Getting what you want: power increases the accessibility of active goals

Power facilitates goal-directed behavior. Two studies, using different types of goals, examined the cognitive mechanisms that underlie this tendency. Participants, primed with power or powerlessness, performed lexical decision tasks that assessed the relative facilitation of goal-relevant constructs during goal striving and after goal attainment. Results showed that during goal striving powerful participants manifested an increased facilitation of goal-relevant constructs compared to other constructs, and this facilitation decreased immediately after goal completion. In contrast, their powerless counterparts showed less facilitation of goal constructs during goal striving and maintained goal accessibility after completion. These results are consistent with the effects of power on goal-directed behavior found in past research

Organizational power predicts decision making quality

The aim of this study was to analyze the link between power and the quality of decision. Participants were 50 employees from an organizational company, consisting of two groups (High-Power, N=24; Low-Power, N=26) based on the organization's hierarchical power position. To evaluate the quality of the decisions, all participants performed tasks involving choice among several alternatives in two separate moments of the same day: in the morning (at the beginning of the workday) and late afternoon (at the end of the workday). Additional subjective measures (fatigue, alertness, effort) and skin conductance were obtained. Results indicated that having high power in the organization was related to making better decisions, over and above the subjective levels of fatigue, alertness, effort, and physiological arousal. No effects of time-of-day were found on the decision making. Consistent with experimental research, having power facilitated decision-making performance in an organizational context

How quickly can you detect it? Power facilitates attentional orienting

This study investigated how power impacts the ability to orient attention across space. Participants were assigned to a high power or control role and then performed a computerised spatial cueing task in which they were required to direct their attention to a target that had been preceded by either a valid or invalid location cue. Compared to participants in the control condition, power-holders were better able to override the misinformation provided by invalid cues. This advantage occurred only at 500 ms stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), whereas at 1000 ms SOA, when there was more time to prepare a response, no differences were found. These findings are taken to support the growing idea that social power affects cognitive flexibility

When subjective experiences matter: power increases reliance on ease of retrieval

Past research on power focused exclusively on declarative knowledge and neglected the role of subjective experiences. Five studies tested the hypothesis that power increases reliance on the experienced ease or difficulty that accompanies thought generation. Across a variety of targets, such as attitudes, leisure-time satisfaction, and stereotyping, and with different operationalizations of power, including priming, trait dominance, and actual power in managerial contexts, power consistently increased reliance on the ease of retrieval. These effects remained 1 week later and were not mediated by mood, quality of the retrieved information, or number of counterarguments. These findings indicate that powerful individuals construe their judgments on the basis of momentary subjective experiences and do not necessarily rely on core attitudes or prior knowledge, such as stereotypes

How long will it take? Power biases time predictions

People tend to underestimate the time it takes to accomplish tasks. This bias known as the planning fallacy derives from the tendency to focus attention too narrowly on the envisaged goal and to ignore additional information that could make predictions more accurate and less biased. Drawing on recent research showing that power induces attentional focus, four studies tested the hypothesis that power strengthens the tendency to underestimate future task completion time. Across a range of task domains, and using multiple operationalizations of power, including actual control over outcomes (Study 1), priming (Studies 2 and 3), and individual differences (Study 4), power consistently led to more optimistic and less accurate time predictions. Support was found for the role of attentional focus as an underlying mechanism for those effects. Differences in optimism, self-efficacy, and mood did not contribute to the greater bias in powerful individuals’ forecasts. We discuss the implications of these findings for institutional decision processes and occupational health

Power as Active Self: From Acquisition to the Expression and Use of Power

Philosophers, scientists, policymakers, and the public have questioned about who ascends to power and how power affects the person. This chapter reviews and discusses social–cognitive literature from the last decade or so that examines how dispositions and contextual factors affect the emergence of power and how having power affects the links between dispositions and behavior. Following a process-based perspective that contemplates the cognitive strategies of people in power, a model is proposed of power as a magnifier of the active self—that is, the subset of self-knowledge that is active on a moment-to-moment basis. The active self channels attention and action in line with priorities and plays a key role in action facilitation and goal-directed behavior. The active self is responsive to chronic dispositions, emotions, and current states of the person and to inputs from the environment in a flexible manner. Extant research is integrated based on this model

Power's mission: impact and the quest for goal achievement

This article discusses evidence linking power to purpose: that of having an impact in the social environment and carrying out individual or collective aims and desires. First, it highlights the role of goals during the emergence and the exercise of power. Accordingly, it suggests that typical power’s mission is to strive for social or personal objectives in social contexts. This includes social influence goals, organizational or personal agendas. Secondly, the article describes how power affects goal-related strategies and cognitive inclinations. Evidence suggests that power triggers prioritization and facilitates the pursuit of any salient goals, filtered by personal values and inclinations of the powerholder. Thirdly, the article examines powerholders’ effectiveness of goal pursuit, including their performance on tangible social tasks. Finally, the article ends with a discussion on non-intended consequences of the power-goal links in particular in the social domain

Cheating at the top: Trait dominance explains dishonesty more consistently than social power

Power has long been associated with dishonesty. Here we examined the contributions of personal and structural factors associated with power. Across 5 studies (N = 1,366), we tested the hypothesis that being dominant, more than having power and felt prestige, predicts dishonesty in incentivized tasks, moral disengagement, and breaking of Covid-19 containment rules. Dominance and dishonesty were positively associated (Study 1). Furthermore, dominance contributed to the positive relationship between occupational power and dishonesty in natural settings (Studies 2, 5). Different types of power had inconsistent effects on dishonesty (Studies 3, 4). Prestige was unrelated to dishonesty. Dominant individuals were overrepresented at the top, suggesting that the association between power and dishonesty may derive from self-selection processes, rather than power itself.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Does power magnify the expression of dispositions?

Conventional wisdom holds that power holders act more in line with their dispositions than do people who lack power. Drawing on principles of construct accessibility, we propose that this is the case only when no alternative constructs are activated. In three experiments, we assessed participants’ chronic dispositions and subsequently manipulated participants’ degree of power. Participants then either were or were not primed with alternative (i.e., inaccessible or counterdispositional) constructs. When no alternatives were activated, the responses of power holders—perceptions of other people (Experiment 1), preferences for charitable donations (Experiment 2), and strategies in an economic game (Experiment 3)—were more in line with their chronically accessible constructs than were the responses of low-power participants. However, when alternatives had been activated, power holders’ responses were no longer more congruent with their dispositions than were the responses of low-power participants. We propose a single mechanism according to which power increases reliance on accessible constructs—that is, constructs that easily come to mind—regardless of whether these constructs are chronically or temporarily accessible