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 redirects attention
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 concerns pain empathy. Klimecki et al. (2014) studied responses to videos of suffering following empathy and compassion training. The findings distinguish those training conditions; they do not establish that a volunteer Debrief produces a specific neural switch or improves long-term volunteer retention. For practitioners, the useful question is how to support reflection without prescribing the emotional response participants should have.
CSR managers can ask whether participants have support for processing difficult experiences and making their own decisions about returning. Feeling distress after an encounter does not, by itself, tell us whether someone will withdraw, develop compassion, or sustain their involvement. Those outcomes need to be observed over time.
The Debrief gives participants a structured opportunity to make meaning while the experience is still accessible. Research on memory consolidation involves several timescales and does not establish a forty-minute deadline for volunteering reflection. Useful prompts include: What did you notice? What surprised you? What might you do differently? The participant decides what the experience means and what to carry forward.
Without reflection, participants may leave focused on whether the event was efficient or on the distress they encountered. A Debrief creates room to examine those responses. It does not guarantee compassion, lasting engagement, or identity change.
06 — DosageThe problem nobody wants to talk about
Even with a strong Brief and a timely Debrief, one event cannot establish a sustained practice. Habit-formation research concerns particular repeated behaviors and cannot supply an annual volunteering dose or a timetable for prosocial identity change. Repeated opportunities, reflection, and support are design choices whose effects need to be examined in the program’s own context.
Design for opportunities to return
Make it possible to encounter people and questions again.
Give participants room to examine meaning and choose what to carry forward.
Support practice between experiences and observe what participants actually do.
A quarterly or annual schedule describes access to experiences; it does not establish an evidence-based threshold for change. RW Institute encourages practitioners to create opportunities for sustained practice, while recognizing that timing, relationships, facilitation, and what happens between events all matter. No fixed number of events guarantees prosocial identity change.
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.
Programs can provide logistics and safety guidance while leaving meaning and reflection to chance. Volunteer leaders also need practice in facilitation: introducing a human story, checking in with participants, and inviting reflection on the gap between expectations and experience.
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, lead a responsive Check-in, and conduct a timely Debrief that invites individual reflection. 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
For CSR managers, this research raises a design question rather than diagnosing the people in a volunteer group. A laboratory power prime and responses to pain images cannot establish what an executive will notice during a volunteer experience, or whether facilitation will change their identity.
Practitioners can still give participants a useful question to carry into the activity, check in while they work, and invite reflection before they leave. These practices create opportunities for learning; what participants make of them remains theirs.
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. (2014). 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