Power, Cognition, And Behavior

Power Affects Basic Cognition

We are surrounded by information. To be able to respond to the environment and pursue our goals we process some information more extensively than other information. This phenomenon, called selective attention, enables reasoning, perception, and action. What exactly we pay attention to is determined on a moment-to-moment basis and depends on our desires, expectancies, needs, and goals, as well as on the characteristics of the environment itself.

[Page 501]A central feature of power is that it directly affects attention, enhancing the ability to process information selectively. This feature was demonstrated by Ana Guinote in a series of laboratory studies in which participants were randomly assigned to powerful roles (i.e., roles that required them to evaluate others and determine how much others earn) or powerless roles (i.e., roles that required participants to perform tasks and be evaluated by others) and performed cognitive tasks. In comparison to those who were assigned to powerless roles, participants assigned to powerful roles more easily focused attention on the central features of an object or a scene and ignored detail and peripheral information such as the surroundings of the object. For example, using the framed line test, developed by Shinobu Kitayama and his colleagues, participants were asked to observe a square frame with a vertical line inside the square, and then to draw a line in a blank square frame, usually of a different size. When the task was to draw a line that had exactly the same length as the line that they originally saw, participants assigned to a powerful role made fewer errors than participants assigned to a powerless role. Participants assigned to a powerful role were therefore better able to ignore the background of the line than could participants assigned to a powerless role. However, when the task was to draw a proportionate line in a blank square frame, that is, a line that was in the same proportion to the size of the blank square frame as the sample line was to the size of the sample square frame, powerful and powerless participants were equally as accurate, and no differences in their performance emerged. Powerful participants can therefore ignore or take into account background and detail information depending on the situation, whereas powerless participants cannot ignore this information, even when the task requires that they do so. Another task that found greater distractibility in powerless individuals required participants to identify on a computer screen whether common objects were upright or inverted. All objects had handles, which was irrelevant to the task at hand. In this task, powerless participants showed delays in their responses when irrelevant information (such as the handles of the object) distracted them from their deliberative responses. Powerful participants showed know such delays.

...