- Email: [email protected]
Social power and the self
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
ScienceDirect Social power and the self Serena Chen Separate literatures exist on social power, status, and hierarchy on the one hand, and the self on the other, but important points of intersection have emerged over the past several decades. This paper reviews recent developments at the interface between social power (and related constructs) and the self. These developments orbit around two broad questions. First, how does social power influence self-expression (e.g. does power enhance or diminish subjective feelings of authenticity)? And second, does social power shift one’s orientation toward the self or toward others (e.g. does power lead people to construe the self in more independent or interdependent terms)? I conclude by suggesting possible future directions on the link between social power and self-related processes and phenomena. Address University of California, Berkeley, United States
(e.g. does power lead people to construe the self in more independent or interdependent terms)?
Power and self-expression One of the earliest points of intersection between power and the self addressed the question of how power affects activation and expression of aspects of the self, such as one’s traits, goals, emotions, attitudes, and behavioral inclinations. In time, this raised questions about the implications of power for one’s subjective sense of authenticity — in that prevailing conceptualizations of the construct suggest that feelings of authenticity arise in considerable part from outwardly expressing, in words and deeds, one’s inner thoughts and feelings. The past several years have witnessed some advances on both of these fronts related to the link between power and self-expression.
Corresponding author: Chen, Serena ([email protected])
The working self-concept Current Opinion in Psychology 2020, 33:69–73 This review comes from a themed issue on Power, status, and hierarchy Edited by Gerben van Kleef and Joey Cheng
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2019.07.021 2352-250X/ã 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Social power and related constructs have long been topics of inquiry among social and personality psychologists. Theoretical and empirical attention to these topics began a steep ascent in the 1990s, an upward trajectory that has continued ever since. The self as a domain of inquiry, on the other hand, is as old as the discipline of psychology itself. As the literature on social power grew, questions implicating the self naturally arose, such as how features of the self may influence the exercise of power and how possessing or lacking power may shape aspects of the self. This article reviews recent theoretical and empirical developments at the interface between social power and the self. I organize these developments around two broad questions: first, how does social power (and related constructs) influence self-expression (e.g. does power enhance or diminish subjective feelings of authenticity?); and second, does social power (and related constructs) tend to shift one’s orientation toward the self or others www.sciencedirect.com
Early studies that spoke to how power influences the activation and expression of self-aspects did not explicitly call upon, much less use the language of, theory and research from the self literature. The focus instead was on empirical demonstrations of how having power, relative to lacking power, is associated with a greater likelihood of, for example, expressing one’s opinions (e.g. Refs. [1,13,22]), feelings (e.g. Ref. [19]), personality dispositions [9,18], and chronic relationship goals (e.g. Ref. [10]). Insofar as opinions, feelings, personality dispositions, and goals can all be considered facets of the self, findings like these suggested that, relative to lower power, higher power activates a constellation of self-aspects, thereby making them more likely to be outwardly manifested in some manner. This suggestion that power enhances activation and expression of features of the self implies a situational, in-the-moment perspective on the self. Such a perspective is captured by a longstanding and widely accepted construct in the self literature — namely, the ‘working self-concept’ [34,35], which refers to the particular subset of self-knowledge that is activated, brought into working memory, in a given moment and context. This subset of self-knowledge is assumed to be the primary driver of the person’s thoughts, feelings, and actions in the particular moment and context. In the language of theorizing on the working self-concept, then, higher relative to lower power can be seen as increasing thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that reflect the contents of this self-concept. In fact, this very proposition lies at the heart of recent theoretical and empirical work by Guinote and colleagues [16,17]. Current Opinion in Psychology 2020, 33:69–73
70 Power, status, and hierarchy
In brief, Guinote and colleagues maintain that power magnifies the currently activated self. Regardless of the precise content of this active self — which is multiply determined, subject to chronic dispositions, current emotions and other internal states, as well as environmental inputs — the argument here is that power energizes this content, such that it directs attention, judgment, and action toward the person’s current priorities. This basic viewpoint provides a useful, unifying framework for a substantial array of empirical findings that have emerged over the past decade or so on the effects of power on cognition, emotion, and action (for a review of such findings, see Ref. [16]).
authenticity. In particular, Kim et al. [24] recently showed that, contrary to what one might expect given the evidence for a power-authenticity association, the emotions that people display after committing a transgression are actually perceived to be less authentic when the transgressor is higher compared to lower in power. Put another way, perceivers tend to discount the emotional authenticity of high-power (versus low-power) transgressors, which in turn leads perceivers to trust higher-power transgressors less and for them to put in less effort to argue for greater leniency in punishment for such transgressors.
Power and authenticity
Power and focus on the self versus others
An increasingly accepted conceptualization of authenticity defines the construct as having the subjective sense, either momentarily or dispositionally that one is in line with one’s true or real self (e.g. Refs. [28,46,51]). This subjective sense of being authentic is likely experienced when people outwardly express — through words, deeds, or both — their inner thoughts, feelings, and dispositional tendencies. Given evidence that power enhances selfexpression, broadly defined, it stands to reason that power would be associated with greater authenticity. Indeed, over the past decade or so, researchers have produced a number of direct empirical demonstrations of a powerauthenticity link (e.g. Refs. [23,26]; for a recent review, see Ref. [8]). For example, participants primed with high power report greater state authenticity than their counterparts primed with low power [23,26].
The second broad question addressed by recent theoretical and empirical efforts at the interface of social power and the self has to do with whether power shifts one’s orientation more toward the self or toward others. This is a longstanding topic of inquiry (e.g. Refs. [12,25]) for which there is evidence to support both possibilities— that power can, under some circumstances or among certain individuals, elicit greater focus on the self and one’s own concerns, emotions, and opinions (e.g. Refs. [27,37,48,49]) as well as, alternatively, a greater orientation toward others and their interests (e.g. Refs. [21,38,42]). Recent studies in this realm provide some new answers to this question. These studies vary in whether the focus has been on social power per se or on other hierarchy-related constructs (i.e. social class; see Ref. [39] for a discussion of similarities and distinctions between social power and social class). They also vary in how orientation toward the self versus others has been conceptualized and operationalized, with some studies measuring aspects of the self more directly than others, but all nonetheless carrying implications for how one views the self in relation to others.
In recent years several new directions on the association between power and authenticity have emerged. One example is work by Gan et al. [14], who proposed and found evidence that people can gain a subjective sense of power by being authentic — in other words, the power-authenticity association is bidirectional such that momentary, state feelings of authenticity can breed power. To illustrate, across several studies these researchers showed that people feel more powerful when they visualized themselves behaving authentically versus inauthentically, or recalled a time when they felt authentic versus inauthentic. Gan et al. also found that perceivers infer others’ power, and make downstream judgments (i.e. likelihood of being an effective negotiator and leader), based on others’ authenticity — with greater authenticity being linked to greater power-related inferences. These recent findings indicating that people infer others’ power from their authenticity fits well with various strands of earlier research showing other bases on which perceivers infer other people’s power — such as when others are action-oriented (e.g. Ref. [30]) or when they violate social norms (e.g. Ref. [48]) — tendencies that both reflect a form of self-expression. Recent years, however, have revealed some interesting nuances to the social perception of power and Current Opinion in Psychology 2020, 33:69–73
Independent versus interdependent orientation
Broadly speaking, an independent orientation entails viewing the self as an autonomous entity, largely separate from the social context and, concomitantly, entails a greater focus on oneself versus others [32,33]. By contrast, an interdependent orientation engenders a sense of interconnectedness, a construal of the self in terms of one’s relations to others, and a corresponding focus on the social environment. Over the past decade a number of researchers have demonstrated that being higher (versus lower) in a social hierarchy — whether measured in terms of, for example, a subjective sense of relative social power or socioeconomic status — is associated with possessing a more independent, relative to interdependent, construal of the self and orientation toward others (e.g. Refs. [6,7,29,31,32]). In turn, a greater independent self-construal and orientation implies less attention and focus on others relative to the self (e.g. Refs. [2,15,47]). www.sciencedirect.com
Social power and the self Chen 71
Recent advances in this vein include research by Vial and Napier [50] examining the implications of the powerindependence association for ingroup identification. These researchers argued that, consistent with the evidence showing that power shifts people toward a more independent orientation, higher (versus lower) power likely reduces people’s tendency to derive a sense of belongingness via identifying with salient ingroups — that is, defining themselves at least in part in terms of their group memberships. Supporting this, Vial and Napier showed, for example, that when women were primed with high (versus low) power, they reported less identification with their gender group. Another recent example is cross-cultural research by Miyamoto et al. [36]. Noting that prior evidence for a link between higher socioeconomic status and a greater independent orientation is based entirely on data obtained from Western countries — where such an orientation is strongly sanctioned — Miyamoto et al. proposed that in countries where an interdependent orientation is sanctioned, this same link may not emerge. They examined this hypothesis in a number of studies involving comparisons between samples from the U.S. and Japan — the latter being a country in which interdependence is strongly valued and promoted. Overall, while Miyamoto et al. did find evidence for a positive association between socioeconomic status and independence across cultures, albeit stronger in Western countries such as the U.S., they also found a strong association between higher socioeconomic status and greater interdependence in Japan, a finding they argue likely generalizes to other cultures that share the Confucian values of Japan. Power as social responsibility
Another angle on the question of whether power shifts one’s orientation toward the self versus others comes from research testing the notion that power can be construed as opportunity or responsibility — that is, as providing enhanced opportunities to achieve one’s own goals or as coming with social responsibilities given one’s control over others’ outcomes, respectively [40,41]. Construing power as opportunity implies a greater self orientation, whereas viewing power as responsibility conveys a greater focus on others. Sassenberg et al. [40] showed that power is generally judged to be more attractive when it is framed in opportunity versus responsibility terms, but this is particularly the case among individuals who score higher on promotion orientation [20] — a self-regulatory disposition associated with a focus on gains and accomplishments. Additional findings have emerged in recent years to illuminate predictors and implications of power when construed as opportunity versus responsibility. For example, in terms of predictors, recent findings suggest that power is more likely to be construed in responsibility rather than opportunity terms when the powerholder in www.sciencedirect.com
question identifies with the social group to which they and those over whom they hold power belong [44]. Another predictor example comes from studies showing that when people are induced to cognitively focus on another person, they are more apt to construe and approach an impending position of power through a responsibility (versus opportunity) lens [45]. Turning to implications, one recent example is work examining whether people respond to power with a threat versus challenge response [43]. When people see the demands of a situation as outweighing their resources, they experience stress, or a threat response, whereas when resources outweigh demands, they exhibit a greater challenge response [3,4]. Although higher power is typically associated with lower threat responses, Scholl et al. [43] demonstrated that when power is construed in responsibility terms, people experience greater threat compared to challenge responses, assessed via both self-report and cardiovascular measures. A second example is research suggesting that when power is construed in terms of responsibility versus opportunity, the typical tendency for powerholders to ignore others’ advice does not emerge [11]. Instead, powerholders who view their power in terms of responsibility (versus opportunity) value others’ advice more, and this is associated with a greater willingness to take such advice.
Summary and future directions To summarize, recent developments at the intersection of social power and the self have focused on two broad questions, one having to do with how power influences expression of the self, and the other having to do with how power shifts one’s construal of the self and corresponding orientation toward others. To be sure, both of these areas of inquiry have yielded important findings and, at the same time, have advanced the literatures on both power and the self. In particular, incorporating constructs, processes, and phenomena from the self literature has offered new insights, hypotheses, and tools for power researchers to explore and utilize. On the flip side, research on how the experience and use of power shape, and are shaped by, aspects of the self is critical for self researchers given the ubiquity of power relations in daily social life. The above said, it is not unreasonable to suggest that exploration of the interface between social power and the self is still in its beginning stages. There are many potential points of intersection that remain to be studied, especially ones where features of the self play a more explicit role in theory and research. For instance, although there are hints in the literature that power may be positively associated with a promotion regulatory focus, many questions regarding how power influences self-regulatory processes remain. How does power influence not only the pursuit of one’s goals, but also one’s reactions to goal setbacks? How does power influence the regulation of one’s emotions? Does it matter whether Current Opinion in Psychology 2020, 33:69–73
72 Power, status, and hierarchy
those emotions are power-related in some manner? Another example pertains to self-concept clarity [5], which refers to the degree to which a person’s selfconcept is clearly and confidently defined, internally consistent, and temporally stable. Do people higher or lower in power experience greater self-concept clarity? What are possible downstream consequences of a link between power and self-concept clarity? Can this relationship explain, in part, why power tends to promote self-expression? Does greater self-concept clarity breed a sense of power? Such questions are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of possible areas of inquiry at the intersection of social power and the self.
11. De Wit F, Scheepers D, Ellemers N, Sassenberg K, Scholl A: Whether power holders construe their power as responsibility or opportunity influences their tendency to take advice from others. J Organ Behav 2017, 38:923-949. 12. Fiske S: Controlling other people: the impact of power on stereotyping. Am Psychol 1993, 48:621-628. 13. Galinsky AD, Magee JC, Gruenfeld DH, Whitson JA, Liljenquist KA: Power reduces the press of the situation: implications for creativity, conformity, and dissonance. J Pers Soc Psychol 2008, 95:1450-1466.
Funding
14. Gan M, Heller D, Chen S: The power in being yourself: feeling authentic enhances the sense of power. Pers Soc Psychol Bull 2018, 44:1460-1472. This empirical piece presents a set of well-powered studies, including ones using experimental designs, that demonstrate that the positive effect of power on subjective feelings of authenticity is bidirectional. This paper also includes findings showing that not only does authentic behavior breed a sense of subjective power, but such behavior also leads social perceivers to infer that targets who engage in authentic behavior have greater power.
This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-forprofit sectors.
15. Gordon AM, Chen S: Does power help or hurt: the moderating role of self-other focus on power and perspective-taking in romantic relationships. Pers Soc Psychol Bull 2013, 39:10971112.
Conflict of interest statement
16. Guinote A: How power affects people: activating, wanting, and goal seeking. Annu Rev Psychol 2017, 68:353-381.
Nothing declared.
References and recommended reading Papers of particular interest, published within the period of review, have been highlighted as: of special interest of outstanding interest 1.
2.
Anderson C, Berdahl JL: The experience of power: examining the effects of power on approach and inhibition tendencies. J Pers Soc Psychol 2002, 83:1362-1377. Blader SL, Shirako A, Chen Y: Looking out from the top: differential effects of status and power on perspective taking. Pers Soc Psychol Bull 2016, 42:723-737.
17. Guinote A, Chen S: Power as active self: from acquisition to the expression and use of power. In Oxford Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology, edn 2. Edited by Deaux K, Snyder M.New York: Oxford University Press; 2018:645-668. This chapter provides a detailed description of a broad theoretical perspective on the effects of power, grounded in the core idea that power magnifies the currently activated self. It also includes an up-todate review of empirical findings that are readily interpretable in the framework of this active self framework. 18. Guinote A, Weick M, Cai A: Does power magnify the expression of dispositions? Psychol Sci 2012, 23:475-482. 19. Hecht M, LaFrance M: License or obligation to smile: the effect of power and sex on amount and type of smiling. Pers Soc Psychol Bull 1998, 24:1332-1342. 20. Higgins ET: Beyond pleasure and pain. Am Psychol 1997, 52:1280-1300.
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Caza BB, Tiedens L, Lee F: Power becomes you: the effects of implicit and explicit power on the self. Organ Behav Hum Decis Process 2011, 114:15-24.
24. Kim P, Mislin A, Tuncel E, Fehr R, Chesin A, Van Kleef G: Power as an emotional liability: implications for perceived authenticity and trust after a transgression. J Exp Psychol Gen 2017, 146:1379-1401.
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Chen S: Authenticity in context: being true to working selves. Rev Gen Psychol 2019. [In press].
25. Kipnis D: Does power corrupt? J Pers Soc Psychol 1972, 24:3341.
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Chen S, Langner CA, Mendoza-Denton R: When dispositional and role power fit: implications for self-expression and selfother congruence. J Pers Soc Psychol 2009, 96:710-727.
26. Kraus MW, Chen S, Keltner D: The power to be me: power elevates self-concept consistency and authenticity. J Exp Soc Psychol 2011, 47:974-980. This paper substantially extended research suggesting that power leads to greater expression of aspects of the self in two key ways. First, the researchers measured self-expression in terms of self-concept consistency. And second, they directly measured subjective feelings of authenticity, which extant data indicate should arise from greater self-concept consistency.
10. Chen S, Lee-Chai AY, Bargh JA: Relationship orientation as a moderator of the effects of social power. J Pers Soc Psychol 2001, 80:173-187. This article was among the first to propose and provide evidence for the notion that power does not necessarily lead to self-interested judgments, goals, and behaviors. Across a series of studies, these researchers demonstrated that the moderating effect of chronic relationship orientation (i.e. exchange versus communal orientation) on power’s effects. Current Opinion in Psychology 2020, 33:69–73
21. Karremans JC, Smith PK: Having the power to forgive: when the experience of power increases interpersonal forgiveness. Pers Soc Psychol Bull 2010, 36:1010-1023. 22. Keltner D, Gruenfeld DH, Anderson C: Power, approach, and inhibition. Psychol Rev 2003, 110:265-284. This article is one of the most highly cited, comprehensive articles on social power. In it, the authors outline the tenets of the approach-inhibition theory of power. 23. Kifer Y, Heller D, Perunovic WQE, Galinsky AD: The good life of the powerful: the experience of power and authenticity enhances subjective well-being. Psychol Sci 2013, 24:280-288.
27. Lammers J, Galinsky AD, Dubois D, Rucker DD: Power and morality. Curr Opin Psychol 2015, 6:15-19. www.sciencedirect.com
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28. Lenton AP, Slabu L, Sedikides C: State authenticity in everyday life. Eur J Pers 2016, 30:64-82.
springboard for a substantial number of empirical efforts examining the predictors and consequences of this distinction.
29. Locke KD, Heller S: Communal and agentic interpersonal and intergroup motives predict preferences for status versus power. Pers Soc Psychol Bull 2017, 43:71-86.
41. Sassenberg K, Ellemers N, Scheepers D, Scholl A: “Power corrupts” revisited: the role of construal of power as opportunity or responsibility. In Power, Politics, and Paranoia: Why People Are Suspicious of Their Leaders. Edited by van Prooijen J-W, van Lange PAM. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press; 2014:73-87.
30. Magee JC: Seeing power in action: the roles of deliberation, implementation, and action in inferences of power. J Exp Soc Psychol 2009, 45:1-14. 31. Manstead A: The psychology of social class: how socioeconomic status impacts thought, feelings, and behaviour. Br J Soc Psychol 2018, 57:267-291. 32. Markus HR, Conner AC: Clash! How to Thrive in a Multicultural World. New York: Penguin (Hudson Street Press); 2014. This book provides a very accessible and comprehensive presentation of the core notion that various cultural divides (e.g. social class, religion, gender, race) promote fundamentally different construals of the self and orientation toward others. 33. Markus H, Kitayama S: Culture and the self: implications for cognition, emotion and motivation. Psychol Rev 1991, 98:224253. 34. Markus H, Nurius P: Possible selves. Am Psychol 1986, 41:954969. 35. Markus H, Wurf E: The dynamic self-concept: a social psychological perspective. Annu Rev Psychol 1987, 38:299-337. 36. Miyamoto Y, Yoo J, Levine CS, Park J, Boylan JM, Sims T, Markus HR, Kitayama S, Kawakami N, Karasawa M et al.: Culture and social hierarchy: self- and other-oriented correlates of socioeconomic status across cultures. J Pers Soc Psychol 2018, 115:427-445. 37. Overbeck JR, Droutman V: One for all: social power increases self-anchoring of traits, attitudes, and emotions. Psychol Sci 2013, 24:1466-1476. 38. Overbeck JR, Park B: When power does not corrupt: superior individuation processes among powerful perceivers. J Pers Soc Psychol 2001, 81:549-565. 39. Rucker DD, Galinsky AD: Social power and social class: conceptualization, consequences, and current challenges. Curr Opin Psychol 2017, 18:26-30. 40. Sassenberg K, Ellemers N, Scheepers D: The attraction of social power: the influence of construing power as opportunity versus responsibility. J Exp Soc Psychol 2012, 48:550-555. This empirical paper introduced and provided evidence to support the important distinction between social power construed as opportunity versus responsibility. The paper has been quite generative, serving as a
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42. Schmid Mast M, Jonas K, Hall JA: Give a person power and he or she will show interpersonal sensitivity: the phenomenon and its why and when. J Pers Soc Psychol 2009, 97:835-850. 43. Scholl A, de Wit F, Ellemers N, Fetterman AK, Sassenberg K, Scheepers D: The burden of power: construing power as responsibility (rather than as opportunity) alters threatchallenge responses. Pers Soc Psychol Bull 2018, 44:1024-1038. 44. Scholl A, Sassenberg K, Ellemers N, Scheepers D, de Wit F: Highly identified power-holders feel responsible: the interplay between social identification and social power within groups. Br J Soc Psychol 2018, 57:112-129. 45. Scholl A, Sassenberg K, Scheepers D, Ellemers N, de Wit F: A matter of focus: power-holders feel more responsible after adopting a cognitive other-focus, rather than a self-focus. Br J Soc Psychol 2017, 56:89-102. 46. Sedikides C, Slabu L, Lenton A, Thomaes S: State authenticity. Curr Dir Psychol Sci 2017, 26:521-525. 47. Stamkou E, Van Kleef GA, Fischer AH, Kret ME: Are the powerful really blind to the feelings or others? How hierarchical concerns shape attention to emotions. Pers Soc Psychol Bull 2016, 42:755-768. 48. Van Kleef GA, Homan AC, Finkenauer C, Gu¨ndemir S, Stamkou E: Breaking the rules to rise to power: how norm violators gain power in the eyes of others. Soc Psychol Pers Sci 2011, 2:500507. 49. Van Kleef GA, Oveis C, van der Leowe I, LuoKogan A, Goetz J, Keltner D: Power, distress, and compassion: turning a blind eye to the suffering of others. Psychol Sci 2008, 19:1315-1322. 50. Vial AC, Napier JL: High power mindsets reduce gender identification and benevolent sexism among women (but not men). J Exp Soc Psychol 2017, 68:162-170. 51. Wood AM, Linley PA, Maltby J, Baliousis M, Joseph S: The authentic personality: a theoretical and empirical conceptualization, and the development of the authenticity scale. J Couns Psychol 2008, 55:385-399.
Current Opinion in Psychology 2020, 33:69–73
ScienceDirect Social power and the self Serena Chen Separate literatures exist on social power, status, and hierarchy on the one hand, and the self on the other, but important points of intersection have emerged over the past several decades. This paper reviews recent developments at the interface between social power (and related constructs) and the self. These developments orbit around two broad questions. First, how does social power influence self-expression (e.g. does power enhance or diminish subjective feelings of authenticity)? And second, does social power shift one’s orientation toward the self or toward others (e.g. does power lead people to construe the self in more independent or interdependent terms)? I conclude by suggesting possible future directions on the link between social power and self-related processes and phenomena. Address University of California, Berkeley, United States
(e.g. does power lead people to construe the self in more independent or interdependent terms)?
Power and self-expression One of the earliest points of intersection between power and the self addressed the question of how power affects activation and expression of aspects of the self, such as one’s traits, goals, emotions, attitudes, and behavioral inclinations. In time, this raised questions about the implications of power for one’s subjective sense of authenticity — in that prevailing conceptualizations of the construct suggest that feelings of authenticity arise in considerable part from outwardly expressing, in words and deeds, one’s inner thoughts and feelings. The past several years have witnessed some advances on both of these fronts related to the link between power and self-expression.
Corresponding author: Chen, Serena ([email protected])
The working self-concept Current Opinion in Psychology 2020, 33:69–73 This review comes from a themed issue on Power, status, and hierarchy Edited by Gerben van Kleef and Joey Cheng
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2019.07.021 2352-250X/ã 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Social power and related constructs have long been topics of inquiry among social and personality psychologists. Theoretical and empirical attention to these topics began a steep ascent in the 1990s, an upward trajectory that has continued ever since. The self as a domain of inquiry, on the other hand, is as old as the discipline of psychology itself. As the literature on social power grew, questions implicating the self naturally arose, such as how features of the self may influence the exercise of power and how possessing or lacking power may shape aspects of the self. This article reviews recent theoretical and empirical developments at the interface between social power and the self. I organize these developments around two broad questions: first, how does social power (and related constructs) influence self-expression (e.g. does power enhance or diminish subjective feelings of authenticity?); and second, does social power (and related constructs) tend to shift one’s orientation toward the self or others www.sciencedirect.com
Early studies that spoke to how power influences the activation and expression of self-aspects did not explicitly call upon, much less use the language of, theory and research from the self literature. The focus instead was on empirical demonstrations of how having power, relative to lacking power, is associated with a greater likelihood of, for example, expressing one’s opinions (e.g. Refs. [1,13,22]), feelings (e.g. Ref. [19]), personality dispositions [9,18], and chronic relationship goals (e.g. Ref. [10]). Insofar as opinions, feelings, personality dispositions, and goals can all be considered facets of the self, findings like these suggested that, relative to lower power, higher power activates a constellation of self-aspects, thereby making them more likely to be outwardly manifested in some manner. This suggestion that power enhances activation and expression of features of the self implies a situational, in-the-moment perspective on the self. Such a perspective is captured by a longstanding and widely accepted construct in the self literature — namely, the ‘working self-concept’ [34,35], which refers to the particular subset of self-knowledge that is activated, brought into working memory, in a given moment and context. This subset of self-knowledge is assumed to be the primary driver of the person’s thoughts, feelings, and actions in the particular moment and context. In the language of theorizing on the working self-concept, then, higher relative to lower power can be seen as increasing thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that reflect the contents of this self-concept. In fact, this very proposition lies at the heart of recent theoretical and empirical work by Guinote and colleagues [16,17]. Current Opinion in Psychology 2020, 33:69–73
70 Power, status, and hierarchy
In brief, Guinote and colleagues maintain that power magnifies the currently activated self. Regardless of the precise content of this active self — which is multiply determined, subject to chronic dispositions, current emotions and other internal states, as well as environmental inputs — the argument here is that power energizes this content, such that it directs attention, judgment, and action toward the person’s current priorities. This basic viewpoint provides a useful, unifying framework for a substantial array of empirical findings that have emerged over the past decade or so on the effects of power on cognition, emotion, and action (for a review of such findings, see Ref. [16]).
authenticity. In particular, Kim et al. [24] recently showed that, contrary to what one might expect given the evidence for a power-authenticity association, the emotions that people display after committing a transgression are actually perceived to be less authentic when the transgressor is higher compared to lower in power. Put another way, perceivers tend to discount the emotional authenticity of high-power (versus low-power) transgressors, which in turn leads perceivers to trust higher-power transgressors less and for them to put in less effort to argue for greater leniency in punishment for such transgressors.
Power and authenticity
Power and focus on the self versus others
An increasingly accepted conceptualization of authenticity defines the construct as having the subjective sense, either momentarily or dispositionally that one is in line with one’s true or real self (e.g. Refs. [28,46,51]). This subjective sense of being authentic is likely experienced when people outwardly express — through words, deeds, or both — their inner thoughts, feelings, and dispositional tendencies. Given evidence that power enhances selfexpression, broadly defined, it stands to reason that power would be associated with greater authenticity. Indeed, over the past decade or so, researchers have produced a number of direct empirical demonstrations of a powerauthenticity link (e.g. Refs. [23,26]; for a recent review, see Ref. [8]). For example, participants primed with high power report greater state authenticity than their counterparts primed with low power [23,26].
The second broad question addressed by recent theoretical and empirical efforts at the interface of social power and the self has to do with whether power shifts one’s orientation more toward the self or toward others. This is a longstanding topic of inquiry (e.g. Refs. [12,25]) for which there is evidence to support both possibilities— that power can, under some circumstances or among certain individuals, elicit greater focus on the self and one’s own concerns, emotions, and opinions (e.g. Refs. [27,37,48,49]) as well as, alternatively, a greater orientation toward others and their interests (e.g. Refs. [21,38,42]). Recent studies in this realm provide some new answers to this question. These studies vary in whether the focus has been on social power per se or on other hierarchy-related constructs (i.e. social class; see Ref. [39] for a discussion of similarities and distinctions between social power and social class). They also vary in how orientation toward the self versus others has been conceptualized and operationalized, with some studies measuring aspects of the self more directly than others, but all nonetheless carrying implications for how one views the self in relation to others.
In recent years several new directions on the association between power and authenticity have emerged. One example is work by Gan et al. [14], who proposed and found evidence that people can gain a subjective sense of power by being authentic — in other words, the power-authenticity association is bidirectional such that momentary, state feelings of authenticity can breed power. To illustrate, across several studies these researchers showed that people feel more powerful when they visualized themselves behaving authentically versus inauthentically, or recalled a time when they felt authentic versus inauthentic. Gan et al. also found that perceivers infer others’ power, and make downstream judgments (i.e. likelihood of being an effective negotiator and leader), based on others’ authenticity — with greater authenticity being linked to greater power-related inferences. These recent findings indicating that people infer others’ power from their authenticity fits well with various strands of earlier research showing other bases on which perceivers infer other people’s power — such as when others are action-oriented (e.g. Ref. [30]) or when they violate social norms (e.g. Ref. [48]) — tendencies that both reflect a form of self-expression. Recent years, however, have revealed some interesting nuances to the social perception of power and Current Opinion in Psychology 2020, 33:69–73
Independent versus interdependent orientation
Broadly speaking, an independent orientation entails viewing the self as an autonomous entity, largely separate from the social context and, concomitantly, entails a greater focus on oneself versus others [32,33]. By contrast, an interdependent orientation engenders a sense of interconnectedness, a construal of the self in terms of one’s relations to others, and a corresponding focus on the social environment. Over the past decade a number of researchers have demonstrated that being higher (versus lower) in a social hierarchy — whether measured in terms of, for example, a subjective sense of relative social power or socioeconomic status — is associated with possessing a more independent, relative to interdependent, construal of the self and orientation toward others (e.g. Refs. [6,7,29,31,32]). In turn, a greater independent self-construal and orientation implies less attention and focus on others relative to the self (e.g. Refs. [2,15,47]). www.sciencedirect.com
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Recent advances in this vein include research by Vial and Napier [50] examining the implications of the powerindependence association for ingroup identification. These researchers argued that, consistent with the evidence showing that power shifts people toward a more independent orientation, higher (versus lower) power likely reduces people’s tendency to derive a sense of belongingness via identifying with salient ingroups — that is, defining themselves at least in part in terms of their group memberships. Supporting this, Vial and Napier showed, for example, that when women were primed with high (versus low) power, they reported less identification with their gender group. Another recent example is cross-cultural research by Miyamoto et al. [36]. Noting that prior evidence for a link between higher socioeconomic status and a greater independent orientation is based entirely on data obtained from Western countries — where such an orientation is strongly sanctioned — Miyamoto et al. proposed that in countries where an interdependent orientation is sanctioned, this same link may not emerge. They examined this hypothesis in a number of studies involving comparisons between samples from the U.S. and Japan — the latter being a country in which interdependence is strongly valued and promoted. Overall, while Miyamoto et al. did find evidence for a positive association between socioeconomic status and independence across cultures, albeit stronger in Western countries such as the U.S., they also found a strong association between higher socioeconomic status and greater interdependence in Japan, a finding they argue likely generalizes to other cultures that share the Confucian values of Japan. Power as social responsibility
Another angle on the question of whether power shifts one’s orientation toward the self versus others comes from research testing the notion that power can be construed as opportunity or responsibility — that is, as providing enhanced opportunities to achieve one’s own goals or as coming with social responsibilities given one’s control over others’ outcomes, respectively [40,41]. Construing power as opportunity implies a greater self orientation, whereas viewing power as responsibility conveys a greater focus on others. Sassenberg et al. [40] showed that power is generally judged to be more attractive when it is framed in opportunity versus responsibility terms, but this is particularly the case among individuals who score higher on promotion orientation [20] — a self-regulatory disposition associated with a focus on gains and accomplishments. Additional findings have emerged in recent years to illuminate predictors and implications of power when construed as opportunity versus responsibility. For example, in terms of predictors, recent findings suggest that power is more likely to be construed in responsibility rather than opportunity terms when the powerholder in www.sciencedirect.com
question identifies with the social group to which they and those over whom they hold power belong [44]. Another predictor example comes from studies showing that when people are induced to cognitively focus on another person, they are more apt to construe and approach an impending position of power through a responsibility (versus opportunity) lens [45]. Turning to implications, one recent example is work examining whether people respond to power with a threat versus challenge response [43]. When people see the demands of a situation as outweighing their resources, they experience stress, or a threat response, whereas when resources outweigh demands, they exhibit a greater challenge response [3,4]. Although higher power is typically associated with lower threat responses, Scholl et al. [43] demonstrated that when power is construed in responsibility terms, people experience greater threat compared to challenge responses, assessed via both self-report and cardiovascular measures. A second example is research suggesting that when power is construed in terms of responsibility versus opportunity, the typical tendency for powerholders to ignore others’ advice does not emerge [11]. Instead, powerholders who view their power in terms of responsibility (versus opportunity) value others’ advice more, and this is associated with a greater willingness to take such advice.
Summary and future directions To summarize, recent developments at the intersection of social power and the self have focused on two broad questions, one having to do with how power influences expression of the self, and the other having to do with how power shifts one’s construal of the self and corresponding orientation toward others. To be sure, both of these areas of inquiry have yielded important findings and, at the same time, have advanced the literatures on both power and the self. In particular, incorporating constructs, processes, and phenomena from the self literature has offered new insights, hypotheses, and tools for power researchers to explore and utilize. On the flip side, research on how the experience and use of power shape, and are shaped by, aspects of the self is critical for self researchers given the ubiquity of power relations in daily social life. The above said, it is not unreasonable to suggest that exploration of the interface between social power and the self is still in its beginning stages. There are many potential points of intersection that remain to be studied, especially ones where features of the self play a more explicit role in theory and research. For instance, although there are hints in the literature that power may be positively associated with a promotion regulatory focus, many questions regarding how power influences self-regulatory processes remain. How does power influence not only the pursuit of one’s goals, but also one’s reactions to goal setbacks? How does power influence the regulation of one’s emotions? Does it matter whether Current Opinion in Psychology 2020, 33:69–73
72 Power, status, and hierarchy
those emotions are power-related in some manner? Another example pertains to self-concept clarity [5], which refers to the degree to which a person’s selfconcept is clearly and confidently defined, internally consistent, and temporally stable. Do people higher or lower in power experience greater self-concept clarity? What are possible downstream consequences of a link between power and self-concept clarity? Can this relationship explain, in part, why power tends to promote self-expression? Does greater self-concept clarity breed a sense of power? Such questions are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of possible areas of inquiry at the intersection of social power and the self.
11. De Wit F, Scheepers D, Ellemers N, Sassenberg K, Scholl A: Whether power holders construe their power as responsibility or opportunity influences their tendency to take advice from others. J Organ Behav 2017, 38:923-949. 12. Fiske S: Controlling other people: the impact of power on stereotyping. Am Psychol 1993, 48:621-628. 13. Galinsky AD, Magee JC, Gruenfeld DH, Whitson JA, Liljenquist KA: Power reduces the press of the situation: implications for creativity, conformity, and dissonance. J Pers Soc Psychol 2008, 95:1450-1466.
Funding
14. Gan M, Heller D, Chen S: The power in being yourself: feeling authentic enhances the sense of power. Pers Soc Psychol Bull 2018, 44:1460-1472. This empirical piece presents a set of well-powered studies, including ones using experimental designs, that demonstrate that the positive effect of power on subjective feelings of authenticity is bidirectional. This paper also includes findings showing that not only does authentic behavior breed a sense of subjective power, but such behavior also leads social perceivers to infer that targets who engage in authentic behavior have greater power.
This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-forprofit sectors.
15. Gordon AM, Chen S: Does power help or hurt: the moderating role of self-other focus on power and perspective-taking in romantic relationships. Pers Soc Psychol Bull 2013, 39:10971112.
Conflict of interest statement
16. Guinote A: How power affects people: activating, wanting, and goal seeking. Annu Rev Psychol 2017, 68:353-381.
Nothing declared.
References and recommended reading Papers of particular interest, published within the period of review, have been highlighted as: of special interest of outstanding interest 1.
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