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

Functional studies on BolA and related genes: increasing the understanding of a protein with pleiotropic effects

Dissertation presented to obtain a Doctoral degree in Biology by Instituto de Tecnologia Química e BiológicaBolA is a protein that is able to change bacterial shape, confer resistance against large antibiotic molecules and detergents, reduce permeability, change the equilibrium of the outer membrane porins, and it is even involved in biofilm formation. This protein has such pleiotropic effects, that its function has been very difficult to unravel. This was the starting point for the work of this dissertation. If bolA is responsible for global cellular changes that confer resistance to a multitude of stresses, it is imperative to obtain more molecular insights to increase the understanding of the role of BolA in cell physiology and survival.(...)Inês Batista e Guinote was the recipient of a Doctoral Fellowship from Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT): PhD grant – SFRH/BD/ 31758/2006. The work was suspended for 5 months for maternity leave

The predicament of Young Journalists: The study of Portugal

This article attempts to draw a portrait of young Portuguese journalists. Who are these young professionals dedicated to a profession which is in turmoil? The reasons for the instability of the sector are many and varied. We could mention the trend towards media concentration into business groups: the resulting mergers lead to diminish the importance of journalists, which in turn leads to contraction of the job market. An issue which is proving intractable is the job insecurity affecting mainly younger journalists - those who actually get the jobs, since there are large numbers of journalism graduates who run up against almost insurmountable barriers to make an entry into the profession. Power relations in the editing rooms are also changing. Relations with supervisors become impersonal, mediated by editors or managers who may not have an access to the board of directors. Within the profession, there are certain facets which differentiate one generation of journalists from another. The new information technologies also play an important role here: in addition to exponentially strengthening the dominance of time management, they completely transform communication models based on the traditional media. The role of the journalist becomes more elusive. In other words, the traditional mediating role of the journalist is disappearing

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 power affects moral judgments: The role of intuitive thinking

Power affects how people think about moral issues, and has been found to elicit deontological moral judgments. We hypothesized that powerholders' propensity to rely on intuitive thinking would trigger deontological moral choices. In two studies, power was induced by role simulation tasks and participants then made a judgment on a moral dilemma that did not involve bodily harm. In Study 1 memory cognitive load was manipulated to induce an intuitive processing style, and in Study 2 deliberation was induced by asking participants to deliver strong arguments. Results of Study 1 show that high power led to deontological judgments regardless of cognitive load, and cognitive load enhanced deontological preferences among powerless individuals. In Study 2 we found that deliberation shifted the judgments of powerholders toward utilitarianism. These results extend prior findings and reinforce the links between power and deontology. The findings suggest that powerholders' preference for deontological moral judgments is driven by their reliance on intuitive thinking

I can, I do, and so I like:From power to action and aesthetic preferences

The current work tested the hypothesis that power increases reliance on experiences of motor fluency in forming aesthetic preferences. In 4 experiments, participants reported their aesthetic preferences regarding a variety of targets (pictures, movements, objects, and letters). Experiments 1, 2, and 3 manipulated power and motor fluency (via motoric resonance, extraocular muscle training, and dominant hand restriction). Experiment 4 manipulated power and assessed chronic interindividual differences in motor fluency. Across these experiments, power consistently increased reliance on motor fluency in aesthetic preference judgments. This finding was not mediated by differences in mood, judgment certainty, perceived task-demands or task-enjoyment, and derived from the use of motor simulations rather than from power differences in the acquisition of motor experiences. This is the first demonstration suggesting that power changes the formation of preference judgments as a function of motor fluency experiences. The implications of this research for the links between power and action, as well as the understanding of fluency processes are discussed

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