Ask someone how much sway they hold over their partner and most people guess low. Not “modest.” Low, lower than the number their partner would actually hand back, if you asked the two of them separately and lined the answers up. A new study from Robert Körner (University of Bamberg) and Nickola C. Overall (University of Auckland), published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, did exactly that lining-up. Across four independent samples and 1,304 total pairs, the self-rating missed in the same direction almost every time. People don’t just misjudge their own relationship power. They misjudge it in one consistent, predictable direction: down.

Quick Verdict

Question	Answer
Who ran the study?	Robert Körner (University of Bamberg) and Nickola C. Overall (University of Auckland)
Sample	1,304 dyads across four samples: 305 friend pairs, 87 same-gender couples, and 481 man-woman couples in Germany, plus 431 man-woman couples in New Zealand
What did they measure?	Each person’s self-rated power to influence a partner or friend, checked against that same partner’s independent report of how influenced they actually felt
Core finding	People consistently underestimated their own power, across every sample
What widens the gap	Higher self-protection motives (attachment anxiety, low self-esteem, jealousy) and personal power motives (a strong desire for control)
What narrows the gap	Higher pro-relationship motives: commitment, seeing power as shared rather than contested
Gender pattern	Men underestimated their power in romantic relationships more than in friendships; the same split didn’t show up for women

Bottom line: You likely have more influence over the people close to you than you believe. The reasons you don’t believe it are the same reasons a lot of self-help keeps telling you to say the thing you’re not currently saying.

What the Study Actually Tested

Power, here, isn’t dominance. In relationship science, power is the ability to get your own needs and preferences met without having to fight for them: whose plans win, whose opinion moves a joint decision, who bends and who doesn’t. It’s treated as something both people can hold simultaneously, not a fixed amount one partner spends and the other loses.

Körner and Overall didn’t ask people to self-assess in isolation, which is how most power research gets done and how most of it goes untested. They collected both sides of 1,304 relationships (friends, same-gender couples, and man-woman couples across Germany and New Zealand) and had each person rate two things: how much they believed they influenced the other person, and separately, the other person rated how much they actually felt influenced. That second number is the check a self-rating almost never gets, because normally nobody thinks to ask the other half of the pair.

The statistical tool for comparing those two numbers is called a truth-and-bias model, a method built to separate “how accurate is this person’s self-view” from “which direction does their error tend to run.” It’s the difference between asking whether someone’s guess is close and asking whether their guesses are close but consistently skewed one way. Here, across friend pairs, same-gender couples, and man-woman couples on two continents, the skew ran the same direction every time.

What Predicts How Much You Underestimate Your Own Power?

Not everyone underestimated equally. Three motives moved the size of the gap, and two of them are the exact traits self-help spends the most pages trying to address:

1. Self-protection motives widened the gap most. People with more attachment anxiety, lower self-esteem, or more relationship jealousy underrated their own influence more than people without those traits.
2. Personal power motives widened it too. People with a stronger drive for control and autonomy (including higher attachment avoidance and psychopathy traits) also rated themselves as less influential than their partner’s own report said they actually were.
3. Pro-relationship motives ran the other way. Higher commitment predicted a smaller gap. People who treated power as something shared, rather than something to guard, came closer to an accurate read on their own influence.

That first and second finding sound like opposites: an anxious person clinging to a relationship and a controlling person trying to run one aren’t the same personality. But they land on the same blind spot from different directions. One is protecting against abandonment. The other is protecting against dependence. Both end up convinced they hold less power than they do.

Why Would Anyone Underestimate Their Own Power on Purpose?

The paper leans on error management theory to explain the pattern, and it’s worth sitting with because it reframes the bias as a feature, not a glitch. The theory’s basic claim: human judgment evolved to make the cheaper mistake, not the accurate one, whenever the two possible errors carry different costs. Overestimating your power and acting on it (pushing harder, assuming your partner will bend, treating your preferences as the default) risks conflict, resentment, and a partner who starts pulling away. Underestimating your power costs less. It just makes you more accommodating than you strictly need to be.

Robert Körner put it plainly in comments on the research: “People usually underestimate how much influence they have over their partners or friends. This tendency is even stronger among people who are highly motivated by power or who feel insecure in their relationships. This matters because feeling low in power is linked to several detrimental relationship outcomes, including aggression, lower relationship quality, and lower sexual satisfaction.” The safer error, in other words, isn’t actually free. It just moves the cost somewhere less visible, into the relationship’s quality, not into a single blown-up argument.

Why Men Underestimated More in Romance Than in Friendship

The gender pattern is the sharpest finding in the paper. Men underestimated their power more than women did overall, and the gap was specific: men underrated their influence in romantic relationships far more than in their friendships. Women’s estimates didn’t split the same way between the two relationship types.

Körner and Overall connect this to social pressure that runs in one direction: men are expected to appear in control, particularly when they’re depending on a female partner for emotional support or connection. Admitting real dependence, or accurately naming how much sway a partner holds over you, cuts against that expectation. So does accurately naming your own sway, oddly enough, because acknowledging you have power in a relationship also means acknowledging the relationship matters enough to fight to keep. This site covered a related mechanic recently in the mankeeping research: men’s shrinking friend networks routing emotional labor onto a female partner, absorbed quietly because naming the dependence out loud isn’t something men are socially rewarded for doing. Different study, same undercurrent. Men’s actual position in a relationship and men’s reported position in a relationship keep coming apart, and the gap tends to run the same direction: toward looking, and feeling, less dependent than the data says they are.

What This Means If You’re the One Underestimating

If this pattern applies to you, the traits driving it aren’t obscure: they’re the ones a lot of relationship books already target, just usually framed as problems in their own right rather than as a power-perception distortion with a second cost attached.

Attachment anxiety is the biggest predictor of underestimating your own influence here, and it’s also the whole subject of Secure by Amir Levine, which argues attachment patterns aren’t fixed traits but learnable ones. This study gives that argument a sharper edge: an anxious attachment style isn’t just costing you peace of mind. It’s actively distorting how much power you think you have, in a direction that makes you defer more than the relationship actually requires.

A weak read on your own influence also makes boundary-setting harder in a specific way. Not because you can’t articulate a boundary, but because you don’t believe you have the standing to hold one. Boundaries by Henry Cloud treats that standing as something to build through practice and repetition. This study suggests some readers already have more standing than they think, and the exercise isn’t building power from zero: it’s recognizing power that’s already there and has been discounted.

And the self-focused version of this (doubting your own read on the relationship rather than your read on other people) echoes the research distinguishing self-doubt from humility, which found the self-focused, doubting stance predicted worse outcomes than an other-oriented one. Underestimating your own relationship power is a fairly literal example of that self-focused doubt in action: a private, unverified belief about your own worth (or control, or standing) that a partner’s actual behavior doesn’t support.

What This Doesn’t Mean

• It doesn’t mean you should assume you have unlimited power. The finding is a systematic downward bias, not permission to swing to the opposite error. Overestimating power carries its own real costs: the paper’s own framing is that overestimating is the more expensive mistake, not the safer one.
• It doesn’t prove the bias causes worse relationships. The design compares self-report to partner-report at largely one point in time. Whether underestimating power causes lower relationship quality, or people already prone to insecurity underestimate and report worse relationships for unrelated reasons, isn’t settled by this data alone.
• It doesn’t generalize past the sampled populations with full confidence. Three of the four samples are German, one is from New Zealand, and same-gender couples make up a small slice (87 pairs) of the total. Whether the same pattern holds outside Western, higher-income, individualistic contexts is untested here.
• It doesn’t mean every man underestimates power in every romantic relationship. It’s a sample-level pattern with a real, specific gender split — not a claim about any individual reader’s relationship.

What Actually Holds Up, Given This

• If you consistently defer, assume you’ll be the one to bend, or feel like your preferences carry less weight than your partner’s, that feeling is worth checking rather than trusting outright. This study is direct evidence that the feeling and the reality frequently don’t match, and the mismatch runs in a predictable direction.
• Attachment anxiety and a strong need for control point to the same blind spot from opposite ends. If either describes you, that’s specifically where your self-assessment is least likely to be accurate here.
• Commitment appears to correct the bias, not worsen it. That cuts against a common self-help instinct to treat commitment and personal power as competing goods: one where you gain security and lose your grip on the relationship. This data says the more committed people in the sample read their own power more accurately, not less.
• This adds another data point to a pattern this site keeps finding in relationship research: the internal, self-reported read on a relationship and the actual, partner-verified state of it are frequently not the same thing. The research on partner comparison found something structurally similar, a private mental habit that splits into a version that helps and a version that quietly erodes, depending on a detail the person doing it usually can’t see from the inside.

The Bottom Line

Across 1,304 pairs (friends, same-gender couples, and man-woman couples in Germany and New Zealand), people consistently rated their own power lower than their partner’s own report said it actually was. Attachment anxiety and a strong desire for control both predicted a bigger gap; commitment predicted a smaller one. Men underrated their power in romance more than in friendship, in a pattern the researchers tie to social pressure on men to look, and feel, less dependent than they are. None of this proves the bias directly causes worse relationships, and it doesn’t license swinging the other way into overestimating your pull. But it’s a specific, measured reason to treat “I don’t have much say in this relationship” as a hypothesis worth testing against your partner’s actual behavior, not a fact to take at face value.

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Körner, R. & Overall, N. C., “Bias in Perceptions of Power in Close Relationships: The Role of Self-Protection, Pro-Relationship, and Power Motives,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (2026). Additional coverage from PsyPost, March 16, 2026. Related reading: Secure by Amir Levine: Can You Change Attachment Style?, Boundaries by Henry Cloud: What’s Useful 30 Years Later, Mankeeping Linked to Women’s Burnout, Study Finds, Self-Doubt Isn’t Humility, Study Finds, and Comparing Yourself to Your Partner Isn’t Always Bad.