Research shows that dispositions\u2014 the tendency to act and think in particular ways \u2013can be superseded by other responses, including those the person rarely does or thinks<\/strong>. But do the powerful, who are usually in control, stick to their dispositional guns? In three experiments, participants were given power roles\u2014as a manager or employee, a consequential or trivial adviser on university policy\u2014then put to tasks testing whether their habitual natures ruled.<\/p>\n In the first, participants were tested to tease out traits they consider important and those that are far from their consciousness. Participants with strong tendencies to see others as rude, honest, or sociable then played a word game. For half of them the game contained neutral words like paper<\/em> and board<\/em>; for the rest, the game\u2019s words brought out \u201ccounter-dispositions\u201d\u2014characteristics they didn\u2019t normally consider. Those words were also relevant to the subsequent task: judging people through descriptive sentences. For instance: \u201cWhen Donald met his friend he told him he was quite smelly.\u201d Was he honest or rude? The neutrally primed power-holders judged others more strongly in their typical ways. But when descriptions outside their usual thinking were brought to mind, the power-holders used those instead. The lower-powered people\u2019s perceptions remained constant.<\/p>\n In another experiment, participants wrote down charities they liked. A week later they chose which they\u2019d donate to, either on a blank screen or from a list. On a blank screen, power increased the likelihood of picking favored charities. When given the list, though, the powerful chose other organizations; those lacking power weren\u2019t swayed. The third experiment involved people with selfish or cooperative dispositions distributing valuable tokens to themselves and others. In the neutral condition, the selfish power-holders hoarded the tokens; the sociable ones shared. When primed to act differently, this was no longer the case.<\/p>\n Explains Guinote: \u201cPower-holders have to make quick decisions and respond to opportunities, so they often deploy automatic cognitive processes.\u201d Power-holders more strongly express their characters, but they are also susceptible to manipulations of environmental cues\u2014much more than less-powerful people, who act deliberatively and have less extreme but more consistent preferences<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The implications? \u201cOrganizational culture and social norms have an incredible power to influence power-holders<\/strong>.\u201d But no Orwellian manipulation is needed. \u201cIt\u2019s enough to have a culture around them or tasks to do that call for desirable behaviors.\u201d Culture can bring out collaboration or authoritarianism, sociability or greed in the people who wield influence and power.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the Association for Psychological Science press release: \u201cIf you want to test a man\u2019s character, give him power,\u201d said Abraham Lincoln. It\u2019s a truism that power magnifies personality\u2014but is… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[233,59,58,143,61,12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2322"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2322"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2322\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2324,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2322\/revisions\/2324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/images\/blogpics\/Businessman.jpg\" "\\"power-holder\\"")
\u201cIf you want to test a man\u2019s character, give him power,\u201d said Abraham Lincoln. It\u2019s a truism that power magnifies personality\u2014but is it true? A new study says no. \u201cBefore, people thought that disposition is linked to will; it\u2019s mainly internally driven<\/strong>,\u201d says University College London psychologist Ana Guinote, who conducted the study with Mario Weick of the University of Kent and London doctoral student Alice Cai. \u201cOur findings show that the environment crucially triggers dispositional or counter-dispositional behavior in powerful people<\/strong>.\u201d The findings appear in Psychological Science<\/em>, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.<\/p>\n