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.

words (excluding references)How cyberostracism affects children and adults 2 Abstract This research examines adults', and for the first time, children's and adolescents' reaction to being ostracised and included, using an on-line game, 'Cyberball' with same and opposite sex players. Ostracism strongly threatened four primary needs (esteem, belonging, meaning and control) and lowered mood among 8-9-year olds, 13-14-year-olds, and adults. However, it did so in different ways. Ostracism threatened self-esteem needs more among 8-9-year-olds than older participants. Among 13-14-year-olds, ostracism threatened belonging more than other needs. Belonging was threatened most when ostracism was participants' first experience in the game. Moreover, when participants had been included beforehand, ostracism threatened meaning needs most strongly. Gender of other players had no effect. Practical and developmental implications for social inclusion and on-line experiences among children and young people are discussed.

The present research sought to establish how cultural settings create a normative context that determines individuals' reactions to subtle forms of mistreatment. Two experimental studies (n = 449) examined individuals' perceptions of high‐ and low‐ranking individuals' incivility in two national (Study 1) and two organizational (Study 2) cultural settings that varied in power distance. Consistent across studies, the uncivil actions of a high‐ranking perpetrator were deemed more acceptable than the uncivil actions of a low‐ranking perpetrator in the large power distance cultural settings, but not in the small power distance cultural settings. Differing injunctive norms (acceptability), but not descriptive norms (perceived likelihood of occurrence), contributed to cultural variations in the level of discomfort caused by incivility. In addition, perceptions of descriptive and injunctive norms coincided, but differed markedly in their associations with discomfort. We discuss the practical and theoretical implications of these findings.

Conventional wisdom holds that powerholders act more in line with their dispositions. Based on principles of construct accessibility, we propose that this is only the case when no alternatives are activated in the situation. In three experiments, participants' chronic dispositions were assessed. Subsequently, power was manipulated and participants made judgments or acted in contexts that activated (vs. did not activate), alternative (i.e., inaccessible or counter-dispositional) constructs. When no alternatives were activated, powerholders responded more in line with chronically accessible constructs, displaying disposition-congruent perceptions of other people (Experiment 1), charity donations (Experiment 2), and strategies in an economic game (Experiment 3).However, when alternatives had been activated, powerholders no longer responded more dispositionally than their low-power counterparts. A single mechanism of reliance on construct accessibility is proposed to explain person and environment-driven influences.

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