SP: social power

Bertrand Russell

"The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics"

Summing up...

- Power is at cross-roads between force and function. - Having power is beneficial for physiology, health and attentional control. - Power facilitates action and goal pursuit, but is detrimental for planning. - The effects derive from differences in information processing.

Functionality

- Powerlessness has a negative impact, and power a positive impact, on individuals: - Physiology: attentional control, ability to attain goals, action

Power and Physiology

- basal cortisol - reactivity to acute stressors - Natural groups: SES, employees (basal cortisol, and poor health - reproductive, cardiovascular, mental etc; Josephs and Flack, 2010)

Common across social species

-Dominance-submissiveness displays -Physiological markers

What is power?

-Power as the potential for influence (French and Raven, 1959) -Power as control over outcomes (Fiske, 1993) -Power as capacity to modify others' feelings, cognitions or behaviour in meaningful ways (Vescio et al., 2003) One's capacity to act or to influence the behaviour of others. This can be defined from the perspective of the influencing agent, the target person, or third parties. From the perspective of the agent (who may be more or less powerful than the target person or the third party) power is the production of intended effects or, more generally, what he/she can cause. Behavior modification is typically framed from this perspective, as are most studies on compliance, SOCIAL INFLUENCE, and strategic SELF-PRESENTATION. The successful or unsuccessful experience of exercising power affects the agent's own SELF-ESTEEM, LOCUS OF CONTROL, sense of effectance or helplessness, and perception of the target person.

Sample exam questions

1.How does power affect people's information processing? 2. Discuss theoretical perspectives that explain the effects of power on action. 3. Discuss the effects of power on goal pursuit.

Power and height

28 US presidential elections 18 of the winning candidates have been taller than their opponents, 8 have been shorter, 2 have been of the same height.

Children Create Hierarchies

Children (2-3 years) form stable, linearly transitive hierarchies (Strayer and Trudel 1984) Dominant toddlers and preschoolers are not social sideliners either. Much like their primate counterparts, dominant toddlers and preschoolers play an important role in the social group apart from their ability to prevail in disputes. Despite their superior ability to acquire and control the objects they desire, and their evident willingness to employ agonistic and coercive strategies to do so, dominant toddlers and preschoolers are socially central in that they are watched, imitated, and liked. Thus, dominance in toddlers and preschoolers is commensurate with the traditional ethnologically derived theoretical and empirical underpinnings of the construct; other group members behave as if they consider the ''alphas'' as possessors of knowledge and competence and therefore are motivated to watch, learn from, and be with them. Perception of dominance emerges earlier than theory of mind. Children seem to understand important aspects of the mind from a strikingly early age, possibly from birth, but this knowledge also undergoes extensive changes with development. Early research focused on the child's understanding of belief and reality, and on the period between three and five years of age. Several significant and correlated changes seem to take place at about this time.

Coercive power derives

Coercive power derives from the ability to provide aversive or otherwise undesired outcomes to someone. As with rewards, coercion can revolve around tangible and concrete outcomes, such as the use or threat of physical force, or instead involve outcomes that are nonmaterial and acquire their valence by virtue of less tangible features. The parent concerned with a child's study habits might express disapproval for the child's shortcomings in this regard, for example, and the salesperson might redouble his or her efforts at moving stock for fear of losing his or her job.

Powerlessness

Constraints, challenge, difficult environments (e.g., Fiske, 1993; Keltner et al., 2003)

Power Increases Behaviour Variability (Guinote, Judd, and Brauer, 2002)

Dominant groups are perceived in more complex and variable ways (Guinote, 2001; Lorenzi-Cioldi, 1993). Powerful people are seem to use more abstract language. Guinote (2001) found that Portuguese participants used more abstract language to describe both their ethnic group and an out group when they were part of the majority than when they were part of a minority. Guinote et al. (2002) assigned participants to a powerful (called the judges) or to a powerless (called the workers) group and videotaped them across three different situations: working by themselves, working together in the group and introducing themselves to the other participants. Observers then rated each participant on 10 traits (creativity, intelligence, laziness). Half of the observers were informed about the power positions of the groups and the other half were not. Regardless of their knowledge about power, observers rated powerful individuals as more variable than powerless individuals, indicated by range and standard deviation of trait judgements. Individuals in powerful positions were therefore acting objectively in more variable ways compared to individuals in powerless positions. Are there differences in the objective variability of dominant and subordinate groups?

Legitimate power

Emergence of legitimate power: from survival and self-interest to coordination of group interests (e.g., Parsons, 1963) Legitimate power is based on the target person's internalized values regarding the rightfulness of the agent's position, and expert power is based on his/her respect for the agent's credibility. Legitimate power derives from societal norms that accord behavior control to individuals occupying certain roles. The flight attendant who instructs 300 passengers to put their tables in an upright position does not have a great deal of reward or coercive power, nor is he or she seen as necessarily possessing deep expertise pertaining to the request, and it is even more unlikely that he or she is the subject of identification fantasies for most of the passengers. Yet this person wields enormous influence over the passengers because of the legitimate authority he or she is accorded during the flight. Legitimate power is often quite limited in scope. A professor, for example, has the legitimate authority to schedule exams but not to tell students how to conduct their personal lives—unless, of course, he or she also has referent power for them. Legitimate power is clearly essential to societal coordination—imagine how traffic at a four-way intersection would fare if the signal lights failed and the police on the scene had to rely on gifts or their personal charisma to gain the cooperation of each driver. But blind obedience to those in positions of legitimate authority also has enormous potential for unleashing the worst in people, sometimes to the detriment of themselves or others. In recognition of this potential, social psychologists have devoted considerable attention to the nature of legitimate power, with special emphasis on obedience to authority.

Expert power drives

Expert power is accorded those who are perceived to have superior knowledge or skills relevant to the target's goals. Deference to such individuals is common when the target lacks direct personal knowledge regarding a topic or course of action. In the physician-patient relationship, for example, the patient typically complies with the physician's instructions to take a certain medicine, even when the patient has no idea how the purported remedy will cure him or her. Knowledge, in other words, is power.

Power facilitates Goal Pursuit

Faster goal setting, initiating and striving. More flexible means (Guinote, 2007) Like other motives that confer selective advantages for humans, the drive for power can sensitise people to important opportunities or "affordances" and contextually relevant information, in the flexible pursuit of their power goals. Those with power also tend to think more globally -- they focus on the first rather than the trees. Those with power seem to carry out executive cognitive functions more rapidly and successfully, including general internal control mechanisms that coordinate attention, decision-making, planning and goal-selection.

Forces

Forces can be induced on the basis of reward, coercion, referent, legitimate, or expert power. The first two power bases originate from the agent's ability to mediate respectively positive and negative outcomes for the target person. The others are derived from particular psychological states of the target person. When a person identifies with the influencing agent, this enables the agent to wield referent power over him/her.

Power Increases Behaviour Variability (Guinote, Judd, and Brauer, 2002) Study 2

Half of the observers know about power and the half doesn't know. Observers rate each judge and worker along several personality attributes (assertive, stubborn, hardworking, creative, lazy, intelligent, dependent and rigid).

Power and Physiology (Carney et al., 2010)

High-power posers experienced elevations in testosterone, decreases in cortisol, and increased feelings of power Low power posers experienced the opposite In addition, Fiske and Morlin (1996) have argued that anxiety due to powerlessness can lead to a reduction of processing capacity. One way in which this may occur is that the anxiety allows intrusive thoughts that interfere with attention to the task at hand.

Informational power

Informational power was later included in the typology to refer to the potential for influence based on the persuasive content of the agent's communication, as distinct from perceived communicator expertise. Changes resulting from information (as compared to the other five power bases) are socially independent and more stable; those resulting from reward or coercion are least stable because these two power bases require surveillance in order to be effective. The typology has been applied extensively in studies of power and LEADERSHIP in family and work settings, and now forms the basis of a power/interaction model of interpersonal influence (Raven, 1992).

Power: Kurt Lewin

Kurt Lewin separated power from its effects by restricting power to the possibility of inducing forces, and by stressing the target person's resistance. Thus the influencing agent's power over the target person is the maximum force that the agent can induce on the target person relative to the latter's maximum resistance. When the agent is able to induce forces but unable to change the target person's behavior, he/she is said to have power over but does not actually influence or CONTROL the latter.

Power, Inhibition, and flexibility (Guinote, 2007)

Participants were assigned to a powerful or a powerless condition using a priming procedure (Galinsky et al., 2003) showed that power leads to action regardless of the social consequences of that action. In their study, the powerful compared to low-power and control individual tok more from a common resource, a situation where individuals must decide how much they want to take from a common resource pool. This assertive action by the powerful ultimately exhausted the resource into extinction. Galinsky er al (2003) considered this evidence supporting the proposition that power leads to assertive action, even when this action can hurt collective interests. They performed the Framed-Line Test (Kitayama et al., 2003)

Non-verbal complementarity (Tiedens and Fragale, 2003)

People assume complementary non-verbal positions of dominance in interaction: - participants spontaneously and mutually adopt complementary positions. - participants respond to a confederate in a complementary way. Tiedens and Fragale (2003) found that when a person displays a nonverbal behaviour associated with status, it is not mimicked, but rather it is "complemented"; nonverbal behaviours, and low status behaviours are responded to with high status behaviours. That is, if the confederate sat like with authority, the participant took on a submissive stance. In contrast, if the confederate sat in a submissive manner, the participant sat more straight and in an upheld manner. Tiedens and Fragale (2003) reason that this response is an automatic and potentially unconscious behavioral response to dominance competition. That is, when faced with clear dominance signals, people tend to behave submissively to avoid potentially aggressive and costly dominance confrontations that could result in conflict or injury. Although the tests of this complementing effect in this study involved a nonverbal behaviour that is not directly related to emotional experience (body span), the same principle could be in effect for emotions associated with status positions. Specifically, emotional expressions that convey the claiming of status for oneself, such as anger or pride could be responded to with complementary emotional responses that sacrifice or reject status, such as sadness, fear, guilt or gratitude.

Planning: Number of days before the deadline (Weick and Guinote, 2010)

People who occupy positions of power in the social hierarchy--and experience the sense of power associated with that role--may be particularly prone to optimistic bias. This hypothesis is based on previous evidence that power indices goal-directed attention and a tendency to disregard information that lies outside of focal goal (Guinote, 2007). Applied to the planning fallacy, then powerful individuals should be particularly inclined to focus narrowly on planning for success and to disregard potential obstacles.

Bases of power

Power in its other sense—that of power over others—is a fundamental feature of all relationships, whether each party has a certain degree of power over the other (which is usually the case) or all the power resides with one party. Power may be based on force, acknowledged expertise, the possession of specific information that people want, the ability to reward others, or legitimization (the perception that one has the right to exercise it). Other bases for power include identification with those who wield it and reciprocity (indebtedness to the wielder of power for providing a prior benefit of somesort). May has described various types of interpersonal power, ranging from harmful to beneficial: exploitative (characterized solely by brute force); manipulative (various types of power over another person); competitive (power against another); nurturing (power for another person); and integrative (power with another person).

Planning

Power manipulation (control over decisions that affect other students) Time 1: Predictions related to course work (first draft, final version) Time 2: Actual completion

Personal and interpersonal terms

Power may be defined in both personal and interpersonal terms. In the first sense, it refers to one's physical, intellectual, or moral capacity to act. In the second,it denotes the ability to influence the behavior of others. Philosophers have often described power as an integral facet of human existence. Psychologist Harry Stack Sullivan (1892-1949) has claimed that power is a more crucial motivation than hunger or thirst.

The Situated Focus Theory of Power (Guinote, 2007)

Power promotes -Selectivity and cognitive flexibility. -Situated mindset It attempts to explain the effects of power on judgement and behaviour in ways that address both the seemingly contradictory findings in the power literate and the greater variability of powerful individuals. The theory relies on the links between power and basic control needs, and how motivation and cognitive mechanisms unfold at the service of adaptive action. The situated focus theory of power proposes that power affects the individual's goals system (i.e., ability to attain desired outcomes) which affects motivation and information processing in ways that promote more situated judgement and behaviour. Specifically, power allows individuals to attain desired outcomes more easily. They can therefore devote their undivided attention to the central aspects of their situations, such as needs, opportunities for action (affordances), accessible constructs, or focal goals. In contrast, powerless individuals cannot easily attain their goals, and they live in more difficult environments, so they pay attention to multiple sources of information to predict the future and increase control over their outcomes. In summary, power directly affects attention in ways that respond to the individual's immediate self-regulartory needs.

Power, Inhibition, and flexibility (Guinote, 2007) Conclusions

Power promotes the ability to inhibit peripheral information. Powerlessness leads to distractibility. Powerful individuals are more attuned to the situation, and have greater processing flexibility

Power and Stereotyping: Attention as a function of power and information (Goodwin and Fiske, 1995)

Powerful people's lack of contingency on their subordinates means that their motivations are more autonomous in the context of their interactions with those subordinates. Personal motives, such as vales, self-concept and personality variables thus become more relevant. For example, to the extent that they are also personally motivated b an orientation toward interpersonal dominance, they will be motivated to control a social interaction without accommodating the other. Power-holders do tend to stereotype more than individuate their subordinates. Moreover, when motivated to suppress their stereotypes, they experience suppression difficulty, which translate to exaggerated postsuppresion rebound; perhaps concluding that they but want to use the stereotype, they later express stereotypes more than do the less powerful.

Poor perspective takers

Powerful: disinhibition, positive affect, risk taking The powerful are often accused of being predominantly concerned with their own desires and well-being, of being insensitive to the social implications of their behavior, and of being poor perspective takers (Fiske, 1993) Indeed, perspective taking— stepping outside of one's own experience and imagining the emotions, perceptions, and motivations of another individual—seems the antithesis of the self-interested behavior often displayed by the powerful: It has been linked to moral reasoning (Kohlberg, 1976), altruistic behavior (Batson, 1991), and social competence (Davis, 1983). Power is often defined as the capacity to influence other people; it emerges from control over valuable resources and the ability to administer rewards and punishments (French and Raven, 1959; Keltner et al., 2003).

Powerless individuals

Powerless individuals have constraints, which leads to inhibition, negative affect, risk aversion

Referent power

Referent power derives from people's tendency to identify with someone they respect or otherwise admire. "Be like Mike" and "I am Tiger Woods," for example, are successful advertising slogans that play on consumers' desire to be similar to a cultural icon. The hoped-for similarity in such cases, of course, is stunningly superficial—all the overpriced shoes in the world won't enable a teenager to defy gravity while putting a basketball through a net or drive a small white ball 300 yards to the green in one stroke. Referent power is rarely asserted in the form of a direct request, operating instead through the pull of a desirable person, and can be manifest without the physical presence or surveillance of the influence agent. A young boy might shadow his older brother's every move, for example, even if the brother hardly notices, and an aspiring writer might emulate Hemingway's sparse writing style even though it is fair to say this earnest adulation is totally lost on Hemingway.

Reward power derives

Reward power derives, as the term implies, from the ability to provide desired outcomes to someone. The rewards may be tangible and material (e.g., money, a nice gift), but often they are more subtle and nonmaterial in nature (e.g., approval, affection). The compliance-for-reward exchange may be direct and explicit, of course, as when a parent offers an economic incentive to a child for doing his or her homework. But the transaction is often tacit or implicit in the relationship rather than directly stated. The salesperson who pushes used cars with special zeal, for example, may do so because he or she knows the company gives raises to those who meet a certain sales quota.

Rollo May

Rollo May has written about power in terms of individual human potential, referring to the roots of the word "power" in the Latin word posse, which means" to be able." May distinguishes among five levels of intrapsychic power. The most basic level,the power to be, is literally the power to exist, which is threatened if one is denied the basic conditions of human sustenance. The second level, self-affirmation, goes beyond mere survival and involves recognition and esteem by others, while the third, self-assertion, refers to the more strenuous affirmation of one's existence that is required in the face of opposition. The next level of power, aggression, develops when one's access to other forms of self-assertion is blocked. In contrast to self-assertion, which May views as essentially defensive, aggression involves the active pursuit of power or territory. The endpoint in May's continuum of power is violence, which, unlike the other levels, is divorced from reason and verbal persuasion.

French and Raven: bases of social power

Social power instead derives from a variety of different sources, each providing a correspondingly distinct form of behavior control. The work of French and Raven (Raven, 1993) is commonly considered the definitive statement on the various bases of social power and their respective manifestations in everyday life. They identify six such bases: reward, coercion, expertise, information, referent power, and legitimate authority.

Power Increases Behaviour Variability (Guinote, Judd, and Brauer, 2002) Study 1

Ten sessions: 4 powerless and 4 powerful participants. Workers perform tasks; Judges evaluate. Perform a group task. Introduce themselves, and are videotaped.

Approach - Avoidance Model Keltner et al. (2003)

The power-approach theory (Keltner et al., 2003) suggests that power increases goal-directed activity. As a result, the powerful act more and with greater variability than the nonpowerful. Although power is considered a structural variable, a property of social relationships, its psychological properties can be activated by exposure to cues related to power or by recalling past experiences with power; activating power through these manipulations leads to the same effects as those obtained using structural and role-based manipulations of power Behavioral Approach System (BAS); regulates behaviour related to sex, food, achievement, aggression. Behavioral Inhibition System (BIS); activated by punishment, threat, and uncertainty. Gray postulates three emotion systems: a behavioral approach system, a fight/flight system, and a behavioral inhibition system, each of which can be described on the behavioral level, the neural level, and the cognitive level. Gray's analysis of the cognitive level, which has focused primarily on the behavioural inhibition system, importantly includes a hypothetical construct he calls "the comparator." The comparator function is a continuous monitoring of whether the current state of the world is the same as, or different from, the expected state of the world.