Why We Keep Underestimating Our Own Sway Over the People Closest to Us

When we talk about power, we usually picture something impersonal: a manager signing off on a budget, a negotiator holding the better cards. But some of the most consequential power any of us wields is quieter than that. It is the pull we have on a close friend's weekend plans, or the way a partner's mood shifts to match our own. New research suggests that most of us are surprisingly bad at seeing that everyday influence for what it is — and the error runs in one direction. We tend to think we have less sway than we really do.

The study, led by Robert Körner at the University of Bamberg [2] with Nickola C. Overall, drew on 1,304 pairs of people spread across four separate samples [1]. The mix was deliberately varied: 305 friendship pairs and 87 same-gender couples in Germany, 481 heterosexual couples in Germany, and 431 heterosexual couples in New Zealand. Crucially, both members of every pair took part. That two-sided design is what makes the findings possible. Instead of asking one person how powerful they felt and taking their word for it, the researchers could line up each person's self-assessment against what their partner reported about how much that person actually influenced the relationship.

To do this, they used a statistical approach built for exactly this kind of question, one that separates two things people usually blur together. The first is accuracy: does your sense of your own power track the reality your partner describes? The second is bias: even if your ranking is roughly right, is it tilted consistently high or low? Teasing these apart matters, because someone can be accurate and biased at the same time — correctly sensing they have more say than average while still lowballing the absolute amount.

That is more or less what the data showed. Across every sample, people were reasonably good at gauging their relative standing. If they held more influence than their partner, they tended to know it. But layered on top of that decent relative judgment was a steady downward bias. People underestimated how much influence they held in real terms [1]. The pull they had on decisions, plans, and the emotional weather of the relationship was larger than they gave themselves credit for.

The size of that blind spot was not the same for everyone. In heterosexual couples, men underestimated their power noticeably more than women did — a twist worth sitting with, given how often cultural conversations assume the opposite. The bias also tracked with what people seemed to want out of the relationship. Those who scored higher on self-protection motives, the drive to guard against rejection or hurt, showed a stronger tendency to undercount their influence. So did people with stronger power motives. Meanwhile, the more committed someone was to the relationship, the smaller their underestimation tended to be. Feeling invested, it seems, comes with a clearer view of how much you actually shape things.

Why would we systematically sell our own influence short? The researchers frame it as motivated perception rather than simple ignorance. Believing you have modest power can be self-protective. If you assume you are not the one steering, you carry less blame when things go wrong, and you brace yourself less for the sting of a partner pushing back. There may also be a social grammar at work: openly claiming influence over someone you love can feel unseemly, so downplaying it becomes the safer, more modest posture. On that reading, the bias is less a glitch than a quiet strategy for keeping a relationship comfortable.

It is worth being clear about what this research can and cannot tell us. The design is correlational and cross-sectional, meaning it captures a single snapshot rather than following couples over months or years. That rules out strong claims about cause and effect. We cannot say that underestimating your power protects a relationship, or that it corrodes one; we can only say the bias is there and travels with certain motives. The samples, while large, came from Germany and New Zealand — two wealthy Western countries whose norms around relationships and self-presentation may not generalize to very different cultures. And the whole thing rests on self-report and partner-report, which means it measures perceptions of influence rather than some objective ledger of who got their way. People can be wrong about each other, too.

Still, the core observation is a useful mirror. Much of the influence we have on the people closest to us operates below the threshold of notice, and our instinct is to assume it is smaller than it is. That has practical echoes. If you routinely feel like the less powerful person in your relationships, this work is a gentle nudge to check whether that feeling is measuring reality or measuring your own caution. The same gap between what we perceive and what is actually happening shows up elsewhere in relationship science, including in the different ways partners handle honesty and deception. For more on how perception shapes our closest bonds, browse more psychology coverage.

Sources

1. Körner, R., & Overall, N. C. (2025). Bias in Perceptions of Power in Close Relationships: The Role of Self-Protection, Pro-Relationship, and Power Motives. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672251409849
2. University of Bamberg, Department of Psychology. https://www.uni-bamberg.de/en/psychology/

This article summarizes published research for general informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice.