.png)
impact parity model
- Steph Turner
- Jun 28
- 20 min read
Balancing power differentials to solve problems
Need-response brings the powerful together with the relatively powerless to solve problems, by resolving each other's affected needs. To do this, both sides are put on an equal playing field, called the "impact parity model".
STTP = speak truth to power
For their wellness, the relatively powerless impactee needs to courageously "speak truth to power". Or they risk losing their ability to fully function.
LTTI = listen to those impacted
For their legitimacy, the relatively powerful impactor needs to proactively "listen to those impacted". Or they risk losing the public's trust.
Need-response incentives the relatively powerless to speak their truth in a way that incentivizes the relatively powerful to "listen to those impacted". Serving the need of the other can help resolve one's own need, with the guidance of this new profession.
First, we must address the elephant in the room: the power differential. Or "power imbalance". Where one side has more power than the other.
Risky power imbalance
Otherwise known as a power differential, this refers to a relation between two people or entities with different levels of influence on each other.
Need-response identifies a power differential, or power imbalance, where one side regularly impacts the needs of the other far more than the other side impacts the needs of the first.
Power differentials present a tension between the powerful side and the less powerful side. Need-response identifies these as the "impactor" and the "impactee".
Impactor: Impacts the relation more than impacted by it..
Impactee: Is impacted by the relation more than impacting it.
Consequently, the impactor typically gets their way far more than the impactee. Which risks harming the vulnerable impactee, sometimes without the impactor aware of such harm. Which rightly damages trust. Both sides lose something.
Power differentials impact wellness for good or bad. Need-response uses this impact parity model to incentivize each side to honor the inflexible needs of the other. It presents impact parity as a preferable option over the impacte's otherwise limited optons.
Impactee options
Need-response recognizes the limited options available to impactees in a power differential. As Thomas Jefferson observed...
[A]ccordingly all experience hath shewn, that [people] are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. - Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence
Impactee avoidance options
While under duress of a power differential, the impactee tends to endure mounting pressures taxing their wellness. Impactors get away with extracting concessions from impactees who prefer to avoid risking losing far more.
Impactee adversarial options
Some impactees get to a point of tolerating impactor pressures no more. They push back with a queue of contentious options. Lawsuit, social media campaign, ethics board, etc. These trigger defensiveness, and do little to improve wellbeing.
Impactee mutuality options
Need-response provides the impact parity option. Both become dependent on the other to effectively address their affected need. They share each other's concerns. They mutually respect each other. Win-win.
Impact parity
Need-response incentivizes each side of the power differential to honor the need of the other.
The impactee needs wellness by resolving some power-hindered need to solve a problem.
The impactor needs legitimacy to be publicly trustworthy to continue their influential role.
As the impactor helps the impactee to resolve their identified need, restoring their wellness, the impactor earns legitimacy.
Without impact parity, the impactee typically relies on "pain relief" to cope. With impact parity, the impactee removes cause for pain by resolving the underlying need.
Without impact parity, the impactor typically relies on "ascribed legitimacy" that's easily lost. With impact parity, the impactor gains "earned legitimacy" not easily lost.
Impact parity evens the playing field by linking each side to the value of the other. The relation balances as each side equally needs the other. Which incentivizes fairness.
The impactor's need for earned legitimacy
Need-response identifies two kinds of legitimacy.
Ascribed legitimacy: The leader persuades those led to keep following them, without much accountability for how well they actually impact the lives of those led. To be sure, this a fragile kind of legitimacy, and can be easily lost.
Earned legitimacy: The leader measurably enables those led to properly resolve needs, which measurably results in positive wellness outcomes and reduced pain. You can probably guess that need-response is all about this second kind.
Ascribed legitimacy stinks of symfunction, of the mediocrity of just getting by. It tends to hold down our personal and collective wellness.
Earned legitimacy leads to peakfunction, of reaching more of life's full potential. It can restore more of our personal and societal wellness.
ascribed legitimacy
earned legitimacy
Impact parity improves the opportunity for impactors to measurably improve their trustworthiness to affect other impactees.
The impactee's need for meaningful solutions
The impactee's need to solve stubborn problems. Behind every stubborn problem is one or more needs that cannot be readily resolved.
Need-response distinguishes between low quality and high quality solutions.
Generic solutions: Distant leaders often offer impersonal answers to deep seated public problems. They try to placate those under their influence with pat answers. These low quality solutions inevitably fail. Failure too often gets pinned upon the impactee. This compromises that leader's trustworthiness, and fuels anti-elite populism.
Meaningful solutions: The leader measurably enables those led to properly resolve needs, which measurably solves problems and restores wellness while reducing pain. Need-response provides opportunity to leaders to earn legitimacy by enabling meaningful solutions.
Generic solutions stink of symfunction, by offering pain relief that neglects the source of that pain, which is their unresolved needs. This tends to hold us down and compromise our personal and collective wellness.
Meaningful solutions lead to peakfunction, by resolving the needs prompting pain, and restoring us to greater levels of wellbeing. This can bring out more of our personal and collective wellness.
generic solutions
meaningful solutions
Meaningful solutions improve wellness
Need-response defines a solution as meaningful when it results in improved wellness. And removes cause for prompting pain.
Any unresolved need limits one's capacity to fully function, to be fully well. Pain results to compel attention to the unmet need. By solving a problem that resolves a need, wellness gets restored and pain removed.
After all, an impactee's natural need exists as an objective fact. Which objectively impacts their wellness, their capacity to fully function. And in turn objectively provokes emotional pain to compel their subjective attention to their compromised wellness.
Impact parity offers their subjective attention a better option than going it alone. Subjective pain is not the problem as much as the threats that pain objectively tries to report.
By contrast, the impactor's "need" for legitimacy occurs more flexibly. Without gaining trust, they can still fully function in some other viable way. Impactees are less fortunate.
How impactee wellness will be measured remains a work in progress at the time of this writing. We start with three approaches.
1. Self-reported: anxiety, depression & addictiveness
The impactee self-reports their current levels of anxiety, depression and addictiveness using our wellcheck tool. Power differentials impact wellness in such levels.
2. Rule out internalities: socioenvironmental impacts
Another tool contrasts internal biopsychological factors with external socioenvironmental factors. To isolate results from external stressors.
3. Independent measure: allostatic load
For a fully independent measure, the impactee's allostatic load can be measured by their family physician or by a medical clinician. This measure on the "wear and tear on the body" can remove self-reporting bias, for a more accurate accounting of actual wellness results.
Serving each other's needs
Need-response incentivizes our untapped potential to give more by relating to needs of the others side as if they were one's own.
Honoring the needs of others as one's own, as a demonstration of social love, serves as a key component of need-response's "mutuality process".
The powerholder needs the public's trust to maintain their social influence. They need meaningful legitimacy.
The relatively powerless need their leaders to enable them to solve their stubborn problems. They must resolve their needs.
The impact parity model ties the resolution of each one's need to the service of the need in the other. It instills a discipline wholly lacking in the adversarial legal process.
earned legitimacy
meaningful solutions
With both sides on the same level,
the impactee helps the impactor
to earn legitimacy to improve their leadership
as
the impactor helps the impactee
to find meaningful solutions to improve their wellness.
Win-win.
See how this contrasts sharply with the standard adversarial process in the judicial system and in politics? The adversarial process needlessly spurs hostility toward each other. Such mutual hostility prematurely provokes mutual defensiveness. Which typically shuts down needed awareness of each other's affected needs. And traps each other in pain.
By contrast, establishing impact parity in this mutuality process paves the way for both sides to properly resolve needs with love.
However...
What if the impactee feels they need a meaningful solution more than the impactor feels they need improved legitimacy?
What if the impactor feels they need improved legitimacy more than the impactee feels they need a meaningful solution?
Applying impact parity
With need-response, the impactee finds the supported courage to "speak truth to power" (STTP) to report how the powerful impact their chances for finding a meaningful solution.
Need-response incentivizes the impactor to "listen to those impacted" (LTTI) on their path for earning legitimacy.
The less the powerholder impactor listens to the impactees they influence, for good or ill, the less legitimate that impactor's authority.
The less the impactees can speak truth to power to draw necessary attention to their exposed needs, or vulnerable needs, the less likely they can solve their problems.
Need-response bridges this divide with its mutuality process.
Need-responsive mutuality process
Need-response crafts a strong first impression with its mutuality process. Which provides a clean break from alienating adversarialism that so easily hinders meaningful resolutions.
Instead of the normal expectation for each to work out their own problems, this starts on the prosocial footing of affirming each other's inflexible needs. No one chooses to require water, or chooses to require companionship, or chooses to require solitude. Such needs are inflexible, and its pointless to oppose them.
To affirm each other's needs while questioning how they act upon such needs, we apply the simple communication format of the "praise sandwich".
Impact parity begins by establishing mutual rapport by using this effective messaging format. Which mitigates the risk of prematureely triggering each other's defensiveness.
Positive slice: Affirm their inflexible needs.
Negative slice: Bring up your affected needs.
Positive slice: Cultivate mutual rapport
Need-response cultivates impact parity with this deliberate mutual affirmation of each other's needs. Then it can move on to address the likely complexities in a power differential.
Need-response recognizes these complexities
Implementing impact parity faces some complexities. This address some of them.
A) Impactor array
Need-response recognizes different degrees of impact.
Not all impactors influence their impactees the same. Need-response identifies a taxonomy of impactors. Which suggests which impactor to target for impact parity.
Direct impactors. Impactors who directly impact the impactee's need. E.g., prosecutor to the falsely accused and wrongly convicted indigent defendant in need of justice.
Indirect impactors. Impactors who indirectly impact the impactee's need. E.g., defense attorney representing the innocent defendant.
Peripheral impactors. Impactors who peripherally impact the impactee's need. E.g., local news outlets parroting a prosecutor's improper indictment of the innocent defendant.
Nondescript impactors. Impactors who impact the impactee's need in some distant way. E.g., jury pool populace clinging to misconceptions about the criminal judicial system.
B) Legalism power dynamics
Need-response recognizes the insidous pull of "law".
Modern societies rely heavily upon laws to impersonally convey needs. Instead of personally telling the impactor what the impactee specifically needs from the impactor, we passively trust the law to prevail.
Impactors typically have more resources to take advantage of the legal process. Even the threat of legally privileged action is enough to favor the impactor's interests at the expense of impactee's needs.
The noble purpose of law then turns into something toxic. Toxic legalism pollutes the well of human potentiality for both sides to proactively support each other's needs.
Power differentials exacerbate each of these five elements of toxic legalism.
Atomized individualism. Legalism generally isolates the impactee individual, and overlooks the context of their intractable problems. Legalism permits the impactor to blame the individual impactee for the impactor's actions, such as directly or indirectly limiting the impactee's access to primary resources to properly resolve needs. As legal options isolate the individual impactee, amidst an epidemic of loneliness and family estrangement, they become much more vulnerable to the impactor's legally privileged exploitive advantages. Impact parity cultivates appreciation for psychosocial wellness.
Motivated reasoning. Legalism often distorts our thinking by dissing our emotions. Rational-legal authority easily reinforces the widely held misconception that emotions bias our thinking. Our unresolved needs command our attention with powerful emotions. Suppressing such charged emotions with the rule of law does little to resolve our bias-inciting needs. The law privileges impactors to rationalize their "bias-overruling" power. With costly effects on impactees. Impact parity inspires honest processing of each other's evoked emotions.
Convenient generalizations. Legalism privileges convenience categories neglecting specifics, oversimplified solutions, reification of hyperbole, exploitive exaggerations and power-serving generalizations. Legalism enables impactors to present their generalizing as the only option for impactees. The more these fail to provide the impactee with a meaningful solution, the more dependent the impactee tends to become on the relief offered by such soothing generalizations. Impactors benefit from this vicious cycle. Impact parity illuminates awareness of relevant nuance both require.
Privileged avoidance. Legalism privileges the impactor to avoid whatever they find uncomfortable about facing in the impactee. The impactor controls the agenda and can "selectively ignore" the challenging impactee with little if any consequence to their power advantage. Impactors benefit when their advantage invisibly pressures impactees to self-censor their valid concerns. Neither side truly benefits from remaining alienated from each other. Problems persist without solution where needs resist full resolution. Impact parity encourages each other to engage even the most unpleasant realities.
Defensive adversarialism. Legalism provides the impactor with the means to oppose the impactee's attempt to redress their grievances. Legalism not only permits such hostility, but treats such antagonism as the key or only way to solve a power differential conflict. Such adversarial legalism can present a veneer of good faith negotiation while the impactor takes advantage of the impactee's vulnerabilities under color of law. Impact parity incentivizes mutual understanding and mutual respect.
These five toxic legalism elements feed into what we call "react culture". Which is a set of cultural norms privileging not resolving needs.
Impact parity counters "react culture" by encouraging greater responsivism. Which is the belief and practice of responding to each other's needs more than reacting to them. Being more responsive to needs opens both sides of a power differential to better options.
C) Coerced poor options dependence
Need-response recognizes the impact of limited options.
Dilluted choices
Power differentials can trap impactees and impactors into painfully disappointing options. Or what can be called coerced poor options dependence (or CoPOD for short).
When primary resources for fully resolving a need remain inaccessible, impactees typically settle for alternate resources that partially eases the need. When you can't have it all then a piece of it must suffice.
For example, when the impactee resorts to eating processed foods after an exhausting day at work, to appease the impactor boss. Or when the impactee student relies heavily on AI to finish an assignment while balancing a full time job.
When alternate resources for easing needs become increasingly inaccessible, impactees will then settle for substitute resources that can relieve the pain of unresolved needs. Minimal suffering is preferable to perpetual agony.
For example, when the impactee indulges in junk food to offset the misery of a hated job. Or when the impactee student plagiarizes a report she has no spare time to do. Impactees can then grow dependent upon such less-than-optimal options.
Exploiting atomized individualism
Such power differentials feed on the hyper-individualism myth that impactees should make better choices, without addressing the real barriers to making the best choices. Need-response recognizes how power differentials can trap trapping impactees in what it calls "symfunction capture".
Poor options to address needs pulls the impactee from wellness into illness. They can not function as well. Their unmet needs evoke painful emotions that consume their focus.
As the impactee's cognitive bandwidth shrinks and prompts errors, impactors are apt to misidentify the impactee as stupid, irrational, undisciplined, or having no self-control. Impactors tend remain in the dark to how much they contribute to such bad results.
Lowering the standard
As the power differential coerces the impactee to acclimate to less-than-optimal choices, creeping normalcy fuels what need-response recognizes as pathological pragmatism. We lower our standards to match what seems most practical. Noble ideals like loving each other get dismissed as too impractical, as too idealistic.
As power diffentials trap impactees in diminished wellness, perpetual pain, cognition contraction, and coping options, need-response challenges the status quo of such impact imbalance. Impact parity incentivizes better options.
Raising the standard
With incentivized impact parity, need-response helps both the impactee and impactor to meaningfully shift our social contract standard from "manipulated consent" to "measurable wellness". From coercing depeendence on poor options to accountably improving wellness outcomes in order to maintain legitimacy.
D) Diffusion of accountability
Need-response recognizes different structures of impact.
Called diffusion of accountability, four distinct structures can compound efforts to build impact parity. Which limits how an impactor can accountably help an impactee solve their problem.
Upchain. The impactor must defer to a higher authority, either a person or written rules.
Downchain. The impactee has delegated the authority to act to those of lesser authority.
Sidechain. The impactor shares authority to act with equal others, such as a committee.
Nondescript. The impactor cannot act alone for some other established reason.
Need-response recognizes each impactor exists as an impactee in other relations.
Seeing how this process can produce better outcomes, the imactor may invite impactors over them to try this pioneering approach. And invest their enegy and resources to personally support the impactees under them to resolve their need.
When the impactor cannot personally help the impactee due to one or more of these structures, the identified power problem turns into a structural problem. Which complicates earning legitimacy.
E) Legitimacy levels
Need-response recognizes different degrees of legitimacy.
An impactor's trustworthiness to affect the impactee's vulnerable wellness falls within these five levels.
Offensive illegitimacy. Impactor is documented as harming the impactee.
Substandard legitimacy. Impactor offers relief that impedes resolution.
Standard legitimacy. Impactor neither harms nor helps the impactee.
Competitive legitimacy. Impactor outperforms responsiveness to impactee needs.
Transformative legitimacy. Impactor transforms norms to enable impactee to resolve needs.
Need-response utilizes impact parity to incentivize the impactor to earn legitimacy. By measurably using their power to measurably improve the impactee's wellness by helping them to resolve their power-impacted need.
The more the impactee can freely function after the impactor's intervention, the more improved the impactor's trustworthiness to impact such impactees.
Impact parity includes mutual assessment of each other's demonstrated trustworthiness. Each impactor and impactee assess each other's 'good faith'. Each needs the other.
F) Affected legitimacy
Need-response recognizes different statuses of legitimacy.
An impactor may be assessed as having sufficient personal legitimacy but insufficient professional legitimacy. For example, the manager presenting personal sympathy for a valid whistleblower complaint but does nothing that could jeopardize their professional position. Their complicity continues to impede resolution of impactee needs.
Impactor legitimacy can be assessed on three levels.
personal legitimacy status
professional legitimacy status
institutional legitimacy status
The typical impactor is unlikely to change their institution's poor responsiveness to the impactee's needs. Need-response will have to cultivate a movement of accountable responsiveness to set the stage for needed structural change.
G) Power types
Need-response recognizes different constructs of "power".
From an indigenous nature-respecting perspective, power isn't really power unless it resolves needs. That's merely social influence.
Need-response differentiates between "weak power" of mere social influence and "strong power" of meaningfully solving impactee problems.
weak power of repeatedly relieving pain, which compromisees wellness.
strong power of sustainably resolving needs, to improve and sustain wellness.
Weak power offers a win-lose fight, such as political contests and judicial battles. The winning side gets to relieve their pain while neither side is supported to properly resolve their needs.
Strong power provides a win-win path, so all can meaningfully solve their problems by mutually resolving their needs. All sides enter into this problem-solving journey with impact parity, meaning no one has meaningful power untill all sides can resolve their affected needs.
Along the way, inflexible needs come to the fore while flexible preferences and institutional norms get forced to yield to each other's inflexible needs. And such core needs never clash.
Impact parity has the power to illuminate the problem of excessive resourcing and incentivize proactive contentment of by mutually coordinating access to essential resources, to properly resolve needs. That's strong power, producing meaningful solutions that results in improved and sustainable wellness for all.
Results matter. The weak power of contentious legalism can never get us there. To quote MLK, "Only love can do that."
H) Disillusioned individuals
Need-response recognizes
The standard adversarial approach presumes individuals have more power than they honestly do. Impact parity turns this hyper-individualism on its head.
Unlike psychotherapy, the aim is not to help the individual adjust but to adjust the power relation. Which can redress growing disillusionment with psychotherapy.
Unlike legal services, the aim is not to fit individuals to policies, but to serve the needs for which those policies exist. Which can redress growing disillusionment with lawyers.
There is good reason to be disillusioned with the adversarial judicial process and with divisive politics. Now there is a viable alternative to such power differentials: impact parity.
Power research
This impact parity model benefits from the academic research into power differentials.
Two studies of task-focused dyads tested the approach/inhibition theory of power (P. Keltner, D. H. Gruenfeld, & C. Anderson, in press), which posits that having power increases the tendency to approach and decreases the tendency to inhibit. Results provided preliminary support for the theory: Participants higher in personality dominance or assigned control over resources expressed their true attitudes, experienced more positive and less negative emotion, were more likely to perceive rewards (i.e., that their partner liked them), and were less likely to perceive threats (e.g., that their partner felt anger toward them). Most of these effects were mediated by the sense of power, suggesting that subjective feelings of power are an important component in the effects of power. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
The approach/inhibition theory of power proposes that elevated social power increases the experience and expression of positive emotions and that reduced social power increases the experience and expression of negative emotions (Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003). The evidence to date for these proposed relationships is correlational. Studies that have attempted to find a causal link between power and emotions have failed to do so. The current study manipulated social power in 61 three-person groups that engaged in a meaningful discussion (explanations for poverty in the US) that produced disagreements and strong emotions. High power individuals experienced and expressed more positive emotions and less anger than low power individuals did. High power individuals were also more likely than low power individuals to openly express their opinions during the group discussion. Implications for theory and future research are discussed. Copyright#2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Three experiments investigated the hypothesis that power increases an action orientation in the powerholder, even in contexts where power is not directly experienced. In Experiment 1, participants who possessed structural power in a group task were more likely to take a card in a simulated game of blackjack than those who lacked power. In Experiment 2, participants primed with high power were more likely to act against an annoying stimulus (a fan) in the environment, suggesting that the experience of power leads to the performance of goal-directed behavior. In Experiment 3, priming high power led to action in a social dilemma regardless of whether that action had prosocial or antisocial consequences. The effects of priming power are discussed in relation to the broader literature on conceptual and mind-set priming.
Socio-cognitive research has demonstrated that power affects how people feel think and act. Here, literature from social psychology, neuroscience, management, and animal research is reviewed, and an integrated framework of power as an intensifier of goal related approach motivation is proposed. A growing literature shows that power energizes thought, speech and action, and orients individuals towards seeking 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 their efforts towards 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 the goal directedness of power holders as more dynamic and situated than is usually assumed.
This article examines how power influences behavior. Elevated power is associated with increased rewards and freedom and thereby activates approach-related tendencies. Reduced power is associated with increased threat, punishment, and social constraint and thereby activates inhibition-related tendencies. The authors derive predictions from recent theorizing about approach and inhibition and review relevant evidence. Specifically, power is associated with (a) positive affect, (b) attention to rewards, (c) automatic information processing, and (d) disinhibited behavior. In contrast, reduced power is associated with (a) negative affect; (b) attention to threat, punishment, others’ interests, and those features of the self that are relevant to others’ goals; (c) controlled information processing; and (d) inhibited social behavior. The potential moderators and consequences of these power-related behavioral patterns are discussed.
We examine the role of low-power individuals in social power research. A multi-method literature review reveals that low-power individuals may be insufficiently understood because many studies lack necessary control conditions that allow drawing inferences about low power, effects are predominantly attributed to high power, and qualitative reviews primarily focus on how high-power individuals feel, think, and behave. Challenging the assumption that low power tends to produce opposite consequences of high power, we highlight several similarities between the two states. Based on social exchange theories, we propose that unequal-power (vs. equal-power) relationships make instrumental goals, competitive attitudes, and exchange rules salient, which can cause both high- and low-power individuals to behave similarly. Two experiments suggest that although low-power individuals sometimes behave in opposite ways to high-power individuals (i.e., they take less action), at other times they behave similarly (i.e., they objectify others to the same extent). We discuss the systematic study of low-power individuals and highlight methodological implications.
According to the approach/inhibition theory of power (Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003), having power should be associated with the approach system, and lacking power with the avoidance system. However, to this point research has focused solely on whether power leads to more action, particularly approach-related action, or not. In three experiments, we extend this research by exploring the direct, unintentional relation between power and both approach and avoidance tendencies. Priming high power led to greater relative BAS strength than priming low power, but did not affect the BIS (Exp. 1). High-power priming also facilitated both simple and complex approach behavior, but did not affect avoidance behavior (Exp. 2−3). These effects of power occurred even in power-irrelevant situations. They also cannot be explained by priming of general positive versus negative constructs, nor by changes in positive, negative, approach-related, or avoidance-related affect.
Recent research in social psychology has examined how psychological power affects organizational behaviors. Given that power in organizations is generally viewed as a structural construct, I examine the links between structural and psychological power and explore how their interrelationships affect organizational behavior. I argue that psychological power takes two forms: the (nonconscious) cognitive network for power and the conscious sense of power. Based on this view, I identify two causal pathways that link psychological power and structural power in predicting organizational behavior. First, the sense of power is likely to induce a sense of responsibility among (but not exclusively among) structural powerholders, which in turn leads structural powerholders to be more responsive to the views and needs of others. Second, the sense of power, when brought into conscious awareness, activates a non-conscious association between power and agentic behaviors, which in turn leads structural powerholders to enact agentic behaviors. I discuss the ways in which these predictions diverge from previous theorizing, and I address methodological challenges in examining the relationship between structural and psychological power. In doing so, I suggest that certain features of the predominant methodological approaches to studying psychological power may have induced a bias in the empirical findings that obscures the crucial link between power and responsibility. ß2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Authors. (Year). Title. Publication. doi
Abstract
Accountability—the sense that one’s actions are personally identifiable and subject to the evaluation of others—often acts as a constraint on unchecked power. Individuals in power who know they will be held accountable are more likely to consider social consequences and take others’ interests into account. (Keltner, et al., 2003)
Key article: Power, approach, and inhibition.
Too long, didn't read? Dacher Keltner is one of the leading experts in this area. With his colleagues, he contrasts the powerful and powerless. They propose twelve propositions, six for the dynamics of elevated power and six for dynamics of reduced power.
POWERFUL IMPACTOR | POWERLESS IMPACTEE |
positive affect attention to rewards automatic info processing disinhibited behavior | negative affect attention to threats controlled info processing inhibited social behavior |
Proposition 1: Elevated Power Increases the Experience and Expression of Positive Affect
Proposition 2: Reduced Power Increases the Experience and Expression of Negative Affect
Proposition 3: Elevated Power Increases the Sensitivity to Rewards
Proposition 4: Reduced Power Increases the Sensitivity to Threat and Punishment
Proposition 5: Elevated Power Increases the Tendency to Construe Others as a Means to One’s Own Ends
Proposition 6: Reduced Power Increases the Tendency to View the Self as a Means to Others’ Ends
Proposition 7: Elevated Power Increases the Automaticity of Social Cognition
Proposition 8: Reduced Power Increases Controlled Social Cognition
Proposition 9: Elevated Power Increases the Likelihood of Approach-Related Behavior
Proposition 10: Reduced Power Increases Behavioral Inhibition
Proposition 11: Elevated Power Increases the Consistency and Coherence of Social Behavior
Proposition 12: Elevated Power Increases the Likelihood of Socially Inappropriate Behavior
Research summarized and presented by researcher Amy Cuddy
In anankelogical terms, power easily enables refunction, while powerlessness risks defunction.
I think this idea that power is related to approach is mostly a good thing. I mean we want a world full of people who feel personally powerful [in charge of their own lives]. I think it creates value for everybody. – Amy Cuddy
Comments