shivering in frustration. This man had felt entitled to adjust the temperature conditions at will, but Deb felt paralyzed. For months after, Deb stewed: Why had this man acted so quickly and confidently while she dithered?
Now imagine that you walked into a room with five other participants. You all sit down around a table and write an essay. Half of you are asked to write about a time when you had power, while the other half are instructed to write about a time when someone had power over you. When you are done with the essay, you are placed in your private room to fill out some surveys. The door closes behind you, and as you settle into your chair, you realize that there is a fan blowing directly into your face. What do you do? Remember, it is unclear whether or not you are allowed to adjust this annoying fan; whether you can turn it off or redirect it.
In one experiment, we purposely created this situation to see who would tinker with the fan and who would sit there getting colder and colder. In other words, we wanted to re-create the psychological experience that Deb had experienced on the plane.
It turned out that those who had been randomly assigned to think about a time they had power were 65 percent more likely to turn off or redirect the fan than someone who had thought about having little power. Simply recalling an experience in which they had power in one room led these individuals to assert agency and power to make their world a more comfortable place to be in the next room.
Being primed with power even changes our voice. In a project led by Sei Jin Ko of San Diego State University, we had participants read a passage to measure the baseline acoustics of each participant’s voice. We then had participants recall an experience with power. Finally, we had participants read their opening statement in a negotiation, and measured whether power changed their acoustic properties. Here is what we found: Participants conveyed a steadier pitch and a greater shift between being loud and quiet—that is, they varied their pitch less and their volume more—after imagining they had power. Like our subjects, Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister, learned to speak with greater authority by varying her volume more but her pitch less. (Thatcher went through vocal training to express this authority in her voice.)
But were these effects noticeable to the naked ear? To find out, we later played the recordings of all of our speakers to listeners at a different university. Without knowing that power had been manipulated in the experiment, these listeners reported that those primed with power
sounded
more authoritative and more powerful.
As it turns out, there is a neurological explanation behind these effects of power. When Maarten Boksem and colleagues from Tilburg University used an EEG to measure brain activity in people who had been primed to think about power, they found that recalling an experience with power actually increased brain activity on the frontal left side of the brain.
This finding tells us something fundamental about why power produces all of the effects we just described, like feelings of authority and confidence. Much of human behavior is driven by the interplay between two brain systems. One is the inhibition system, which helps people avoid negative outcomes. The other system is the approach system, which directs our attention toward achieving positive outcomes. The approach system resides in that frontal left side of the brain, the side of the brain that gets activated in those who feel powerful. It is this left-hemisphere activation that causes us to behave like the man on the plane and take action to achieve the outcome we want.
Evidence of these effects of power can even be seen in our blood. Dana Carney has found that power leads individuals to experience decreased cortisol, a stress hormone that serves as a psychological inhibitor. Similarly, in our research with Jennifer Jordan of the
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