What does it mean to be influential? How does one persuade others to pursue a unified goal? How does one leverage power? In this course, you’ll learn how to develop influence and to become more effective in achieving your organizational goals. Professor Cade Massey of the Wharton School has designed this course to help you understand the framework of power and influence and the dynamics of effective networks, and shows you how to develop your skills of persuasion and leverage. By the end of this course, you’ll know your own strengths and how to use them to get what you need, how to gain power and influence, and how to leverage relationships and alliances to achieve your goals in both business and in life.
The Psychology of Status
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From the course by University of Pennsylvania
Influence
85 ratings
University of Pennsylvania
85 ratings
Course 4 of 4 in the Specialization Achieving Personal and Professional Success
From the lesson
Module 4
In this module, you’ll examine the ethical implications of persuasion and the responsibilities that come with having a powerful leveraging toolkit. By looking at examples of our own unconscious biases, you’ll gain a better understanding of where your perspective and values stand. You’ll learn how to find the right balance in making the necessary tradeoffs while exerting sustainable influence. Through exploring different hypothetical scenarios in the Hard Questions Survey, you’ll form strategies to avoid common pitfalls while leveraging influence. By the end of this module, you’ll have a deeper understanding of the ethics of persuasion and influence, and be able to make difficult decisions that are more aligned with you and your organization’s values.
Meet the Instructors
Cade MasseyPractice Professor
The Wharton School
Most of this course has been about how to build your power and influence.
And, we want to give you the tools to do that to equip you
to accomplish whatever goals you're trying to accomplish.
But, we would be remissed to end the course
without talking about the downside of having power.
At this point, we've seen a lot of research especially
recently in psychology on the downside,
the interpersonal consequences of having power and status.
And so, for the next few lectures we're wanna talk a little bit about those downsides.
Wanna begin with an anecdote from Nell Minow.
Nell, for a period of time was the head of Institutional Shareholder Services.
And, when she took that over from the previous CEO on the day he left,
she said the president told her,
"Watch how funny your jokes get."
And, she says, "I must think about that three or four times a week.
Not because I'm telling a joke and people are laughing,
but because I need to remind myself constantly of the challenge that gets tougher and
tougher as you get higher in the organization to get people to be honest with you".
This is the reality of status that people respond differently to you.
And it's not even necessarily a strategic choice,
It's an automatic intrinsic change in our behavior in the presence of status.
And as we'll see,
there are automatic intrinsic changes in our own behavior as we achieve status.
So, that's the thing and that's the reason wanna start with this example because
it's jokes and humor as something as basic as that,
is influenced by whether a person has status or not.
Another quote that gets started from Alain de Botton who says,
"Love is people being nice to you because they like you;
Power is them being nice to you even though they might hate you."
This is what you're facing,
and on one level it maybe this is a good thing, right?
You rather have people who even if they hate you are nice to you.
On the other hand, you're gonna change.
If this is the way you interact with the world and you're also going to be closed off
to important sources of information and relationships if this is how people treat you.
So, it's hard to navigate that.
We want to give you some more tools for navigating it.
Some sociologists note that,
"The chief danger of status is that of suppressing personal development,
and so of causing social enfeeblement,
rigidity and ultimate decay."
This sounds awful. I mean,
we've been trying to get you status the entire course and here at the end we're saying,
"Well, you're welcome this is what you're going to have personal social enfeeblement."
So, we want to avoid that and it's hard to avoid.
So we're going to hit it pretty hard here and
talk about what we've learned from social psychology.
We're going to use a review paper in 2003 by Doc Keltner and a couple of his colleagues.
On the determinants of power but really we want to jump to the end.
We're going to talk about the social consequences of power.
So, let me just unpack those for you.
This research has been done in the lab and outside of the lab,
very often they are running experiments.
Keltner is just one of the researchers in this area but one the most prominent.
But, the people working in this field,
they run experiments where they manipulate whether
a person is in a high power situation or a low power situation.
So they can really isolate the impact of power directly.
Some of the studies are field studies where they just assessed,
they determined independently whether someone's in a high power, low power situation.
So, what they have found?
Let's run through a quick summary here.
Elevated power increases and
reduced power increases the experience and expression of positive affect whereas,
reduced power increases the experience and expression of negative affect.
So, powers making people happier and
facilitates the expression of that happiness and vice versa for reduced power.
Elevated power increases sensitivity to rewards,
where reduced power increases sensitivity to threat and punishment.
So you can imagine this has direct consequences for how people act,
if one is only focused on the upside,
that might lead for example to more risk taking.
If one is disproportionately focused on the downside,
the threats and punishment,
that's going to lead to a great deal of risk aversion for example.
Elevated power increases the tendency to construe others as a means to an end,
where reduced power increases the tendency
to see yourself as a means of somebody else's end.
So a kind of profound social... profound psychological
shifts as we increase power or have our power reduced.
Elevated power increases automatic social cognition.
This is for example the use of stereotypes.
It's reasoning about people kind of top down from our schemas, from our stereotypes,
from our categories reasoning down to the individuals whereas,
reduced power increases controlled social cognition,
so it's reasoning up from the details of the situation.
So for example, they have studied this and
looking at applicants to a school or to a committee
and they've coded how people reason about
those applicants and when they're induced to be at a high power situation,
the more apt to use these social categories and
stereotypes as a reason about the applicants.
Elevated power increases approach-related behavior
whereas reduced power increases behavioral inhibition.
So what is the approach-related behavior?
This can be attitudes and behavior on food,
physical space, verbals and nonverbal sex, sex.
And these studies is usually some kind of flirtatious behavior.
But for example, people use physical space very
differently when they are in high power situations than when they're in low.
In the classroom we ask people,
okay give us a little demonstration, sit!
As people would sit,
if they had low power.
And you see a whole classroom of kids,
they you know sprung up like this and they bend over and then you say,
okay alternatively sit as you would,
if you really feeling powerful and people start leaning
back and spreading out and invariably somebody put their feet up on the desk.
They'll be knocking other people's stuff out of the way.
And this is what's been observed in field settings and in experimental settings,
people take up space very differently
when they're feeling high power or they're feeling low power.
And this is connected to this idea of
approach-related behavior versus behavioral inhibition.
When you have... when you're in a high power situation, you're more approach-related.
People when they have higher power,
the experience of power increases consistent and coherent social behavior
whereas reduced power increases situationally contingent behavior.
That means when you're feeling more powerful,
you're more the same across
a wide range of situations than when you're not feeling powerful.
When you're not feeling powerful,
you're completely pushed around by the situation.
You situate your behavior is situationally contingent.
So, as we get to this point of the slide,
you begin to realize these consequences aren't all bad.
Right? Because who do you want to be?
Do you want to be the person who is the same in every situation?
Or do you want to be the person who gets pushed around by all these various situations?
Well, truthfully, you probably need to be somewhere in the middle.
We've all had friends or colleagues or
bosses who were a little bit too much the same person in all situations.
They probably could have tailored it a little bit better to the situation.
On the other hand, you don't want to be someone who is
completely malleable by the situation.
So, it begins giving us the sense that some of
this power leads to behavior that is good and probably advantageous to us,
too much of it leads to behavior that can be damaging to us.
Finally, the elevated power increases the likelihood of socially inappropriate behavior.
So for example, interrupting,
speaking out of turn, impolite eating.
So in the lab they've gone as far as coding the code things like;
how often people talk over people,
they code things like how much they chew with their mouth open,
how many crumbs fall when they eat.
They've gotten very precise and the results are always in the same direction that
increased power leads to these socially inappropriate behaviors.
So, more recently Keltner in his book, The Power Paradox,
finds four themes in this literature,
four consequences of power.
One, is what he calls empathy deficits.
We have a harder time empathizing with other people.
We have a harder time even understanding the emotions we're experiencing,
when we're in high power situations.
We have more self-serving impulsivity.
You've just seen examples of that in some of the experiments I cited.
We have more incivility and disrespect.
The talking over, the demands,
the bad language, the criticism.
And, we have what he calls narratives of exceptionalism.
We are amazingly resourceful and rationalizing why we deserve,
after all we've accomplished and all the work we've put
in to act in possibly unethical ways.
In fact, its not even unethical because we deserve it,
we're entitled, we are exceptional.
These are the themes that Keltner as seen,
given another 12 or 13 years on his research.
There's even a simpler theme and that is the common thread of disinhibition.
This is one way of making sense of all the behaviors that we've just talked about.
Increased power leads to acting on desires in
a social context without concern for social consequences.
So again, some of this is probably a good thing right?
It's the problem of having too much,
is the problem of a little power is good but a lot of
power feel and the status becomes a bad thing.
I would probably wish for most of my friends and students a little less inhibition right,
a little more disinhibition,
until they have too much.
So what we see is power leads people to be more reward focused,
more sensitive to their internal states,
reduced sensitivity to other people's needs or
action orientation and general being more instrumental.
All of this comes from a more disinhibited.
To be even a little bit more provocative and to underscore this disinhibition idea.
Some colleagues Hirsh, Galinsky and Zhong
studied disinhibition in a few different ways and they found that,
the way people act when they are in powerful situations,
is related to the way they act when they're
in anonymous situations or when they're drunk.
Power, alcohol, and enmity all lead to disinhibition and it starts helping us
understand the connections and
the consequences of feeling a little bit too much the status idea.
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