. It matters here because it changes the available options, loosens some constraints, provides insulation from certain consequences and allows more preferences to become actions. My friend’s Xbox was not a study of political authority. It was a small doorway into the larger transition from wealth to status, authority and power.

That seems to be something most of us do.

I would stay humble if I became powerful.

I would be generous if I became rich.

Fame would not change me.

I would be a compassionate boss.

Perhaps.

But how do we know who we would be in a decision environment we have never entered?

Future Me has excellent character

The future versions of ourselves are morally impressive.

They eat well, apologize quickly and handle authority with the calm wisdom of people who have never had to make a decision before lunch.

Part of the problem is that we often treat an aspiration as if it were behavioural evidence.

In three studies, Erik Helzer and David Dunning found that people predicting themselves gave relatively more weight to their aspirations, while peer predictors relied more on past achievement and were sometimes more accurate. The studies involved performance rather than sudden wealth or moral character, so they do not settle my friend’s case. But they expose the tempting substitution: when asked what we will do, we answer with what we hope to do. (Helzer & Dunning, 2012)

Our self-model contains far more examples of me under current conditions than me with power over someone’s promotion, me with enough money to redefine enough, or me surrounded by people who laugh before I reach the punchline.

We are extrapolating from a limited sample.

That does not make the prediction worthless. It makes the confidence suspicious.

Power might reveal

The simplest explanation is that power reveals what was already present.

My friend always liked games. More money made the preference easier to express. A person may already crave status, control or generosity but lack the resources to turn the preference into visible behaviour.

Constraint can also imitate virtue.

It is easy to describe yourself as merciful when nobody depends on your judgment. Loyalty is less expensive when no alternative is available. Humility is easier when the room does not permit arrogance.

This does not mean the virtue is fake. Practising patience while constrained is still evidence of patience.

It is simply not the same test.

Some experimental research supports a person-by-situation view of power. In a series of studies, Serena Chen, Annette Lee-Chai and John Bargh found that activating power was associated with more socially responsible behaviour among participants with a communal orientation and more self-interested behaviour among those with an exchange orientation. Power did not push everybody in one moral direction; it appeared to activate different goals in different people. (Chen, Lee-Chai & Bargh, 2001)

Other experiments found that power sometimes made behaviour more consistent with whatever disposition or idea was already most accessible—but that this effect changed when an alternative idea was made salient. (Guinote, Weick & Cai, 2012)

These are controlled studies, not surveillance footage from the first year of a presidency. Still, they complicate “power corrupts.”

Power may give the loudest existing motive a microphone.

Power might change

The second explanation is less comfortable: the future person is not merely the current person with a larger bank balance.

New status changes experience.

People become more accommodating. Disagreement grows polite. Bad jokes develop excellent careers. Invitations arrive from different rooms, and the new comparison group quietly updates what counts as normal.

A theory proposed by Dacher Keltner, Deborah Gruenfeld and Cameron Anderson argues that greater power is associated with more freedom, reward and approach-oriented behaviour, while lower power is associated with threat, punishment and inhibition. (Keltner, Gruenfeld & Anderson, 2003)

That theory should not be treated as a law. Seven later studies found little support for one specific proposed mechanism—that power directly increases attention to rewards. (Lin & Schmid, 2022)

The cautious claim is enough: changing a person’s control, feedback and consequences can change their psychological experience.

If everybody agrees with you, you do not need an unusually large ego to become less calibrated. You need time and a defective feedback system.

Power may reveal the person.

It may also participate in producing the person it later appears to reveal.

Power changes the room

There is a third possibility that I find even more interesting.

The person may retain many of the same values while the decision itself changes around them.

Imagine an employee describing the manager they would become.

From the employee’s current position, fairness, empathy and job security are highly visible. They know what arbitrary decisions feel like. They promise never to forget.

Then they become responsible for payroll, legal risk, poor performance, precedent, deadlines and whether the organization survives long enough to pay anyone next month.

Fairness has not disappeared.

It has acquired competitors.

The manager may make a decision their earlier self would condemn, not because compassion vanished, but because variables that were previously invisible now occupy the foreground.

This resembles the question behind why everyone seems nicer in the church parking lot. Different environments call different concerns forward. The cue changes what the person notices, and what the person notices changes what action feels reasonable.

Power is a state transition.

It changes:

• which options are available;
• whose approval matters;
• which consequences feel immediate;
• what counts as expensive;
• which risks can be ignored;
• what receives attention.

The old self predicts from outside that state. The new self decides from inside it.

That gap may explain why sincere promises fail without requiring either fraud or total personality transformation.

Power may change the person, but it also changes the room in which the person has to decide.

Character outside the training data

Machine-learning language offers a useful analogy if we do not take it too literally.

We have a large training set for ordinary versions of ourselves:

Me when someone else chooses the restaurant.

Me when my manager rejects an idea.

Me when money is tight enough that generosity remains mostly theoretical.

We have little data for:

Me when nobody can overrule me.

Me when the cost of one luxury no longer registers.

Me when honesty threatens something I spent twenty years building.

Then we confidently predict across the gap.

Your character is partly a prediction you make about yourself from a limited training set.

Psychologists Walter Mischel and Yuichi Shoda proposed that personality can include stable if–then patterns: if a person encounters one kind of situation, they tend toward one response; in another situation, another response becomes more likely. Variability across situations does not necessarily mean there is no coherent person underneath. The pattern of variation may itself be part of the person. (Mischel & Shoda, 1995)

That suggests character may not be a single score labelled humility: 87.

It may look more like:

Humble among equals, defensive with critics, generous when observed, attentive when dependent, dismissive when secure.

The pattern is less flattering than the label.

It is also more useful.

Can humility be tested before power arrives?

Perhaps only imperfectly.

Small asymmetries offer small tests: how we treat a junior colleague, a child, a server, someone asking for credit, or a person who cannot improve our future.

But miniature power is not enormous power. Returning the shopping cart does not prove how you would run a country.

There is another clue in what people build around themselves.

A leader who invites disagreement, separates personal benefit from important decisions and makes bad news safe to deliver is not proving permanent humility. They are acknowledging that their future character should not be trusted without support.

That may be a deeper form of humility than describing oneself as humble.

We usually treat safeguards as evidence that a person lacks virtue.

Perhaps safeguards are what virtue looks like when it understands state transitions.

My current hunch

Perhaps asking whether power reveals or changes character sets up the wrong contest.

Power can remove a constraint and reveal a preference that was already present. Removing that constraint creates a new decision environment: different options, stakes, audiences and consequences. Repeated experience inside that environment can then change what feels normal, what receives attention and what the person expects from other people.

The three explanations may be stages of one process:

constraint disappears → the room changes → experience accumulates → the person entering the next decision is slightly different

Power reveals, rearranges and changes—sometimes in that order, sometimes all at once.

None of this removes responsibility. “The variables became more salient” would be an excellent sentence to hear immediately before refusing someone’s expense claim, but a poor defence of cruelty.

Context explains behaviour. It does not automatically excuse it.

Past conduct remains evidence of character. It is simply less decisive when the future situation is unlike anything in the past.

So perhaps a virtue you have never had the opportunity to violate is not imaginary.

It is an untested hypothesis.

Maybe humility is not a trait we can declare we possess. Maybe it is a prediction that has to survive a change in state.

And perhaps the real test begins at the exact moment people become too careful to tell us we are failing it.

Until the next strange question,

Osagie