This paper examines how power influences human behavior. We consider evidence from diverse literatures relating elevated power to approach and reduced power to inhibition. Specifically, power is associated with (a) positive affect, (b) attention to rewards and to features of others that satisfy...

Cultures might differ when they lose control and seek to regain it. Two experiments explored whether threats to control affected participants’ willingness to believe personality feedback from a horoscope. We found that lack of control increased the degree to which people in Western, but not...

We suggest that power enables individuals to defy obstacles in their environment and continue to pursue their goals, unfettered by constraints. The first two experiments test whether the powerful defy instructions from authority (Experiment 1) and ignore social constraints against helping in...

Though women have increasingly reached parity with men in terms of degrees earned, they remain under-represented in many fields of employment (e.g., STEM) and in the upper levels of management. Diversity training programs are now common in most organizations, yet even if the more overt forms of...

Power affects the behavior of people in the workplace. Communication is a prime example of a behavior that can be affected by the level of power that a person holds in an organization. Statements can have both semantic and pragmatic implications. The semantic implication of a statement concerns...