Neuroscience
Everyone knows that power is seductive, but is it power over others that we crave or power over our own actions and decisions?
To find out, Marius Van Dijke and Matthijs Poppe devised a financial game in which hundreds of undergrads took turns with a ‘partner’ to make share investment decisions. The students didn’t know this, but they actually played the game with a computer.
When the participants chose how much to invest, as well as using a share’s performance history, their decision was constrained within a recommended upper and lower limit set by their ‘partner’. In turn, the participants were able to set the upper and lower limits for what they thought was their partner. The researchers made it so that some participants had more control over their partner than their partner had over them, some participants had less control, and the remainder had equal control.
When quizzed afterwards, the participants consistently said they would like in the future to have more control over their own investment decisions, but they didn’t wish to have more control over their partner’s decisions. In fact, if they’d previously had more power over their partner’s decisions than their partner had had over theirs, many of the participants actually said they’d like in the future to have less power over their partner. This general pattern remained the same regardless of how much agreement or conflict there appeared to have been between their own and their partner’s investment decisions.
The researchers said this showed people are more motivated to decrease their dependence on other people’s power than they are to increase their power over others. In other words, they believe we’re driven to increase our ‘personal power’ over ourselves, but not necessarily our ‘social power’ over others.
“We believe we have advanced our understanding of the complexities involved in strivings for personal power”, they said.
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Van Dijke, M. & Poppe, M. (2006). Striving for personal power as a basis for social power dynamics. European Journal of Social Psychology, 36, 537-556.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
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Neuroscience
The pursuit of power
Everyone knows that power is seductive, but is it power over others that we crave or power over our own actions and decisions?
To find out, Marius Van Dijke and Matthijs Poppe devised a financial game in which hundreds of undergrads took turns with a ‘partner’ to make share investment decisions. The students didn’t know this, but they actually played the game with a computer.
When the participants chose how much to invest, as well as using a share’s performance history, their decision was constrained within a recommended upper and lower limit set by their ‘partner’. In turn, the participants were able to set the upper and lower limits for what they thought was their partner. The researchers made it so that some participants had more control over their partner than their partner had over them, some participants had less control, and the remainder had equal control.
When quizzed afterwards, the participants consistently said they would like in the future to have more control over their own investment decisions, but they didn’t wish to have more control over their partner’s decisions. In fact, if they’d previously had more power over their partner’s decisions than their partner had had over theirs, many of the participants actually said they’d like in the future to have less power over their partner. This general pattern remained the same regardless of how much agreement or conflict there appeared to have been between their own and their partner’s investment decisions.
The researchers said this showed people are more motivated to decrease their dependence on other people’s power than they are to increase their power over others. In other words, they believe we’re driven to increase our ‘personal power’ over ourselves, but not necessarily our ‘social power’ over others.
“We believe we have advanced our understanding of the complexities involved in strivings for personal power”, they said.
__________________________________
Van Dijke, M. & Poppe, M. (2006). Striving for personal power as a basis for social power dynamics. European Journal of Social Psychology, 36, 537-556.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- Power Leads Us To Dehumanise Others
'How can you not feel sorry about people who have died? I mean you would be inhuman if you didn't think that,' former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair speaking to Andrew Marr on the BBC.Think how terrible you'd feel if a decision you made...
- Extras
Eye-catching studies that didn't make the final cut: The social power of brands. Link observed between rates of eye blinking and the personality dimension of psychoticism. Another follow-up on Libet's classic free will study. This one suggests...
- Mindless Eating: The Food Decisions We Don’t Realise We’re Making
How many food-related decisions do you think you make every day? When Brian Wansink and Jeffery Sobal of Cornell University asked 139 participants this question, the average answer was 14 decisions. But then the participants were asked to break a typical...
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“I haven’t got a sign on the door that says white people only. I don’t care if you're black, brown or yellow - you know, Orientals make very good workers”, David Brent, from the BBC comedy The Office. Like gender, age, hair colour and other...
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In one of the first ever studies to simultaneously scan the brains of two people, researchers at the Human Neuroimaging Lab in Texas have furthered our understanding of how the brain represents trust. Forty-eight pairs of participants took part in an...