The Use and Abuse of Power

Annette Y. Lee-Chai, John Bargh

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781841690223
• eBook ISBN: 9781317710356
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

A compilation of works from prominent researchers, promoting both a panoramic and multilevel understanding of this complex construct, with focus on power as a cause of social ills and remedies to prevent corruption and abuse.

PART I

POWER WITHIN THE MIND

1

Using Power

Newton’s Second Law

DAVID KIPNIS

The Hobbesian (1968) assumption that we are programmed by our desires, and by our dependence on other people to satisfy these desires, provides an important perspective for understanding the use of power. At times, our desires override our obligations to help others, to be decent, to be charitable, and to be what society considers civil. We want things from others from the moment of birth until death. We want affection, material goods, services, information, to be loved, to dominate, the chance to do better than others, to be treated fairly, and to be left alone, to name but a few of the many desires that impel us to influence others. There is no end to our dependence on others, because there is no end to the things we want. The dismal observation of Hobbes that people s motivations consist simply of endless streams of appetites appears as true today as when he wrote Leviathan (1968) in the 17th century.

If we accept these assumptions, then it follows that everyone must exercise influence and power on a day-to-day basis. Thus, the critical question is not whether people exercise power, but how they exercise power. That is, what are the tactics people use to influence others and what happens next? This chapter is about what happens next; that is, the consequences of exercising influence.

Some of these consequences have been examined by social psychologists, in particular, how people respond to being influenced. Studies of attitude change, leadership, conformity, reducing prejudice, affectionate relations, and more, are basically concerned with understanding how target persons respond to influence acts designed to change their behavior. Far less attention is given, however, to the person who is trying to change the target person s behavior, called here the powerholder.

BEHAVIOR TECHNOLOGIES

Technology can be defined as the use of systematic procedures to produce intended effects. Thus technology is not synonymous with engineering hardware, but includes techniques found in the social sciences and in everyday culture (Ellul, 1964). The goal of all technologies is to produce outcomes with less effort, and that are more uniform and predictable, than can be achieved by unassisted human effort. The use of technology, then, reduces the amount of uncertainty in attempts to solve practical problems. Reducing uncertainty means increasing the probability that events will occur as wanted.

Just as there are technologies to transform physical materials, there are technologies to transform behaviors (Kipnis, 1987, 1990). The goal of behavior technologies is to produce behaviors that are predictable and controllable from the point of view of an influencing agent (e.g., advertiser, psychotherapist, leader). One way of increasing control is to devise technologies that increase a target persons understanding of their activities (e.g, Langer, 1983; Schofield, Evans-Rhodes, & Huber, 1990). More typically, however, control is increased by devising technologies that reduce the amount of thinking and free choice available to the target of influence.

Thinking and free choice are limited by such techniques as reducing the amount of information available to the target person (one-sided arguments, media control; e.g., Herman & Chomsky, 1988), telling people what to think and how to behave (behavior therapy techniques), distorting peoples self-appraisals (dissonance, foot-in-the-door, door-in-the-face techniques), substituting pleasure or pain for thinking (principles of reinforcement, ingratiation, coercion), controlling information (e.g., putting a spin on the news), using group processes such as democratic leadership to induce compliance, and developing jury selection techniques that identify biased jurors.

In short, many of the behavior technologies developed in social psychology use flimflam, deception, or coercion—what Petty and Cacioppo (1981) aptly labeled as peripheral techniques. From the perspective of the influencing agent, the use of logic and reason to persuade—that is, central techniques of influence—are inefficient. This is because the use of reason increases the uncertainty of desired outcomes, takes too much time, and gives too much control to the person being influenced.

METAMORPHIC EFFECTS OF POWER

In earlier writings Kipnis (1976, 1984), presented evidence that the act of influence can change not only the behavior of persons who are the targets of influence, but also the values and attitudes of persons doing the influencing. These changes in agents are called the metamorphic effects of power.

Metamorphic effects involve two sets of independent variables: 1) the strength of the influence tactics that are used to persuade the target person to comply; and 2) the subsequent attributions of the influencing agent concerning who controls the target person s behavior—the target person or external forces including the influencing agent.

When influencing agents successfully use strong and controlling tactics of influence (“I demand,” “I tell them what I want done”), they believe, not surprisingly, that the person being influenced no longer controls his or her own behavior, but is controlled by the influencing agents tactics. Stated in terms of attribution theory (Weiner, 1985), the successful use of strong tactics produces the belief that the person being influenced is externally controlled.

Further, when we believe that people are not in charge of their own behavior, we evaluate them unfavorably An explanation for these less favorable evaluations is that the behavior of the person being influenced, no matter how excellent, is seen as guided by outside forces rather than by the person s abilities and motivations. Hence, he or she is not given full credit for anything that is accomplished.

Social relations also suffer under these circumstances. This is because we seldom treat as equals or actively seek the company of persons who are not in control of their own behavior. Finally, moral values that affirm the intrinsic worth of each person are seen as not applicable to the less powerful. These opinions about the target person set the stage for subsequent exploitation and abuse by the powerholder.

It should be noted that when rational tactics (“I explain my reasons,” “I suggest”) or weak tactics (“I beg,” “I act more loving”) are used successfully to persuade, the user attributes compliance to the decisions of the target person. Thus the exercise of influence, per se, is not problematic for social relations. Rather problems arise when strong and controlling tactics are used to get one’s way.

ROUTINIZATION AND THE METAMORPHIC MODEL

Within the context of this view, it can be suggested that behavior technology provides influencing agents with strong tactics of influence. To the extent that these procedures are successful, it is reasonable to believe that the technology will be seen as the cause of the target person s behavior. Hence the target person will be given little credit for what he or she does.

Support for this view was initially found in several field studies that examined how the routinization of work affected managers evaluations of their employees (Kipnis, 1984). Routinization is defined as the transfer of the skill and control components of work to machines and machine systems. The benefits to management of routinization are many, including increased control of the work flow, decreased reliance on employee skills, and consequently reduced labor costs. There is considerable evidence that work routinization reduces employee’s feeling of competence and job satisfaction (Blauner, 1964; Gutek & Winter, 1990; Shaiken, 1985).

The findings of these field studies (Kipnis, 1984) were consistent with the metamorphic model. In these field studies, it was found that as a unit’s work increased in routinization, managers increasingly attributed unsatisfactory work to the employee’s lack of motivation, rather than to the employee’s lack of ability. Further, managers’ evaluations of their employees were directly related to technological changes in the work of their units. In all samples, employees who worked in routinized units were devalued by their managers. These employees were described as avoiding responsibility, requiring close supervision, and taking little pride in their work.

While these findings are consistent with the metamorphic model, it is clear that they can also be viewed as simply reflecting actual differences in attitudes and motivations of employees hired to do skilled and unskilled labor. The next section of this chapter describes more recent experimental studies of the ways in which behavior technologies change the attitudes of their users.

ATTITUDE CHANGING TECHNOLOGIES

For over six decades, social psychology has studied the interrelated questions of how attitudes are formed and maintained and how they mediate social behavior. In addition, considerable attention has been devoted to the development of systematic techniques for changing people’s attitudes. Such techniques as doorin-the-face, democratic leadership, one- or two-sided arguments, communicator credibility, dissonance arousal, and more, have been shown to change attitudes in the direction chosen by an influence source.

Research about attitude changing technologies has focused, almost exclusively, on the question of validity, that is, whether these technologies actually change attitudes. Little consideration has been given to the possibility that these attitude change techniques might also change their users’ attitudes and values. The metamorphic model suggests, however, that those who use peripheral attitude change techniques may believe that target persons have no choice but to change, and hence will disparage them.

To examine the issue, two experimental studies were conducted. In the first, Edgar O’Neal, Kelli Craig, and this author (1994) conducted an experimental study in which students were taught how to use one of three attitude change techniques. These were the door-in-the-face, the foot-in-the-door, or a technique based on the use of rational influence.

The door-in-the-face technique requires that influencing agents first ask for a very large favor. After this request is refused, the agent makes a lesser request and asks for what he or she really wants. The foot-in-the-door technique requires influencing agents to first ask for a small favor that is difficult to refuse. After this small favor is granted, the agent then asks for what he or she really wants. The rational influence technique, a central route technique, requires the agent to develop logical reasons why the target person should change and then asks the target person to think over these reasons.

Participants were told that we were developing exercises to demonstrate attitude change theory in introductory psychology courses. The goal of each persuader was to convince a target person to join a group advocating curriculum changes, using one of the influence techniques described in the preceding paragraph. These changes were initially opposed by the target person, but favored by the persuader. In all instances, the use of the assigned persuasion technique was programmed to be successful. That is, the target person responded to the technique by agreeing to do what the persuader wanted.

It had been expected that users of the door-in-the-face or foot-in-the-door techniques would perceive persons they influenced as submissive and lacking in the ability to exercise influence. An unexpected finding in the first study was that participants who used the door-in-the-face or the foot-in-the-door techniques described targets as more, rather than less, dominant when compared with participants who used rational influence. O’Neal, Kipnis, and Craig’s (1994) explanation for this unexpected finding was based on research by Stahelski (1992). Stahelski reported that users of the door-in-the-face and foot-in-the-door techniques were consistently described by outside observers as less powerful than their targets of influence.

Taken together, the findings of O’Neal, Kipnis, and Craig, and of Stahelski indicate that the door-in-the-face and the foot-in-the-door techniques are seen as techniques used by people with little power to persuade the more powerful. Presumably, when the balance of power favors the target person, people assume that personal powers of persuasion, such as the use of reason, or even threats, are not likely to gain compliance. Rather more deceptive and indirect tactics are preferred.

To further explore this possibility, a second experimental study was conducted by Bruce Rind and David Kipnis (1999). This study added another persuasion technique, labeled authority technique, in which users simply demanded that participants comply. The second study retained the use of rational influence and the door-in-the-face technique, but dropped the foot-in-the-door technique. This was because the use of the door-in-the-face and the foot-in-the-door techniques yielded practically identical results in the first study.

In the second study, we also tested the idea that the use of rational influence would change the user’s self-evaluations for the better; while the use of the door-in-the-face would change these self-evaluatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• About the Editors
• Contributors
• Preface
• I. Power Within the Mind
• II. Power Between Individuals
• III. Power and Groups
• IV. Power in Society
• Author Index
• Subject Index