Encuesta para la determinación de perfiles profesionales

The purpose of this experiment was to show the merits of studying powerfulness in combination with powerlessness in a domain where high power is generally assumed to be the driver behind power’s effects. Specifically, we ran an experiment examining the effect of social power on objectification. Since prior research has shown that powerfulness is associated with increased levels of objectification and aggressive behavior (e.g., Bargh et al. 1995; Gruenfeld et al.

2008; Kipnis 1972; Zimbardo 1973), it is reasonable to expect that we could replicate these effects. As such, we expected that participants would be more likely to report that they have objectified a work partner over whom they had power (i.e., a subordinate) than an individual who was their peer (the control condition used in Gruenfeld et al. 2008). According to this logic, one would conclude that power and objectification would be positively correlated, i.e. the more power one has, the more one will objectify others.

Design and Procedure

Participants. Three hundred and one participants were recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk to participate in this study. Sample size was determined in advance based on a pretest. Prior to launching the study, we decided to exclude participants with duplicate IP addresses or those who failed an attention check (Oppenheimer, Meyvis, and Davidenko 2009). In addition,

171

participants who were not currently employed or who were not a superior, subordinate and a peer in their current job were not eligible to participate in the study and were “screened out” prior to starting the survey. This was done to maximize the likelihood that each participant would be able to describe a relationship with either a subordinate, superior or a peer. However, at the end of the study, some participants still indicated that they were not currently employed or that they did not have experience as a supervisor, superior and peer. These participants were also excluded. Based on these a priori determined exclusion criteria, 42 subjects were dropped leaving a final sample of 259 participants (mean age = 32.61, SD = 9.42; 42.47% female). Results are identical when all 301 participants were analyzed instead (all ps < .001).

Design. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions (low power, control, or high power) where they encountered a short writing task developed by Gruenfeld et al. (2008, study 1a). In the high power condition, participants were asked to describe a hierarchical, professional relationship in which their work partner reports directly to them or in which they have power or control over their work partner:

Please think of a professional relationship you have, or have had in the past, that is hierarchical. The relationship should be one in which your work partner either reports directly to you or in which you have disproportionate power or control (or both) over him/her. Briefly describe your partner, and the nature of your relationship, in the space below.

172

In the control condition, participants were asked to describe a non‒

hierarchical, professional relationship in which neither they nor their work partner has comparably more power or control:

Please think of a professional relationship you have, or have had in the past, that is not hierarchical. The relationship should be one in which you and your work partner do not report directly to one another, nor does one of you have disproportionate power or control over the other. Briefly describe your partner, and the nature of your relationship, in the space below.

In the low power condition, participants described a professional relationship in which they report directly to their work partner or one in which their work partner has power or control over them:

Please think of a professional relationship you have, or have had in the past, that is hierarchical. The relationship should be one in which you report either directly to your work partner or in which your work partner has

disproportionate power or control (or both) over you.

Briefly describe your partner, and the nature of your relationship, in the space below.

Next, participants rated how likely they are to objectify the work partner they described. We used the established 10 item objectification scale previously used by Gruenfeld and colleagues (α = .69; e.g., “I think more about what this person can do for me than what I can do for him/her”, “I tend to contact this person when I need something from him/her” and “This relationship is important to me because it helps me accomplish my goals”). Next,

participants were asked to think back to the relationship they described and rate

173

how powerful they felt in this relationship. We used the sense of power scale developed by Anderson, John, and Keltner (2012; α = .91; e.g., “In the relationship with this person I can get him/ her to do what I want”, “In the relationship with this person I think I have a great deal of power” and “In the relationship with this person I can get him/her to listen to what I say”). Last, participants completed an attention check, provided their demographic information, and were debriefed.

Results

Manipulation Check. As expected, participants in the high power condition reported feeling more powerful (M = 5.73, SD = 1.01) than

participants in the control condition (M = 5.16, SD = 0.76), F(1,258) = 12.98, p

< .001, d = .65. Participants in the low power condition reported feeling less powerful (M = 4.32, SD = 1.36) than participants in the control condition, F(1, 258) = 28.08, p < .001, d = -.78, and the high power condition, F(1, 258) = 72.11, p < .001, d = -1.18. Thus, the power manipulation was successful.

Objectification. Based on prior research we expected that participants would report being more likely to objectify another person when the person in the described professional relationship was a subordinate rather than a peer. This was what we found. Participants in the high power condition were more likely to objectify their work partner (M = 4.49, SD = .86) than participants in the control condition (M = 3.86, SD = .88), F(1,258) = 25.10, p < .001, d = .72.

174

Strikingly, participants who were asked to describe a professional relationship in which their work partner had power over them (low power condition) also reported being more likely to objectify this work partner (M = 4.47, SD = .70) than participants in the control condition, F(1,258) = 23.70, p <

.001, d = .76. The difference in objectification between participants in the low power and high power conditions was not significant, F(1,258) = .02, p = .88, d

= -.03, suggesting that the powerful and powerless exhibit similar tendencies to objectify others.

Discussion

This study shows that comparing the effects of high power to a control condition, could lead to different conclusions about the effects of power depending on whether powerlessness is simultaneously tested as well. In this study, a researcher who only included a high power and control condition in their design would conclude that being in a position of power increases the objectification of social targets. In contrast, the surprising effect of the low power condition could suggest, for example, that the effects of power on objectification are curvilinear or that any type of vertical hierarchical thinking could increase objectification as compared to non-hierarchical thinking. In the manuscript, we discuss a number of likely explanations for such an effect.

175 References

Anderson, Cameron, Oliver P. John and Dacher Keltner (2012), "The Personal Sense of Power," Journal of Personality, 80(2), 313-344.

Bargh, John A., Paula Raymond, John B. Pryor and Fritz Strack (1995),

"Attractiveness of the Underling: An Automatic Power → Sex Association and Its Consequences for Sexual Harassment and Aggression," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68(5), 768-781.

Gruenfeld, Deborah H., M. Ena Inesi, Joe C. Magee and Adam D. Galinsky (2008), "Power and the Objectification of Social Targets," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(1), 111-127.

Kipnis, David (1972), "Does Power Corrupt?" Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 24(1), 33-41.

Oppenheimer, Daniel M. Tom Meyvis and Nicolas Davidenko (2009),

“Instructional Manipulation Checks: Detecting Satisficing to Increase Statistical Power,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45, 867 – 872.

Zimbardo, Philip G. (1973), "On the Ethics of Intervention in Human Psychological Research: With Special Reference to The Stanford Prison Experiment," Cognition, 2, 243 - 256.

176