Chapter 5
The Power Lens
There’s a passage by English humorist Douglas Adams that always comes to mind when I think about the power lens. In Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Adams writes about horses:
They have always understood a great deal more than they let on. It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some other creature, without forming an opinion about them.
On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to sit all day, every day, on top of another creature and not have the slightest thought about them whatsoever.1
What Adams correctly noted, with his characteristic insightfulness and humor, is that power changes how we see one another—assuming we see one another at all.
Just as the trust lens is worn when perceivers are still determining whether you are friend or foe, the power lens is worn whenever there is a disparity of power—specifically, when the perceiver you are interacting with has relatively more power than you do. And this lens has a straightforward agenda: prove yourself useful to me, or get out of my way.
Also like the trust lens, the power lens distorts Phase 1 perception for the person with power. Unlike the trust lens, though, it doesn’t affect all of us all the time—in any given situation, the relatively powerless are unaffected.
This means that while having more power can warp your view of the less powerful, having less power rarely distorts your view of the more powerful. Oh sure, maybe the less powerful are occasionally fearful—or envious—of the powerful. But being powerless makes people much more motivated to be accurate—to engage in Phase 2 perception and take nothing for granted. Those with less power need to be able to predict how those with more power will think, feel, and act—because the less powerful depend on the more powerful to get what they want.
When I talk about power, I don’t necessarily mean CEOs, government leaders, or the rich and influential—although those people undoubtedly wield power. I also mean it much more broadly, to include the kind of garden-variety power that ordinary people encounter or experience on a daily basis. Perhaps the most commonly agreed-upon—though decidedly technical—definition of power among psychologists is this: power is asymmetrical control over desired resources.2 In other words, powerful people get to make the decisions, and powerless people get to live with the results.
Here’s another way of looking at it: Imagine two friends, Amy and Claire. Amy needs to borrow five hundred dollars from Claire to hold her over until her next payday. Now, Claire can be said to have power over Amy, because Amy depends on Claire to get something that she wants—something she can’t get without Claire’s cooperation. Amy’s (temporary) dependence on Claire, in turn, gives Claire the ability to determine Amy’s outcomes (i.e., giving her the loan or not) and to make demands on Amy in exchange for a better outcome (How about you help me move to my new apartment on Saturday, then?).
Thought about this way, power can clearly have many sources. Managers have more power than their employees, because managers control important outcomes—everything from task assignments and parking spaces to whether you even have a job in the first place. Popularity is a kind of power, too, since popular people are the gatekeepers to the most coveted circles of society. Their friendship, in this case, is the desired resource in question. And popular people get to dictate the norms of style, speech, and behavior that the unpopular must follow if the latter are to have any hope of fitting in. Wealthier people enjoy more power than the poor, because the affluent depend less on others to obtain the things they desire. And experts, like scientists, celebrity endorsers, editorialists, and critics, have power—the power to influence public opinion.
What is really essential to understand about all of these sources of power is that they are all dependent on context and circumstance. Your boss only has power over you if you want to continue working for him or her—once you’ve decided to quit, the boss’s power evaporates. (If your boss then decides to beg you to stay, suddenly you are the one with the power to make demands in exchange for the outcome he or she wants. Got to love it when that happens.)
The point is that power dynamics are not simple or static. It’s really never that person X is more powerful than you, period. It’s that person X is more powerful under these specific circumstances, with respect to these particular issues, at this point in time. And that is when he or she will be wearing the power lens.
How Power Changes People
Being in a position of power relative to those around you certainly does change you—not necessarily in an evil way, but there is a definite shift in how you see things when you are in the driver’s seat. Let’s start with the good news.
The Good
When people feel relatively powerless, they are concerned primarily with safety and security—with hanging on to what they’ve already got. They have their guards up and have to stay focused on not making mistakes or displeasing the higher-ups. As a result, their thinking is more concrete, more conventional, and more risk-averse.
When people feel powerful, on the other hand, they tend to think in more abstract, big-picture ways—the kind of thinking that is consistently associated with creativity and innovative problem-solving. Power also increases optimism and self-assurance, both of which allow us to embrace risk and tackle tough challenges.
In fact, research shows that on average, feelings of power lead to better performance, particularly on complex or difficult tasks that require effort and persistence. This is true for four reasons:
- Powerful people feel responsible to those they have power over (i.e., the group they are leading). This is an added motivation that the relatively powerless often lack, and it makes throwing in the towel a less attractive option.
- All eyes are on them. Powerful people—particularly leaders—feel more individually identifiable, which increases their sense of accountability. Because they expect to be noticed by others, they feel pressured to perform well and set a good example for others.
- Power stimulates the brain, specifically, what psychologists refer to as the brain’s executive function, located in the prefrontal cortex (the part of your brain right behind your forehead). These processes are instrumental when it comes to setting and achieving goals. For example, when participants in laboratory experiments are given power over the outcomes of others (usually their fellow students), they are better able to control their attention, effectively plan future behavior, and take goal-directed actions, all hallmarks of superior executive function.
- Power keeps you going. Research shows that powerful people not only outperform the less powerful, but also continue to do so even when their energy and willpower have been seriously depleted. As I mentioned before, self-control is a limited resource—like a muscle in your body, it gets tired when you’ve given it a good workout. Typically, when you’ve depleted your self-control by working on something really challenging, your performance on subsequent tasks suffers. Powerful people, however, are slower to show signs of depletion—they can keep up their A-game longer, thanks in part to their strong motivation and heightened executive functioning.
The Sometimes Good, Sometimes Bad
Thanks to all that optimism and confidence, feeling powerful can lead someone to engage in riskier behavior than he or she otherwise would. And risk, as you know, can be either good or bad. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained” and “Fools rush in . . .” seem to apply to the powerful in equal measure.
In a series of studies, Columbia Business School’s Adam Galinsky and his colleagues showed that when male and female participants felt powerful, they preferred riskier business plans (with bigger potential rewards) to more-conservative plans. Moreover they divulged more information and were more trusting during negotiations, chose to “hit” more often during a game of blackjack, and indicated they were more likely to engage in unprotected sex during a one-night stand.3 Except for that last one, these tendencies to go for the riskier option might prove beneficial, but if you aren’t a particularly good judge of when to take a risk, power can get you into big trouble.
When in power, people focus more on the potential payoffs of their risky behavior and much less (if at all) on the possible dangers. They are even overly optimistic about things no one could possibly control. For instance, compared with the relatively powerless, they believe they are less likely to encounter turbulence on an airplane or to run into a dangerous snake while on vacation. (Logically it follows that they are probably not worried about snakes on a plane, either, but Galinsky didn’t test that combination.)
The Ugly
This may come as no surprise, but powerful people are more likely to act like selfish jerks. Research by a group of Berkeley researchers, led by Paul Piff, has found evidence of power-induced jerkiness in even the most mundane daily activities. In one of their studies, the researchers observed drivers at a busy four-way stop sign and used the make and model of car as a way of estimating the driver’s social class and wealth. The highest-status cars—the Mercedes, BMWs, and Porsches—cut off other drivers (by going before it was their turn) 30 percent of the time, compared with only 7 percent for the lowest-status cars. In a second study, where researchers were stationed at a clearly marked crosswalk, high-status cars failed to yield to a pedestrian trying to cross nearly 50 percent of the time, while lower-status cars failed to yield only 25 percent of the time. (Interestingly, the very lowest-status cars—your beat-up, rusty, rag-for-a-gas-cap type cars—stopped for pedestrians every time.)4
Other studies by Piff and his colleagues showed that people with relatively high status were more likely to tell lies or cheat on a friendly game. And in my absolute favorite of these studies, the researchers gave college students—who saw themselves as having relatively high or low socioeconomic status—a packet of questionnaires to complete on a variety of topics. When the students had finished, the experimenter took out a jar of individually wrapped candies and explained that while these candies were meant for the young children who were currently in a study down the hall, “You can have some if you want.” So, who literally takes the most candy from children? You guessed it! The richer participants took roughly twice as much candy as the poorer participants.
So what is it, exactly, that makes these people more likely to behave unethically? Piff argues that those with higher socioeconomic status are somewhat dehumanized by their experience of wealth and power. Because they depend less on others to get what they want, they become more self-focused, less aware of those around them, and less likely to experience empathy. And interesting evidence from functional MRI studies of brain activity pinpoints how these differences play out on a neural level.
Motor resonance is the term neuroscientists use to describe a fascinating phenomenon: when you watch another person doing something—giving a speech, cooking a meal, dancing a jig—the same neural circuitry that would be involved if you were speaking or cooking or dancing becomes activated, as if you were the actor, rather than simply the observer. Motor resonance provides a means of understanding the actions of others and of imagining things from their perspective. Interestingly, and perhaps not surprisingly at this point, people who feel powerful show significantly less motor resonance when observing others than the relatively powerless do.5 This incredible, sophisticated brain architecture—one that has evolved to give us unique access to the thoughts and feelings of our fellow human beings—just sits there, doing nothing. Because to your cognitive miser, the gist is fine.
In the end, this is the biggest obstacle you deal with when you deal with the powerful. It’s not so much that they think they are better than you as it is that they simply do not think about you at all.
Here’s the really scary thing: power does the same thing to you. Even if you only feel powerful momentarily.
Just about every research finding I’ve described so far in the chapter is obtained not only when participants have a generally higher sense of power, but also when they were momentarily made to feel powerful in the experiment. And that part is really important, because when we witness instances of bad behavior among the rich and powerful, it’s easy to assume that the kind of people who seek power are also the kind of people who take crazy risks and behave irresponsibly and unethically. What the research of Galinsky, Piff, and others suggests is that power itself is the driving force—and that even someone who is new to power will be prone to the same kinds of mistakes as someone who has enjoyed a lifetime of it.
And remember how power is generally associated with superior performance? I should probably explain why—or more specifically, when—it’s not. You see, powerful people often have a lot on their plates, and it stands to reason that they can’t possibly bring their best to everything. They need to decide where to put their effort and where to hold back. So, how do they decide?
The short and unsurprising answer is that people with power generally withhold effort when they feel that the task in question is unworthy of a powerful person—in other words, when it seems like the kind of thing an underling would do. This attitude can and does affect performance. For example, in the research by Galinsky I referred to earlier, when participants were given boring, repetitive tasks like filling out multiplication tables, those assigned to a leadership role (i.e., those given power) performed worse than nonleaders and complained that they didn’t think it was the sort of task a leader should have to do.
Arrogant as this may seem at times, you have to admit that this attitude makes some sense. Powerful people approach tasks with greater energy and intensity, but their well of energy and intensity isn’t bottomless. They need to be selective—to be motivated tacticians. Which is why powerful perceivers often choose to spend elsewhere the energy they could be spending on getting an accurate impression of you.
How the (Relatively) Powerful See You
What we know for certain is that powerful perceivers often rely heavily on the cognitive miser’s bag of shortcuts to keep the time and energy they must devote to perceiving you to the bare minimum. There is less agreement on why that’s true, however. Some argue that it’s purely about cognitive load—that the powerful want to conserve their mental resources for the really important stuff (or, more accurately, for what they believe to be the really important stuff). Some say it’s more of an accidental consequence of the self-focus that power tends to create. Other researchers point to evidence that suggests the powerful want (largely unconsciously) to maintain a sense of psychological distance from the less powerful and thus deliberately pay less attention to them.
There’s good reason to believe that all three of these factors are playing a role in the functioning of the power lens. Here’s what the power lens is doing: powerful people seem to feel that they need not have complex, nuanced views of you if you are (relatively) powerless. As a consequence, the Phase 1 tendency to stick with any assumptions they have about you is intensified. An abundance of studies have reliably shown that feeling powerful tends to make ordinary people more stereotypic in their thinking, too.6
Research shows that feelings of power will make an interviewer or a supervisor more likely to be biased by stereotypic information when the person is choosing job candidates or distributing rewards. He or she is likely to be particularly biased by the negative stereotypes about the target (women are too emotional, bad at math, etc.)—though the evaluator will likely have no idea that the bias is influencing his or her judgment.7 (And yes, even a female interviewer or supervisor will, unconsciously, use negative stereotypes of women to judge other women. One of the most interesting, if a bit horrifying, discoveries in the past twenty years of social psychology has been that people can be influenced by stereotypes even when they believe them to be utterly wrong.)
When powerful people experience feelings of threat—when, say, the source of their power is illegitimate or unstable—they often negatively stereotype subordinates even more. For instance, a set of studies found that people assigned to be group leader paid particular attention to negative stereotypic information about their other group members, but only when these leaders were randomly chosen to be group leaders. When, instead, they felt they had earned the role through an evaluation of their social skills and suitability for the job, the bias disappeared.8 Research like this suggests that powerful leaders can and do use negative stereotyping strategically, to bolster their sense of entitlement to power.
But the powerful are not always less perceptive. There are circumstances when power leads to enhanced, more accurate perception. And therein lies the key to mastering the power lens.
Research by psychologists Jennifer Overbeck and Bernadette Park has shown that powerful perceivers aren’t uniformly terrible—in fact, the researchers argue, it would be more accurate to describe the perceivers as flexible, using their attention as a resource that they deploy strategically. In other words, when their goal requires them to pay close attention to individuating information about a person to form a more accurate impression of him or her, powerful people do so more effectively than the relatively powerless.
In one of Overbeck and Park’s studies, for example, participants were assigned the high-power role of supervisor in a publishing company. Their job was to manage five telecommuting proofreaders, who were actually confederates in the experiment. These confederates would report on their own progress—the number and nature of the errors they had found and the problems they were encountering. Each proofreader was also assigned a personality profile that he or she tried to express in various ways in the reports. “Joe” was good-natured and friendly, “Sally” was smart and efficient, and so on.
The supervisors were given one of two goals:
Goal 1: Make your workers feel engaged and included.
Your task is to establish an atmosphere in which workers feel positive, engaged, and with a sense of belonging to the organization. It has been demonstrated that this atmosphere causes workers to be more enthusiastic and motivated to focus on doing what is best for the company. If the right environment is established, the rest of the company’s goals can be met with much less effort and difficulty. Workers are more likely to channel their effort to the company’s benefit, by doing their work rather than (for example) watching TV while they are at home, which is basically taking pay without working. Use whatever means you can derive to accomplish this goal, including the kinds of recommendations and feedback you provide, and decisions about workers’ pay.
Goal 2: Make your workers more productive and efficient.
Your task is to get the workers performing at the goal level by the end of the work session. In order for telecommuting to be a viable option, it is critical that people perform as productively and efficiently as possible. Therefore, we need to discover whether we can assure the necessary levels of production. We do not want workers sabotaging the company’s goals by sitting at home watching TV when they should be working. Use whatever means you can derive to accomplish this goal, including the kinds of recommendations and feedback you provide, and decisions about workers’ pay.9
Note that establishing feelings of engagement and belonging (goal 1) requires a more nuanced understanding of each employee. Thus, spending time and effort on forming an accurate impression of each employee is more essential for successfully reaching this goal, compared with when the goal is to simply keep all the employees working at a good pace (goal 2).
After receiving their goals, the supervisors communicated with their workers about their reports via computer over the next hour. The supervisors then rated their impressions of each of their workers’ performance and personality.
The researchers found than when a power holder was given the goal of making workers feel engaged and included, he or she was indeed much more likely to differentiate between them and to accurately discern their individual characteristics. In other words, powerful people pay will pay attention to you when doing so facilitates their goal. As Overbeck and Park argue, much of the research demonstrating biased perception on the part of the powerful was conducted in contexts in which careful attention was not necessary or rewarded. Which means that to get powerful people to perceive you accurately, you are going to need to make it necessary or rewarding.
How to Be Seen Clearly through the Fog of Power
There is a really important insight in this research. For the powerful, your instrumentality is key. Frankly, it is all that matters. What can you do to help powerful people reach their goals? How is having an accurate understanding of you in their self-interest? If they invest time and mental energy into really “getting” you, what is the potential return on their investment?
The first step to being instrumental is to understand the desires and challenges of the powerful person in question. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the powerful person is your direct supervisor. You know what your targets and stretch goals are for the year—what are your boss’s? Where does he or she need help the most—and how could you ease this burden? Where is your supervisor falling behind? Most of us have a little wiggle room when it comes to how we allocate our time. By prioritizing your own tasks in such a way that they provide assistance to your boss where he or she needs it most, you can dramatically increase your perceived usefulness.
Also, it goes without saying that to be instrumental, you need to do everything that is directly asked of you—but where you can really stand out is by anticipating your boss’s needs, before he or she asks. I had a research assistant who did exactly that—who prepared literature reviews for me that she knew I would eventually need, who had documents ready before I asked for them, who took over, without being asked to, the scheduling of research participants, a thankless and frustrating job. I wrote her the most glowing recommendation I’ve ever written for a student. And when she left my lab and moved on to graduate school, I was depressed for a week. That’s instrumentality.
Instrumentality isn’t about being nice—it’s about being useful. Whenever I’m at a conference or an awards dinner with a few movers and shakers in attendance, I’m always a little amazed to see how reflexively people seem to shower the powerful with flattery and ingratiation. It’s so natural, it just seems to come rushing out of their mouths. I really admire the work you do. I’m such a big fan. Your marketing strategy is brilliant. Sure, that might elicit a smile. And of course, being warm signals that you are a friend and not a foe, which is good. But believe me when I tell you that powerful people by and large don’t give a damn that you think they are awesome. To really get their attention, you’ll need to let them know how you can help facilitate their continuing, increasing awesomeness. If you want them to see the real you, this is the only way.
That probably sounds a little Machiavellian to you, but in fairness, powerful people tend to be powerful because they have a lot of responsibilities and a whole lot going on. Everyone’s mental and emotional resources are limited. It may be arrogant, but it’s also fundamentally practical. You have to be worth taking time and energy for, and powerful people have no reason to believe you are unless you give them one.
That does not mean that you should walk up to powerful people and just start listing your good qualities. They don’t care about those, either. It’s the goals that matter. What are their goals, do they align with yours, and how can you be instrumental in reaching them? Know the answers to these questions, and you’ll have their power lens working for you.