Social power modulates individuals' neural responses to monetary and social rewards.

Although previous research has shown that social power modulates individuals' sensitivity to rewards, it is currently unclear whether social power increases or decreases individuals' sensitivity to rewards. This study employed event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the effects of social power on individuals' neural responses to monetary and social rewards. Specifically, participants underwent an episodic priming task to manipulate social power (high-power vs. low-power) and then completed monetary and social delayed incentive tasks while their behavioral responses and electroencephalograms (EEG) were recorded. According to ERP analysis, during the anticipatory stage, low-power individuals exhibited a greater cue-P3 amplitude than high-power individuals in both monetary and social tasks. In the consummatory stage, though no impact of social power on the reward positivity (RewP) was found, low-power individuals showed a higher feedback-P3 (FB-P3) amplitude than high-power individuals, regardless of task types (the MID and SID tasks). In conclusion, these results provide evidence that social power might decrease one's sensitivity to monetary and social rewards in both the anticipatory and consummatory stages.

Adolescent psychopathic traits and adverse environments: Associations with socially adaptive outcomes.

Researchers have suggested that psychopathic traits among adults may be, at least in part, an adaptive and/or a learned response for securing socially adaptive outcomes in adverse environments, but there is a lack of developmental evidence supporting this hypothesis among adolescents. Therefore, we examined the indirect links from self-perceived adverse environments (parental neglect, socioeconomic status, school competition, neighborhood violence) to evolutionarily relevant social outcomes (social power, dating behavior) through psychopathic traits. A community sample of 396 adolescents completed measures for the study (Mage = 14.64, SD = 1.52). As predicted, there were significant indirect effects from higher levels of parental neglect, school competition, and neighborhood violence to both forms of socially adaptive outcomes through psychopathic traits, but unexpectedly, there were no indirect effects with socioeconomic status. There were also direct effects between environment and socially adaptive outcomes. Results support the hypothesis that psychopathic traits may be, in part, an adaptive and/or learned response to cues from adverse social environments as a means to acquire evolutionarily relevant social outcomes. Interventions could be designed to target the adverse social issues that might be facilitating the development of psychopathy and should be sensitive to the social outcomes adolescents may acquire from these traits.

Individual differences in social power: Links with beliefs about emotion and emotion regulation.

OBJECTIVE: People differ in how they regulate their emotions, and how they do so is guided by their beliefs about emotion. We propose that social power-one's perceived influence over others-relates to one's beliefs about emotion and to emotion regulation. More powerful people are characterized as authentic and uninhibited, which should translate to the belief that one should not have to control one's emotions and, in turn, less suppression and more acceptance. More powerful people are also characterized as self-efficacious and confident, which should translate to the belief that one can control one's emotions and, in turn, more reappraisal and acceptance. METHOD: Two preregistered studies using four samples (Ntotal  = 1286) tested these hypotheses using cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys as well as diaries. RESULTS: In Study 1, power related to beliefs about emotion and emotion regulation in hypothesized ways. Study 2 also largely supported the hypotheses: The belief that one should not have to control one's emotions accounted for the links between power and suppression and acceptance, whereas the belief that one can control one's emotions accounted for the link between power and reappraisal. CONCLUSION: Power and emotion regulation are interconnected, in part because of their links with beliefs about emotions.

Personal socio-cultural preferences modulate neural correlates of decisions to socialize with powerful persons.

Social power differences fundamentally shape the behavioral interaction dynamics of groups and societies. While it has long been recognized that individual socio-cultural preferences mitigate social interactions involving persons of power, there is limited empirical data on the underlying neural correlates. To bridge this gap, we asked university student participants to decide whether they were willing to engage in social activities involving their teachers (higher power status), classmates (equal power status), or themselves (control) while functional brain images were acquired. Questionnaires assessed participants' preferences for power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and cultural intelligence. As expected, participants generally accepted more social interactions with classmates than teachers. Also, left inferior frontal activity was higher when accepting than when rejecting social interactions with teachers. Critically, power distance preferences further modulated right lateral frontoparietal activity contrasting approach relative to avoidance decisions towards teachers. In addition, uncertainty avoidance modulated activity in medial frontal, precuneus, and left supramarginal areas distinguishing approach decisions towards teachers relative to classmates. Cultural intelligence modulated neural responses to classmate approach/avoidance decisions in anterior cingulate and left parietal areas. Overall, functional activities in distinct brain networks reflected different personal socio-cultural preferences despite observed social decisions to interact with others of differential power status. Such findings highlight that social approach or avoidance behaviors towards powerful persons involves differential subjective neural processes possibly involved in computing implicit social utility.

Early presence of a "power = males" association: Girls link power to their gender less often than boys but can be as motivated to gain it.

In three studies, it was tested whether children (N = 184; aged 6-10 years, White, mid- to high income) from a U.S. midwestern city used other individuals' gender and race to predict who is in charge and the means by which power is gained (Study 1) and whether children's own gender predicted their assignments of positions of authority (Study 2A) and pursuits of positions of authority (Study 2B). When asked to predict who was in charge at different workplaces, with age White children decreased their race-based, power-related favoritism; children were increasingly likely with age to link White adults to rather questionable routes to power as well as Black adults with meritorious reasons for gaining power (Study 1). In addition, boys (but not girls) systematically associated power with adult workers of their own gender and did so regardless of whether or not power had been obtained meritoriously (Study 1). Nonetheless, when given the option to assign an authority role (Study 2A) or assume an authority role (Study 2B), boys and girls exhibited comparable levels of in-group and self-biases.

Power in Aggressor-Victim Relationships: Exploring Social, Physical, Gender- and Ethnicity-Based Power.

Theory highlights power in aggressor-victim relationships, yet empirical work assessing dyadic power is largely absent. Variability in power balance versus imbalance within aggressor-victim dyads (based on social, physical, gender- and ethnicity-based power) was explored. Participants (N = 952; grade 6-8; 50% girls, 44% Hispanic/Latina/o) nominated aggressors and victims (4662 aggressor-victim dyads; 642 strong dyads [based on reputational strength]; 169 sustained dyads [based on longevity]). Dyadic social power (social network centrality and prestige) was calculated from friendship nominations. Self-report was used for dyadic physical (body mass index), gender- and ethnicity-based power. Across power indicators, there were more power-balanced than imbalanced dyads (particularly for strong and sustained dyads). The findings challenge theoretical notions that aggressors are more powerful than their victims and have implications for aggressor-victim relationships.

The effects of socioeconomic status and situational power on self-other processing in the automatic imitation task.

Previous work using physiological measures has shown that socioeconomic status and social power both influence the degree to which people are attuned to the actions of others. However, it is unclear whether such effects on brain activity translate into behaviourally significant outcomes. Here, we examined differences in automatic imitation between individuals varying in SES and power from the local community population. The automatic imitation task involves participants making actions in response to a symbolic cue while simultaneously being exposed to an action that is incongruent or congruent with the cued response. Patterns of interference in reaction time and error rate reveal the extent to which a person is susceptible to influence from the actions of other-what we refer to as "the degree of social attunement". We found that individuals from low SES backgrounds and those in the low power priming group exhibited more interference than individuals from high SES backgrounds and those in the high power priming group. However, we did not observe an interaction between chronic status and the power group. We discuss our results in relation to broader behavioural patterns exhibited by individuals at varying levels of a social structure.

Power grabbed or granted: Children's allocation of resources in social power situations.

Notwithstanding alternative ways of obtaining power, social power is mostly commonly acquired through either a dominance approach, where power is grabbed by the powerholder, or a prestige approach, where power is granted by group members. Although children's attitude toward power in the dominance situation has been studied, little is known about how children understand and distinguish different ways of obtaining power. We examined the understanding of power in children aged 4-8 years by their resource allocation behavior in two social power acquisition situations. In Study 1, 4- to 8-year-olds (N = 123) gradually shifted from distributing more to the powerholder to showing no preference for either party (in the prestige situation) or to distributing more to the subordinates (in the dominance situation) as they age. Older children (6-8 years), but not 4- and 5-year-olds, were more likely to favor the powerholders in the prestige situation than in the dominance situation. In Study 2, when power did not produce unfair results, 7- and 8-year-olds (N = 48) favored the powerholder in the prestige situation but showed no preference in the dominance situation. The results suggest that children's attitudes toward the two ways of acquiring power are gradually differentiated with age, and children's resource allocation in the power situations is influenced by the way of acquiring power and children's equity concern.

Determining social power: Do Chinese preschoolers integrate verbal and nonverbal cues?

Children aged about 5 years can use verbal and nonverbal cues to determine social power. However, it is not clear what kinds of nonverbal cues preschoolers can use and whether they can integrate each nonverbal cue with verbal content when determining social power. Therefore, this research examined the ability of Chinese preschoolers to use and integrate visual, auditory, and verbal cues when determining social power as well as how this ability develops with age. In Study 1 (N = 478), 4- to 6-year-old Chinese children were recruited to judge the social power in visual, auditory, content, visual-auditory, visual-content, auditory-content, visual-auditory-content, and neutral cues. The results showed that 4-year-olds could not use any cues, 5-year-olds could not use content cues, and 6-year-olds could use all the cues. Children's performance improved with increasing age and the number of channels. Study 2 (N = 240) investigated whether speech tempo influences children's performance when using content cues. The results showed that 5- and 6-year-olds, but not 4-year-olds, could use content cues to determine social power under normal and slow tempos. Study 3 (N = 80) was conducted to clarify which visual cues 5- and 6-year-olds can use and the age difference. The results revealed that 5- and 6-year-olds could use head, eye, posture, and mixed cues to determine social power, whereas their performance was steady for both 5- and 6-year-olds. In sum, the results show that Chinese children aged about 5 years are already able to use and integrate visual, auditory, and content cues when determining social power. Moreover, the ability to determine social power is gradually improved with age during the preschool period.

The revealing effect of power: Popularity moderates the associations of personal values with aggression in adolescence.

OBJECTIVE: Values have been found to predict aggressive behavior in adolescents. Adolescents who endorse self-enhancement values typically exhibit more aggressive behaviors, while adolescents who endorse self-transcendent values are less likely to behave aggressively. The associations between values and aggression are low to moderate, suggesting that other factors might moderate them. The study examined whether these associations were moderated by adolescent popularity, an indication of social power. METHOD: The study included 906 adolescents from three cultures: Brazilians (N = 244), Jewish citizens of Israel (N = 250), and Arabic citizens of Israel (N = 409). Personal values were assessed using the Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ). Peer nominations were used to assess direct aggression and popularity. RESULTS: Popularity moderated the associations between values and aggression: while the aggressive behavior of popular adolescents was highly associated with their personal values, the behavior of unpopular adolescents was unrelated to their values. This effect consistently emerged across samples, with specific variations for gender and culture. CONCLUSION: Popularity enables adolescents to act according to their personal values: aggressive behaviors increase or decrease according to personal value priorities. The strength of this effect depends on cultural expectations and gender roles.

Infants distinguish between leaders and bullies.

We examined whether 21-month-old infants could distinguish between two broad types of social power: respect-based power exerted by a leader (who might be an authority figure with legitimate power, a prestigious individual with merited power, or some combination thereof) and fear-based power exerted by a bully. Infants first saw three protagonists interact with a character who was either a leader (leader condition) or a bully (bully condition). Next, the character gave an order to the protagonists, who initially obeyed; the character then left the scene, and the protagonists either continued to obey (obey event) or no longer did so (disobey event). Infants in the leader condition looked significantly longer at the disobey than at the obey event, suggesting that they expected the protagonists to continue to obey the leader in her absence. In contrast, infants in the bully condition looked equally at the two events, suggesting that they viewed both outcomes as plausible: The protagonists might continue to obey the absent bully to prevent further harm, or they might disobey her because her power over them weakened in her absence. Additional results supported these interpretations: Infants expected obedience when the bully remained in the scene and could harm the protagonists if defied, but they expected disobedience when the order was given by a character with little or no power over the protagonists. Together, these results indicate that by 21 months of age, infants already hold different expectations for subordinates' responses to individuals with respect-based as opposed to fear-based power.

Institutional-level drivers of gender-inequitable scientific career progression in sub-Saharan Africa.

BACKGROUND: This study sought to determine how institutional environments, including values, policies, and their implementation, shape inequities in scientific career progression for women and men, and their disadvantages in relation to their multiple social identities in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The findings are drawn from a wider research study that was aimed at gaining an in-depth understanding of the barriers and enablers of gender-equitable scientific career progression for researchers in SSA. This was nested within the context of the Developing Excellence in Leadership, Training and Science in Africa (DELTAS Africa) programme-a health-based scientific research capacity-strengthening initiative. METHODS: The study adopted an exploratory qualitative cross-sectional study design. In-depth interviews (IDIs) with trainees/research fellows at various career stages supported and/or affiliated to three purposively selected DELTAS Africa Research Consortia were the main method of data collection. In addition, key informant interviews (KIIs) with consortia research leaders/directors, co-investigators, and the consortia management team were also conducted to corroborate information gathered from the IDIs, and also to provide additional insights on the drivers of intersectional gender-inequitable career progression. In total, 58 IDIs (32 female and 26 male) and 20 KIIs (4 female and 16 male) were conducted. The interviews were carried out in English between May and December 2018. The data were analysed inductively based on emergent themes. RESULTS: Three interrelated themes were identified: first, characterization of the institutional environment as highly complex and competitive with regard to advancement opportunities and funding structure; second, inequitable access to support systems within institutions; third, informal rules-everyday experiences of negative practices and culture at the workplace, characterized by negative stereotypical attitudes, gender biases, sexual harassment, and bullying and intimidation. CONCLUSIONS: We contend that understanding and addressing the social power relations at the meso-institutional environment and macro-level contexts could benefit career progression of both female and male researchers by improving work culture and practices, resource allocation, and better rules and policies, thus fostering positive avenues for systemic and structural policy changes.

Subjective power and emotions in everyday interpersonal interactions: Counterparts' constrictive posture as moderator.

Power is one of the vital components embedded within interpersonal interactions, but few studies have studied it in everyday life context. This experience sampling study examined the associations of subjective power with emotional well-being and investigated the moderating effects of counterpart' postures in the associations. Our results demonstrated that individuals reported higher positive emotions and lower negative emotions when they perceived higher subjective power. Their positive emotions were positively correlated with counterparts' expansive postures while negative emotions were positively correlated with counterparts' constrictive postures. The subjective power-negative emotion associations were stronger when counterparts displayed higher level of constrictive posture. Our findings provide an evidence base for a comprehensive understanding on the role of subjective power and perception of counterparts' power-related posture in dyadic communications in emotional well-being.

Socioeconomic status and self-other processing: socioeconomic status predicts interference in the automatic imitation task.

High-status individuals have been found to be less attuned to the behaviour of others in the social environment, at least in the absence of any specific instructions to pay attention to them. Previous work using neural measures has shown that socioeconomic status (SES) influences the degree to which people are attuned to the actions of others. In particular, individuals from low-SES backgrounds were found to exhibit more mu-suppression, which has been suggested to reflect greater levels of sensorimotor resonance, compared to their high-SES counterparts. However, it is unclear whether such effects on brain activity translate into behaviour. Here, we examined differences in automatic imitation between high-SES and low-SES individuals. The automatic imitation task involves participants making actions in response to a numerical cue, while simultaneously being exposed to an action that is incongruent or congruent with the cued response. Patterns of interference effect reveal the extent to which the congruence of the observed action affects performance of the cued response. Interference thus indexes self-other processing, where high levels of interference suggest an increased susceptibility to the actions of others. Our results show that individuals from low-SES backgrounds exhibit more interference than individuals from high-SES backgrounds. Regression analyses revealed a negative relationship between SES and the degree of interference. Overall, our findings suggest that differences in SES are linked to differences in self-other processing, which could be relevant for broader behavioural tendencies exhibited by individuals at varying levels of a social structure.

Coerced resilience in fire management.

Mechanisms underlying the loss of ecological resilience and a shift to an alternate regime with lower ecosystem service provisioning continues to be a leading debate in ecology, particularly in cases where evidence points to human actions and decision-making as the primary drivers of resilience loss and regime change. In this paper, we introduce the concept of coerced resilience as a way to explore the interplay among social power, ecological resilience, and fire management, and to better understand the unintended and undesired regime changes that often surprise ecosystem managers and governing officials. Philosophically, coercion is the opposite of freedom, and uses influence or force to gain compliance among local actors. The coercive force imposed by societal laws and policies can either enhance or reduce the potential to manage for essential structures and functions of ecological systems and, therefore, can greatly alter resilience. Using a classical fire-dependent regime shift from North America (tallgrass prairie to juniper woodland), and given that coercion is widespread in fire management today, we quantify relative differences in resilience that emerge in a policy-coerced fire system compared to a theoretical, policy-free fire system. Social coercion caused large departures in the fire conditions associated with alternative grassland and juniper woodland states, and the potential for a grassland state to emerge to dominance became increasingly untenable with fire as juniper cover increased. In contrast, both a treeless, grassland regime and a co-dominated grass-tree regime emerged across a wide range of fire conditions in the absence of policy controls. The severe coercive forcing present in fire management in the Great Plains, and corresponding erosion of grassland resilience, points to the need for transformative environmental governance and the rethinking of social power structures in modern fire policies.

Higher social power increases occupational gender stereotyping in Chinese culture.

Prior studies have used the perspective of the social function of social power (such as how power affects interpersonal interaction between the powerful and the powerless) to explore how powerful people stereotype powerless people. In the present research, we further explored how high and low levels of social power affect occupational gender stereotyping from the perspective of how social power affects cognitive processing, that is, social categorization. We proposed that higher social power-primed participants, compared to low social power-primed participants, would be more inclined to use category-based representation and thus use stereotyping. In two studies, we investigated these effects and found that high social power, compared to low social power, increased occupational gender stereotyping in Chinese culture.

The Role of Experimenter Belief in Social Priming.

Research suggests that stimuli that prime social concepts can fundamentally alter people's behavior. However, most researchers who conduct priming studies fail to explicitly report double-blind procedures. Because experimenter expectations may influence participant behavior, we asked whether a short pre-experiment interaction between participants and experimenters would contribute to priming effects when experimenters were not blind to participant condition. An initial double-blind experiment failed to demonstrate the expected effects of a social prime on executive cognition. To determine whether double-blind procedures caused this result, we independently manipulated participants' exposure to a prime and experimenters' belief about which prime participants received. Across four experiments, we found that experimenter belief, rather than prime condition, altered participant behavior. Experimenter belief also altered participants' perceptions of their experimenter, suggesting that differences in experimenter behavior across conditions caused the effect. Findings reinforce double-blind designs as experimental best practice and suggest that people's prior beliefs have important consequences for shaping behavior with an interaction partner.

How Power Affects People: Activating, Wanting, and Goal Seeking.

Sociocognitive research has demonstrated that power affects how people feel, think, and act. In this article, I review literature from social psychology, neuroscience, management, and animal research and propose an integrated framework of power as an intensifier of goal-related approach motivation. A growing literature shows that power energizes thought, speech, and action and orients individuals toward salient goals linked to power roles, predispositions, tasks, and opportunities. Power magnifies self-expression linked to active parts of the self (the active self), enhancing confidence, self-regulation, and prioritization of efforts toward advancing focal goals. The effects of power on cognitive processes, goal preferences, performance, and corruption are discussed, and its potentially detrimental effects on social attention, perspective taking, and objectification of subordinates are examined. Several inconsistencies in the literature are explained by viewing power holders as more flexible and dynamic than is usually assumed.

Social power, conflict policing, and the role of subordination signals in rhesus macaque society.

OBJECTIVES: Policing is a conflict-limiting mechanism observed in many primate species. It is thought to require a skewed distribution of social power for some individuals to have sufficiently high social power to stop others' fights, yet social power has not been examined in most species with policing behavior. We examined networks of subordination signals as a source of social power that permits policing behavior in rhesus macaques. MATERIALS AND METHODS: For each of seven captive groups of rhesus macaques, we (a) examined the structure of subordination signal networks and used GLMs to examine the relationship between (b) pairwise dominance certainty and subordination network pathways and (c) policing frequency and social power (group-level convergence in subordination signaling pathways). RESULTS: Networks of subordination signals had perfect linear transitivity, and pairs connected by both direct and indirect pathways of signals had more certain dominance relationships than pairs with no such network connection. Social power calculated using both direct and indirect network pathways showed a heavy-tailed distribution and positively predicted conflict policing. CONCLUSIONS: Our results empirically substantiate that subordination signaling is associated with greater dominance relationship certainty and further show that pairs who signal rarely (or not at all) may use information from others' signaling interactions to infer or reaffirm the relative certainty of their own relationships. We argue that the network of formal dominance relationships is central to societal stability because it is important for relationship stability and also supports the additional stabilizing mechanism of policing.

Power and trust in organizational relations: an empirical study in Turkish public hospitals.

Given the salience of the interplay between trust and power relations in organizational settings, this paper examines the perceptions of social power and its effects on trust in supervisors within the context of public hospitals. Following the theoretical background from which the study model is developed, the recent situation of hospitals within Turkish healthcare system is discussed to further elucidate the working conditions of physicians. Sample data were collected employing a structured questionnaire that was distributed to physicians working at seven different public hospitals. The statistical analyses indicate that perceptions of supervisors' social power affect subordinates' trust in supervisors. Although coercive power is found to have the greatest impact on trust in supervisors, the influence of the power base is weak. In addition, the results show that perceptions of social power differ between genders. However, the results do not support any of the hypotheses regarding the relations between trust in supervisors and the examined demographic variables.