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Power: Do Powerful People Want Your Opinion, Care What You Think, Use Sex, And Know What Happens When YOU are Powerless?

by Kevin Hogan

This research looks at an issue that has been largely ignored by social scientists, Petty said. Many studies have looked at how the power of a person delivering a message impacts those who receive it. But this appears to be the first study that looks at how the power of the message recipient affects persuasion.

In several related studies, the researchers told college students they would be participating in two supposedly separate experiments. In one experiment, the students role-played in a situation in which one was a boss - in other words, had a position of power - and the other was an employee who simply took orders.

In the second experiment, the participants viewed a fake advertisement for a mobile phone. The ad was designed to see if participants were paying attention to the message, so half the participants received ads with particularly weak arguments for buying the phone (for example, touting that it had a broad currency converter), while the others received strong arguments (the phone could be recharged in just 5 minutes). Participants were then asked to rate how favorably they viewed the phone.

When the role-playing exercise was conducted before viewing the phone ad, those who played boss were more likely than those playing employees to rate the phone similarly -- whether they received the strong or the weak arguments.

"The strength of the argument made no difference to those who played the boss - they obviously weren't paying attention when they felt powerful," Petty said. "Those who played the employee, who were made to feel powerless, paid a lot more attention to the arguments. They weren't as confident in their own initial beliefs and weighed the arguments more carefully."

In a related study, the order of the experiments was essentially reversed. Participants first read the mobile phone ads, and were presented with either the strong or the weak arguments, and wrote down their thoughts while reading it. However, before they actually rated the phones, the same participants took part in the role-playing exercise in which some were the boss and some the employee. Later, they went back and rated the phones.

The results showed that the bosses in the role-playing exercise were now more influenced by the quality of the arguments in the ads. Those who were low-power employees were not as influenced by the ad quality.

"When power was experienced after the ads had been processed, it gave people confidence in their most recent thoughts, so if they read strong arguments, they rated the phones more favorably. If they read weak arguments, they were much more negative toward the phone," Petty said.

"Those who were feeling less power weren't as confident about the validity of their thoughts to the ads, so the strength of the arguments didn't matter as much."

What this all means is that it matters when people are feeling powerful - before or after they receive a persuasive message. If the message comes right after their power is made relevant to them, then powerful people will be difficult to persuade because they are confident in their existing opinions.

However, if people can be made to feel powerful right after a strong persuasive message, attitude change is more likely because powerful individuals will feel confident in the positive thoughts they generate to the message, Petty said.

To read about how this applies to getting a raise, turn the page...

Continue: Page | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |

Kevin Hogan
Network 3000 Publishing
3432 Denmark #108
Eagan, MN 55123
(612) 616-0732

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