Psychological Power

Abstract

Psychological power is the exertion of a strong influence or control over others in a variety of settings, administrative, social and academic among them, and MeSH classifies it under motivation. This article covers the classification of the bases of social power, the approach/inhibition account of how power changes behavior, the effects of power on action, perspective taking, abstract thinking and stereotyping, the personal sense of power, the distinction between power and personal control, the replication debate over power posing, and empowerment. The central question is what holding power does to the person who holds it: an influential theory casts power as activating approach, while later work argues that high and low power do not always have opposite effects.

Keywords: power, social power, approach and inhibition, perspective taking, power posing

Scholars who examine the psychological effects of power have often argued that possessing power shapes individual behavior because it instills an elevated sense of power (Anderson et al., 2012). Sociocognitive research has demonstrated that power affects how people feel, think and act (Guinote, 2017).

What Psychological Power Is

MeSH defines the descriptor Power, Psychological as the exertion of a strong influence or control over others in a variety of settings, administrative, social, academic and others, and lists Power (Psychology), Power, Personal, Power, Professional and Power, Social among its entry terms. MeSH files the descriptor under motivation and lists one narrower descriptor, empowerment. Professional power falls within the same research: the bases of power model has been examined in terms of its applicability to settings including hospital infection control, patient compliance with physicians' recommendations and supervisor/subordinate relationships (Raven, 1993).

Power is distinguished from status. One review argues that status and power are two important yet distinct bases of hierarchical differentiation, with power related to one's control over valued resources and status related to the respect one has in the eyes of others (Magee & Galinsky, 2008). Power, on that account, transforms individual psychology such that the powerful think and act in ways that lead to the retention and acquisition of power, which is one reason status and power hierarchies tend to be self-reinforcing (Magee & Galinsky, 2008).

The entry terms personal power and social power correspond to a distinction drawn in the research literature between social power, power over other people, and personal power, freedom from other people; in two studies the two had opposite effects on stereotyping but parallel effects on behavioral approach (Lammers et al., 2009). Across nine studies, subjectively experiencing one's power as autonomy predicted the desire for power, whereas the experience of influence over others did not (Lammers et al., 2016). The personal sense of power is a separate object of study. Across nine samples and 1,141 participants, the personal sense of power was coherent within social contexts, moderately consistent across relationships but with considerable relationship specificity, and affected not only by sociostructural factors such as social position and status but also by personality variables such as dominance (Anderson et al., 2012).

Types of Psychological Power

MeSH lists a single narrower descriptor beneath power, which is itself filed under motivation. MeSH is an indexing classification, not a theory of the mind: its subtypes record how the literature is indexed, they need not be mutually exclusive, and the list is not a claim that power divides naturally into kinds.

Psychological empowerment has been distinguished into processes and outcomes, on the assumption that empowerment differs across people, contexts and times, and one analysis argues that a universal and global measure of psychological empowerment may not be a feasible or appropriate goal (Zimmerman, 1995).

Bases of Power

French and Raven classified the bases of social power in a 1959 chapter (French & Raven, 1959). A later review traced the analysis to Kurt Lewin and his followers at the Research Center for Group Dynamics, and reported that the bases of power model posited six bases of power, reward, coercion, legitimate, expert, referent and informational (or persuasion), the last credited to Raven (1965), and that the model has since gone through significant developments, including a more comprehensive model of the influencing agent's motivations, strategies and their aftereffects (Raven, 1993). A later summary traces the work from the initial 1959 work of French and Raven through decades of follow-up work, and ties it to that of others doing work on power bases (Raven, 2008). An independent critique found that a majority of the field studies using French and Raven's five-fold typology suffered from severe methodological shortcomings, and its reanalysis strongly suggested that at least some knowledge about the five bases of power is methodologically suspect (Podsakoff & Schriesheim, 1985).

Effects of Power

Keltner, Gruenfeld and Anderson proposed that elevated power is associated with increased rewards and freedom and thereby activates approach-related tendencies, whereas reduced power is associated with increased threat, punishment and social constraint and thereby activates inhibition-related tendencies (Keltner et al., 2003). Table 2 lists the associations they derived. The approach/inhibition theory's emphasis on approach remains at the centre of a later review, which proposes an integrated framework of power as an intensifier of goal-related approach motivation (Guinote, 2017).

Figure 1

The Approach/Inhibition Account of Power

A review proposes an integrated framework of power as an intensifier of goal-related approach motivation, in which power energizes thought, speech and action and orients individuals toward salient goals, and argues that several inconsistencies in the literature are explained by viewing power holders as more flexible and dynamic than is usually assumed (Guinote, 2017). A quantitative review challenges the assumption that low power tends to produce opposite consequences of high power: many studies lack the control conditions needed to draw inferences about low power, and in two experiments low-power individuals sometimes took less action than high-power individuals but at other times behaved similarly, objectifying others to the same extent (Schaerer et al., 2018).

Power changes action. Participants who possessed structural power in a group task were more likely to take a card in a simulated game of blackjack, participants primed with high power were more likely to act against an annoying fan, and priming high power led to action in a social dilemma regardless of whether that action had prosocial or antisocial consequences (Galinsky et al., 2003). Guinote argued that the greater ease with which powerful individuals acquire desired outcomes can partly be attributed to self-regulation: across four studies of goal setting, the initiation of goal-directed action, persistence and flexibility, and responses to good opportunities, power facilitated prioritization and goal-consistent behavior (Guinote, 2007).

Power reduces perspective taking. Participants primed with high power were more likely than those primed with low power to draw an E on their forehead in a self-oriented direction, and high-power participants were less likely to take into account that others did not possess their privileged knowledge and less accurate than control participants in determining other people's emotion expressions (Galinsky et al., 2006).

Power changes how information is processed. In six experiments with conceptual and perceptual tasks, priming high power led to more abstract processing than did priming low power, even when this led to worse performance (Smith & Trope, 2006). A rival account, the social distance theory of power, proposes that asymmetric dependence produces asymmetric social distance, with high-power individuals feeling more distant than low-power individuals, and that this distance leads them to engage in more abstract mental representation; the same review reassesses the approach/inhibition theory, noting limitations both in what it can predict and in the evidence directly supporting its proposed mechanisms (Magee & Smith, 2013).

On one theory, power and stereotyping reinforce each other. Fiske proposed that the powerless attend to the powerful who control their outcomes and so form complex, potentially nonstereotypic impressions, whereas the powerful pay less attention and so are more vulnerable to stereotyping, because they need not attend, cannot attend owing to attentional overload, or, with a high need for dominance, may not want to attend (Fiske, 1993). The type of power matters here: social power and personal power had opposite effects on stereotyping (Lammers et al., 2009).

Whether power corrupts has a long history. In a simulated organizational setting, control of power caused participants to increase their attempts to influence the less powerful, devalue the worth of their performance, attribute their efforts to power controlled by themselves, view them as objects of manipulation and prefer to maintain psychological distance from them, while no support was found for the prediction that power would elevate self-esteem (Kipnis, 1972). More recent work separates power over others from personal control: in three correlational studies, power over others positively predicted aggressiveness and exploitativeness, whereas personal control predicted these outcomes negatively, although in Study 2 that effect was only marginally significant (Cislak et al., 2018). Power's effects also depend on the holder's goals: across three studies, power-primed individuals with a communal relationship orientation responded in socially responsible ways, whereas power-primed individuals with an exchange orientation acted more in line with their self-interests (Chen et al., 2001).

The Power-Posing Debate

The embodiment of power became a replication test case. In the original study, high-power posers experienced elevations in testosterone, decreases in cortisol, and increased feelings of power and tolerance for risk, while low-power posers showed the opposite pattern, and the authors concluded that a person can, by assuming two simple 1-min poses, embody power (Carney et al., 2010). A later study assessed the robustness of power posing in a large sample of men and women and reported no effect on hormones and risk tolerance (Ranehill et al., 2015). A p-curve analysis of the 33 studies cited in the original authors' reply concluded that the distribution of p-values was indistinguishable from what is expected if the average effect size were zero and selective reporting were solely responsible for the significant effects, and that the existing evidence was too weak to advocate power posing (Simmons & Simonsohn, 2017). The debate continued with a reply whose authors reported that a p-curve analysis of a more comprehensive body of research on postural feedback revealed evidential value for power-posing effects (Cuddy et al., 2018).

Worked Example

The sense-of-power studies give the scale of the evidence: a total of 1,141 participants across nine samples (Anderson et al., 2012), or about 127 participants per sample on average (1,141 / 9 = 126.8). The personal-control studies were larger: Study 1 had 793 participants and Study 2 had 445 (Cislak et al., 2018), so Study 1 alone was about 70% of the combined sense-of-power samples (793 / 1,141 = 0.695).

Discussion

Three conclusions follow for psychology. First, power is a relation with psychological consequences: on the approach/inhibition theory it activates approach (Keltner et al., 2003), and on a later framework it intensifies goal-related approach motivation (Guinote, 2017).

Second, the effects are not simply the mirror image of powerlessness. Low-power individuals sometimes behaved like high-power individuals, objectifying others to the same extent (Schaerer et al., 2018), and power over others and personal control had opposite associations with aggressiveness and exploitativeness (Cislak et al., 2018).

Third, findings about power need replication. The hormonal effects reported for brief power poses (Carney et al., 2010) were not found in a large replication (Ranehill et al., 2015).

Current Directions

Three lines of work are active. Low power: many studies lack control conditions needed to draw inferences about low power, and effects are predominantly attributed to high power (Schaerer et al., 2018). Control: holding a high position is associated with both power over others and personal control, which can have opposite consequences (Cislak et al., 2018). Flexibility: power holders have been argued to be more flexible and dynamic than is usually assumed (Guinote, 2017).

Common Misconceptions

“Low power is simply the opposite of high power.”

In two experiments, low-power individuals sometimes took less action than high-power individuals but at other times objectified others to the same extent (Schaerer et al., 2018).

“Wanting a high position means wanting power over others.”

One account holds that people seek high positions not to gain influence over others but to satisfy their need for personal control: in nine studies, people desired power not to be a master over others but to be master of their own domain (Lammers et al., 2016; Cislak et al., 2018).

“Status and power are the same thing.”

Power is related to control over valued resources and status to the respect one has in the eyes of others (Magee & Galinsky, 2008).

Glossary

Abstract processing.

Focusing on primary aspects of stimuli and extracting the gist, which priming high power increased.

Approach/inhibition theory.

The proposal that elevated power activates approach-related tendencies and reduced power inhibition-related tendencies.

Bases of power.

The sources of an agent's influence in the bases of power model: reward, coercion, legitimate, expert, referent and informational (or persuasion), the last credited to Raven (1965).

Coercive power.

One of the six bases of power in the French and Raven model.

Empowerment.

The narrower MeSH descriptor beneath power, whose processes and outcomes differ across people, contexts and times.

Expert power.

One of the six bases of power in the French and Raven model.

Informational power.

The base of power also called persuasion in the French and Raven model.

Legitimate power.

One of the six bases of power in the French and Raven model.

Personal control.

Influence over one's own life, distinguished from power as influence over others.

Personal sense of power.

An individual's belief in their own power, coherent within social contexts and partly specific to each relationship.

Perspective taking.

Comprehending how other people see, think and feel, which power was associated with doing less.

Power posing.

Assuming open, expansive postures, proposed to cause changes in hormones, feelings of power and risk tolerance.

Referent power.

One of the six bases of power in the French and Raven model.

Reward power.

One of the six bases of power in the French and Raven model.

Status.

The respect one has in the eyes of others, a basis of hierarchy distinct from power.

Key Researchers

Dana R. Carney

Professor at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley; first author of the original power-posing study. Wikipedia - Wikidata - Google Scholar - Faculty Page

Susan T. Fiske

Professor at Princeton University; proposed that power and stereotyping are mutually reinforcing through attention. ORCID - Wikipedia - Wikidata - Google Scholar - Faculty Page

John R. P. French

(1913-1995). Social psychologist at the Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan; co-authored the classification of the bases of social power. Wikipedia - Wikidata

Adam D. Galinsky

Professor at Columbia Business School; co-authored studies of power, action and perspective taking. ORCID

Ana Guinote

Social psychologist at University College London; showed across four studies that power facilitated prioritization and goal-consistent behavior, and proposed that power intensifies goal-related approach motivation. ORCID - Faculty Page

Dacher Keltner

Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley; co-proposed the approach/inhibition theory of power. ORCID - Wikipedia - Wikidata - Google Scholar - Faculty Page

Bertram H. Raven

(1926-2020). Social psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles; co-authored the bases of social power and later extended the model. Wikipedia - Wikidata - Faculty Page

Frequently Asked Questions

What is power in psychology?

MeSH defines it as the exertion of a strong influence or control over others, and one review relates power to control over valued resources (Magee & Galinsky, 2008).

What are the bases of power?

The bases of power model posited six: reward, coercion, legitimate, expert, referent and informational (Raven, 1993).

How does power change behavior?

On the approach/inhibition theory, elevated power activates approach-related tendencies and reduced power activates inhibition-related tendencies (Keltner et al., 2003).

Does power make people less empathic?

High-power participants were less accurate than control participants in determining other people's emotion expressions (Galinsky et al., 2006).

Why are powerful people prone to stereotyping?

One theory holds that the powerful pay less attention to those they control and so are more vulnerable to stereotyping (Fiske, 1993).

Does power corrupt?

In correlational studies, power over others positively predicted aggressiveness and exploitativeness, whereas personal control predicted them negatively, although in one study that effect was only marginally significant (Cislak et al., 2018).

Does power posing work?

A large replication reported no effect of power posing on hormones and risk tolerance (Ranehill et al., 2015).

What is psychological empowerment?

It has been analysed as processes and outcomes that differ across people, contexts and times (Zimmerman, 1995).

References