When subjective experiences matter: Power increases reliance on the ease of retrieval.

Abstract

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.

Compliant Sinners, Obstinate Saints: How Power and Self-Focus Determine the Effectiveness of Social Influences in Ethical Decision Making

“…Specifically, social psychological research demonstrated that a heightened self-focus decreases susceptibility to social influence regardless of the decision-making issue (Froming et al, 1982;Gibbons & Wright, 1983;Hutton & Baumeister, 1992;Pryor, Gibbons, Wicklund, Fazio, & Hood, 1977). Since power reliably increases self-focus, as documented both in our studies and implied by other research (Guinote, 2010;Weick & Guinote, 2008), we believe that a our findings generalize across the different types of moral issues. Nevertheless, issuecontingent perspectives of ethical decision making (Jones, 1991) do have important links with our research more generally.…”

“…For instance, (Weick & Guinote, 2008) found that power makes individuals relatively more sensitive to their own subjective experiences when forming attitudes and judgments.…”

Power reduces the press of the situation: Implications for creativity, conformity, and dissonance.

“…Because the powerful are more attuned to their internal states than situational information, they should be especially sensitive to their own intrapsychic processes, perhaps even processes instigated by their very lack of consideration for cues and information in the situation. Consistent with this idea, Weick and Guinote (2008) found that the attitudes of high-power participants are driven more by temporary subjective experiences and cognitive states than are the attitudes of low-power participants.…”

Magnitude estimation is influenced by social power

“…Accordingly, we expected that when increasing the initial segment until its length corresponds to the magnitude of the target number, low-power individuals will do so more (i.e., extend the initial segment more, resulting in more overestimation). In contrast, high-power individuals should stop earlier increasing the starting segment-just as Weick and Guinote's (2008) findings suggested that high-power individuals would assume they could stop earlier when completing a task. In short, we expected that estimates of line length should, as a function of social power, differ only in the increase (but not in the decrease) condition.…”

“…The authors assumed that low-power individuals would perceive themselves as having fewer resources than high power individuals (e.g., would feel less able to cope with heavy weights), which may explain why they estimated the boxes as heavier. Similarly, Weick and Guinote (2008) demonstrated that when estimating the time participants would need to complete a task, low-power individuals assumed that it would take them longer than high-power individuals guessed it would take them.…”