When Power Shrinks Mentalization, Personal Narratives Build Trust

One of the hardest things to remember in conflict is that most people do not experience their own view as a view.

They experience it as reality.

That is part of what researchers call naive realism: the tendency to see our own perceptions as objective and to explain disagreement as the other person's ignorance, bad judgment, or bad motives.

That matters in politics. It matters at work too.

It matters in a toxic team meeting, in a tense networking conversation, in an interview panel, and in every moment when two people are trying to decide whether the other person is thoughtful, safe, trustworthy, or impossible.

The research on trust across ideological divides adds an important twist here. In a 2021 paper, David Hagmann, Julia Minson, and Catherine Tinsley found that people judge those who support their opinions with personal narratives as more trustworthy than those who support their opinions with data alone or stories about third parties.

That finding is highly relevant for work.

Because when power narrows a person's ability to take another person's perspective, trust rarely grows through harder argument.

It often grows through more vulnerable, more human, more audience-aware communication.

What I mean by mentalization

I use mentalization to mean your ability to model what another person may be seeing, fearing, misunderstanding, protecting, or needing.

It is closely related to perspective-taking, but in practice it is a little more useful for high-stakes communication. It is not just "Can I imagine their opinion?" It is "Can I hold a reasonably accurate model of their mind while I decide how to speak?"

That skill matters everywhere:

in interviewing
in networking
in managing upward
in navigating political teams
in getting your expertise understood outside your specialty

And this is where power becomes dangerous.

How power shrinks mentalization

The cleanest underlying research point comes from the power-and-perspective-taking literature. Galinsky, Magee, Inesi, and Gruenfeld found that power reduces perspective-taking. Powerful people become less likely to spontaneously orient toward another person's point of view.

My synthesis is this: in real work settings, that often looks like shrunken mentalization.

Not because powerful people become monsters in some cinematic way.

But because power can reduce the felt need to keep updating one's model of other minds.

If fewer people can meaningfully challenge you, if more people adapt around you, and if your own judgment is rarely interrupted, then it becomes easier to assume:

I am being clear
they understand me
they are reacting badly because they are weak, slow, political, or resistant
if they disagree, the problem is probably with them

That is how the "emperor has no clothes" dynamic develops.

The issue is not always that nobody sees the problem.

The issue is that the person with the most power may have stopped accurately reading how they are landing, while everyone else has become more careful, more strategic, and more silent around them.

That is why some work environments feel so disorienting.

You can be making perfectly reasonable interpretations of what is happening while the person above you is operating from a dramatically thinner model of everyone else in the room.

Why data often fails in those environments

Once you understand that, a lot of frustrating communication patterns make more sense.

Many highly-trained professionals respond to distorted environments by becoming even more correct:

more evidence
more explanation
more detail
more logic

Sometimes that helps.

Often it does not.

If the other person is in a naive-realist state and power has already reduced their motivation to take your perspective, your additional facts may be processed not as help but as friction.

This does not mean data is useless.

The Hagmann, Minson, and Tinsley paper is useful precisely because it does not argue for abandoning evidence. One of its important findings is that trust did not suffer when personal narratives were combined with data. The key mechanism appears to be vulnerability, not anti-quantitative bias.

That is a major distinction.

The goal is not to become less rigorous.

The goal is to become more trustworthy.

Why personal narratives build trust

In the trust paper, personal narratives increased perceived trustworthiness more than data-only arguments or narratives about third parties.

Why?

Because personal narrative changes what the listener thinks is happening between the two of you.

A personal narrative says:

I am not hiding behind abstraction
I am willing to locate myself in the claim
I am showing you what shaped my view
I am giving you something human, not just something defensible

That reads as vulnerability.

And vulnerability can lower defensiveness.

That does not always produce agreement. It often produces something more useful first: enough trust to keep the conversation open.

At work, that can be the difference between:

being seen as oppositional versus thoughtful
sounding self-protective versus reality-based
seeming ideological versus experience-grounded
triggering escalation versus creating a pause

What this means for interviews, networking, and leadership

This is not just a political-polarization insight.

It is a career strategy insight.

In interviews

Many candidates answer difficult questions with facts, responsibilities, and polished abstractions.

That can sound competent. It does not always sound trustworthy.

A stronger answer often includes a concise personal narrative:

what you walked into
what made the situation hard
what you noticed about other people's concerns
what judgment you made
what changed because of it

That structure shows more than expertise.

It shows how you read people, how you made sense of tension, and whether you can communicate as a trusted advisor rather than a responsibility bot.

In networking

People often try to win networking conversations by sounding impressive.

That is usually a weaker play than sounding specific, reflective, and legible.

A brief personal narrative about why you are making a transition, what kind of work you are trying to move toward, or what you have learned in a difficult environment often creates more trust than a polished credentials summary.

It gives the other person a human map.

In leadership and toxic workplaces

If you are dealing with someone whose power has narrowed their perspective-taking, the strategic question is not only:

"How do I prove I am right?"

It is:

"What communication is most likely to be received by the mind that is actually in front of me?"

Sometimes that means leading with a grounded personal narrative before you move into recommendations or evidence.

For example:

what you have observed firsthand
what impact you are seeing on execution, trust, or risk
what concern you are trying to solve, not just what complaint you are raising

This does not guarantee fairness.

It does improve the odds that your message is heard as credible rather than adversarial.

The practical communication shift

If power can shrink mentalization and personal narratives can build trust, the practical implication is not "tell emotional stories all the time."

It is more disciplined than that.

It is:

Notice when the conversation is trapped in certainty, abstraction, or mutual misreading.
Stop assuming more facts alone will solve the trust problem.
Use a concise personal narrative to reveal what you have actually seen, lived, or learned.
Then connect that narrative to the decision, recommendation, or request.

That sequence matters.

Story without judgment can feel meandering.

Judgment without human grounding can feel cold, self-protective, or arrogant.

Together, they become influence with integrity.

The strategic takeaway

Naive realism makes people over-trust their own interpretation.

Power can make that problem worse by reducing spontaneous perspective-taking. My reading of the literature is that, in practice, this often looks like shrunken mentalization: a thinner and less accurate model of other minds.

That is one reason some powerful people become so hard to reach.

The encouraging part is that trust does not have to begin with total agreement.

It can begin with a different communication move.

Personal narratives, especially when joined to clear judgment and evidence, can make people seem more trustworthy across disagreement. That matters in ideological conflict, but it also matters in interviews, networking, leadership, and the daily reality of communicating inside strained organizations.

If you are trying to become more influential without becoming manipulative, this is one of the most useful questions to ask before a high-stakes conversation:

What does this person seem able to perceive right now, and what lived, truthful narrative would help them trust what I am trying to show them?

If you want direct help with high-stakes interview prep, networking strategy, or message design for a difficult work situation, I offer a focused $350 working session built around one immediate communication deliverable.

References

Hagmann, Minson, and Tinsley, "Personal Narratives Build Trust Across Ideological Divides" (2021)
Galinsky, Magee, Inesi, and Gruenfeld, "Power and Perspectives Not Taken," Psychological Science 17(12), 2006.