From Politico.com, here’s former presidential candidate Andrew Yang talking about the psychological effects of running for president:
The historian Henry Adams described power as “a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.” This may sound like hyperbole, but it has been borne out by years of lab and field experiments. Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley, has been studying the influence of power on individuals. He puts people in positions of power relative to each other in different settings. He has consistently found that power, over time, makes one more impulsive, more reckless and less able to see things from others’ points of view. It also leads one to be rude, more likely to cheat on one’s spouse, less attentive to other people, and less interested in the experiences of others.
. . .
Lord David Owen and Jonathan Davidson called it the “hubris syndrome” — a disorder of the possession of power held over years and with minimal constraint on the leader. Its clinical features include contempt for others, loss of reality, recklessness and displays of incompetence. Lack of empathy is part of the package.
You don’t have to run for president to be afflicted by hubris syndrome. I reckon we can see those same symptoms at City Hall.