An executive who walks away from a volunteer experience unchanged was probably paying close attention the whole time. Not to the people. To the logistics, to how the activity will read in the annual report, to whether the half-day was worth the calendar disruption. The attention was fully deployed. It arrived oriented toward the wrong question.
If you manage a corporate volunteer program, you have watched this happen. A senior leader shows up, works hard, says the right things, leaves. Two weeks later they approve the same budget they would have approved anyway. Nothing shifted. You assumed the problem was engagement. It wasn't. The problem was orientation.
01 — EvidenceThe neural story nobody expected
A 2019 ERP study by Ma, Wu, and Zhang, published in Frontiers in Psychology, put a complication into the standard narrative about power and empathy. The researchers primed participants with either high power (recall a time you had authority over someone) or low power (recall a time someone had authority over you), then showed them images of people in painful and non-painful situations while EEG recorded brain activity.
The finding that matters for program design: high-power participants showed larger P1 amplitudes than low-power participants. The P1 is an early visual component that fires roughly 100 to 160 milliseconds after a stimulus appears. It reflects sensory encoding, the raw allocation of attention. The high-power group was processing incoming information more intensely, not less.
Both groups showed equivalent responses to painful versus non-painful images across later processing stages. The interaction between power and pain was not significant across any of the four neural components measured. Ma, Wu, and Zhang concluded that power tends to enhance early sensory processing broadly, rather than specifically reducing empathic responses.
Read that again through the lens of your program. The executives in the room are not tuned out. They are, if anything, tuned up. The signal is arriving with full strength. Something downstream determines what gets done with it.
02 — ReframeWhat the dominant narrative gets wrong
The view that power reduces empathy has been around since Keltner and colleagues laid the groundwork in 2003, extended by Galinsky and others through 2006. It has replicated well enough to take seriously. But the ERP findings add a layer the behavioral research alone cannot show: if high-power individuals score lower on empathic accuracy at the behavioral level, the deficit is not happening at the sensory gate. The information is getting in.
Cote and colleagues offered a frame in 2011 that helps make sense of this. Elevated power enhances goal focus. Attentional resources get directed toward whatever the person has already decided matters. Barrett, and later Mesquita and Boiger, reinforced this from situated emotions theory: emotions are not fixed responses to fixed inputs. Power changes the social context a person is operating from, and therefore changes what gets constructed from incoming signals.
For CSR managers, this reframes the entire design challenge. You are not working with leaders who lack the neural capacity to respond to others' experience. You are working with leaders whose attentional architecture is optimized for goal pursuit, and who arrived at your event with a goal already loaded. If that goal is "evaluate whether this was a good use of time," every sensory signal they receive will be processed through that filter. The community member's story, the look on the child's face, the moment that should have landed. All of it gets routed through the wrong question.
03 — DiagnosisWhere program design has been solving the wrong problem
The standard corporate volunteering logic runs like this: get leaders close enough to community need and the feeling will follow. That instinct is not entirely wrong. Construal Level Theory predicts that psychological distance suppresses empathic response, and research by Adam Grant and colleagues shows that direct beneficiary contact produces motivation increases that persist for weeks. Proximity does real work.
But if power-primed participants arrive with heightened early sensory processing rather than diminished processing, exposure alone is not the binding constraint. What Ma, Wu, and Zhang describe at the neural level is consistent with what experienced facilitators observe in the field: executives in a well-run experience notice a great deal. What they often lack is a question worth carrying into it.
In the Tourist-Traveler-Guide framework that RW and RW Institute use to understand learning states, that is precisely the difference between one state and another. Not sensitivity. Orientation. A Tourist is not less capable of empathy than a Traveler. A Tourist is operating from a different set of questions, often the default questions their role and context supplied. The framework does not describe personality types or a developmental ladder. It describes what happens when a person's attentional resources meet a particular set of conditions. Change the conditions, and the same person processes the same experience differently.
The practical question for every CSR manager reading this: what conditions are you setting before the experience begins?
04 — MechanismThe Brief is a neurological intervention
At RW and RW Institute, the Brief is the short facilitation practice that opens a well-designed volunteer experience. It is not a logistics rundown. It is not "here's what we're doing today and where the bathrooms are." Its function is to redirect the attentional resources a participant already has before those resources find a default target.
A Brief that works does three things. It challenges an assumption the participant arrived with, creating productive dissonance. It introduces a specific human story that activates mentalization, the process of attributing full inner life to another person. And it raises the question of personal relevance before the activity gives the participant something easier to focus on instead.
None of that happens by accident. And none of it happens when the Brief is replaced by announcements.
The Ma, Wu, and Zhang findings give this design choice additional grounding. If high-power individuals already have amplified sensory processing, the Brief is not trying to wake up a dormant system. It is trying to redirect an active one. The attentional resources are already deployed. The Brief changes what they are deployed toward.
05 — CircuitThe distinction that changes the design target
There is a second layer to this that matters for long-term program sustainability, and it comes from a different body of research.
The Ma et al. study focuses on pain empathy specifically: the kind of response that activates what researchers call the pain matrix, a shared-suffering circuit. That circuit is real. When you see someone in pain and feel a visceral echo of it, that is the pain matrix doing its job. But Tania Singer and colleagues, through compassion training research (the clearest study being Klimecki et al., 2013, published in Cerebral Cortex), have shown that empathic distress and compassion run through different neural pathways. Compassion activates reward circuitry and sustains engagement over time. Empathic distress, the shared-suffering response, tends toward burnout under repeated exposure.
This distinction should change what CSR managers optimize toward. A program that reliably produces empathic distress in participants, that "gut punch" moment when someone confronts poverty or illness or injustice for the first time, is not a program designed for sustained engagement. It is a program designed for a powerful single experience followed by gradual withdrawal. The participants felt something real. They also felt depleted. And without a structured way to process that response toward something generative, many of them quietly opt out of the next event.
The Debrief is the mechanism that enables the shift from distress to compassion. Conducted within the first memory consolidation window after the experience (roughly 40 minutes, before the neural consolidation process locks in whatever frame the participant is currently holding), structured reflection gives participants a way to process what they encountered. Three questions do most of the work: What did you notice? What surprised you? What might you do differently? The third question is where the processing pivots from "that was hard" to "that matters to me, and here is what I want to carry forward."
Without the Debrief, the consolidation window closes around whatever emotional frame the participant happened to land on. For many, especially those with high-power processing patterns, that frame is evaluation: "Was this worthwhile? Was this well organized? Would I do this again?" The experience gets filed under the same goal-pursuit architecture it arrived with. For others, the frame is distress. Neither frame produces lasting engagement. Neither frame produces identity change.
06 — DosageThe problem nobody wants to talk about
Even with a strong Brief and a timely Debrief, most corporate volunteer programs face a structural problem that no single event can solve. The research on habit formation is clear: the median time to automaticity for a new behavior is 66 days, with a range of 18 to 254 days depending on the behavior's complexity. Prosocial behaviors, the kind that involve relating to unfamiliar people across social distance, sit toward the complex end of that range.
Quarterly volunteering, which is what most large corporate programs offer, means four experiences per year. That is below the threshold that neuroscience and behavioral research suggest for lasting change. RW Institute's design work points to a minimum of eight to twelve experiences per year, spaced at intervals that respect the brain's consolidation architecture. Too close together (back-to-back events on the same day, for example) and you run into the 60-minute refractory period required for long-term potentiation. Too far apart and you lose the spaced repetition benefit entirely.
The uncomfortable implication: your annual volunteer day, even if it is beautifully designed, is not a transformation program. It is one experience. It can be a powerful one. A single well-designed experience can produce a genuine shift in how someone sees the world, particularly if the Brief creates productive dissonance and the Debrief mines the gap between what participants expected and what they actually encountered. But that shift needs reinforcement, or it decays.
This is not an argument against annual events. It is an argument for being honest about what they can and cannot do, and for building the connective tissue between events that gives participants a developmental arc rather than a series of disconnected moments.
07 — GapWhat most programs are actually missing
The diagnostic question for most programs is not whether participants have the neural capacity to respond to others' experience. Based on what Ma, Wu, and Zhang found, that capacity is present and in some cases amplified by the sense of authority many volunteers carry into the day. The question is whether the program design gives that capacity a target, and whether the facilitation channels the response toward compassion rather than depletion.
Most programs do not. The Brief is absent or reduced to announcements. The Debrief happens the following week, if it happens at all, well outside the consolidation window where it could do its most important work. The volunteer leaders running the experience have been trained on logistics and safety protocols but not on facilitation. Nobody taught them how to tell a story that reactivates the medial prefrontal cortex, or how to ask a reflection question that mines the expectation-reality gap.
What that leaves is a participant with fully functional neural equipment, a well-meaning organization, and an experience that asked nothing of either.
RW and RW Institute call this the Design Gap: the space between a program's intention and its facilitation architecture. The gap is not about budget or participation rates or platform technology. It is about whether anyone in the system knows how to conduct a Brief, guide the experience with real-time calibration, and run a Debrief before the consolidation window closes. Those three competencies — what RW calls the Three Keystone Behaviors — are the binding constraint for most programs. Everything else is downstream.
08 — ImplicationReframing the job
If you are a CSR manager reading this, the Ma, Wu, and Zhang finding should change how you think about your most powerful participants. They are not the hardest people in the room to reach. They are the people with the most attentional resources available for redirection. Their early sensory processing is amplified. Their goal-pursuit architecture is highly efficient. And their default question, the one they carried through the door, is almost certainly the wrong one.
Your job is not to make them feel something. Their nervous system will handle that. Your job is to change the question they are carrying before the experience gives them something easier to focus on. The Brief does that. The Debrief locks it in. The spacing between experiences determines whether the change persists or decays.
The executive who walks away unchanged was not inattentive. They were paying very close attention, to the wrong thing. And the program, by failing to redirect that attention before it found its default target, made that outcome inevitable.
The fix is not more proximity. It is better facilitation. And it starts five minutes before the experience begins.
References
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Ma, J., Wu, H., & Zhang, W. (2019). The influence of power on empathy for pain: An ERP study. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 2320. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02320 north_east
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Klimecki, O. M., Leiberg, S., Ricard, M., & Singer, T. (2013). Differential pattern of functional brain plasticity after compassion and empathy training. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 9(6), 873–879. doi.org/10.1093/scan/nst060 north_east
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Keltner, D., Gruenfeld, D. H., & Anderson, C. (2003). Power, approach, and inhibition. Psychological Review, 110(2), 265–284. doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.110.2.265 north_east
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Cote, S., Kraus, M. W., Cheng, B. H., Oveis, C., van der Lowe, I., Lian, H., & Keltner, D. (2011). Social power facilitates the effect of prosocial orientation on empathic accuracy. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(2), 217–232. doi.org/10.1037/a0023171 north_east
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Grant, A. M. (2012). Leading with meaning: Beneficiary contact, prosocial impact, and the performance effects of transformational leadership. Academy of Management Journal, 55(2), 458–476. doi.org/10.5465/amj.2010.0588 north_east
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Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998–1009. doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.674 north_east