PSY22-6a

Research Article

Power and Perspectives Not Taken Adam D. Galinsky,1 Joe C. Magee,2 M. Ena Inesi,3 and Deborah H Gruenfeld3

1 Department of Management and Organizations, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University;

2 Robert F.

Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, New York University; and 3 Graduate School of Business, Stanford University

ABSTRACT—Four experiments and a correlational study

explored the relationship between power and perspective

taking. In Experiment 1, participants primed with high

power were more likely than those primed with low power

to draw an E on their forehead in a self-oriented direction,

demonstrating less of an inclination to spontaneously

adopt another person’s visual perspective. In Experiments

2a and 2b, high-power participants were less likely than

low-power participants to take into account that other

people did not possess their privileged knowledge, a result

suggesting that power leads individuals to anchor too

heavily on their own vantage point, insufficiently adjusting

to others’ perspectives. In Experiment 3, high-power

participants were less accurate than control participants

in determining other people’s emotion expressions; these

results suggest a power-induced impediment to experienc-

ing empathy. An additional study found a negative rela-

tionship between individual difference measures of power

and perspective taking. Across these studies, power was

associated with a reduced tendency to comprehend how

other people see, think, and feel.

The powerful are often accused of being predominantly con-

cerned with their own desires and well-being, of being in-

sensitive to the social implications of their behavior, and of

being poor perspective takers (Fiske, 1993; Keltner, Gruenfeld,

& Anderson, 2003; Kipnis, 1972). Indeed, perspective taking—

stepping outside of one’s own experience and imagining the

emotions, perceptions, and motivations of another individual—

seems the antithesis of the self-interested behavior often dis-

played by the powerful: It has been linked to moral reasoning

(Kohlberg, 1976), altruistic behavior (Batson, 1991), and social

competence (Davis, 1983). In this article, we demonstrate em-

pirically that power is associated with increased difficulty in

taking other individuals’ perspectives. Individuals primed with

power anchor too heavily on their own vantage points and

demonstrate reduced accuracy when assessing the emotions and

thoughts of others.

DEFINITIONS AND THEORIES OF POWER

Power is often defined as the capacity to influence other people;

it emerges from control over valuable resources and the ability to

administer rewards and punishments (French & Raven, 1959;

Keltner et al., 2003). The power-approach theory (Keltner et al.,

2003) suggests that power increases goal-directed activity. As a

result, the powerful act more (Galinsky, Gruenfeld, & Magee,

2003) and with greater variability (Guinote, Judd, & Brauer,

2002) than the nonpowerful. Although power is considered a

structural variable, a property of social relationships, its psy-

chological properties can be activated by exposure to cues re-

lated to power or by recalling past experiences with power;

activating power through these manipulations leads to the same

effects as those obtained using structural and role-based

manipulations of power (Anderson & Galinsky, 2006; Chen,

Lee-Chai, & Bargh, 2001; Galinsky et al., 2003).

POWER AND PERSPECTIVE TAKING: OPPOSING EFFECTS

There are a number of reasons why power may diminish per-

spective taking. First, by definition, people in power have

control over valuable resources and are therefore less dependent

on others. Thus, to accomplish their goals, the powerful do not

need to rely on an accurate, comprehensive understanding of

others. Second, power is typically associated with increased

demands on attention, so that it is difficult for power holders to

take the perspective of everyone under their charge (Fiske,

1993).

Address correspondence to Adam D. Galinsky, Department of Management and Organizations, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 2001 Sheridan Rd., Evanston, IL 60208, e-mail: [email protected].

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1068 Volume 17—Number 12Copyright r 2006 Association for Psychological Science

In addition, power and perspective taking affect a number of

variables in opposite ways. For example, whereas the perspec-

tive taker seems to be the consummate adapter who includes the

traits of other individuals in his or her own self-representation

(Galinsky, Ku, & Wang, 2005), the high-power individual’s self-

concept remains more rigid; individuals with more power in

their marriages resist the identities imposed on them by their

less powerful spouses (Cast, 2003), and when relationship

partners become more emotionally similar, it is the lower-power

partner who has done the majority of the adapting (Anderson,

Keltner, & John, 2003). Perspective taking is associated with

increased similarity between the self and others (Davis, Conk-

lin, Smith, & Luce, 1996), whereas having power creates psy-

chological distance from other people (Lee & Tiedens, 2001).

The differential effects of power and perspective taking ex-

tend to social perception. The powerful, on the one hand, are less

accurate than the powerless in estimating the interests and

positions of other people (Keltner & Robinson, 1997) and are

more likely to make self-serving attributions (Kipnis, 1972).

Perspective takers, on the other hand, accurately perceive the

interests of others (Eisenberg, Murphy, & Shepard, 1997) and

are more other-serving in their attributions (Regan & Totten,

1975). People with more power form less complex interpersonal

impressions than people without power (Woike, 1994), basing

their impressions of others on expectancies (Copeland, 1994)

and stereotypes (Fiske, 1993; but see Overbeck & Park, 2001).

In contrast, perspective takers have been shown to battle suc-

cessfully the seemingly inevitable forces of stereotyping

(Galinsky & Moskowitz, 2000), and to create more integratively

complex contemplations (Tetlock, Skitka, & Boettger, 1989).

The opposing forces of perspective taking and power have im-

portant social implications: Perspective taking has been asso-

ciated with altruism and helping behavior (Batson, 1991),

whereas power has been linked with such malfeasant social

behaviors as sexual harassment (Bargh, Raymond, Pryor, &

Strack, 1995).

Given these conflicting effects of power and perspective

taking, we hypothesized that power would decrease perspective

taking. We conducted an initial study to test for this proposed

inverse relationship. Thirty-two participants (13 male and 19

female undergraduate students) reported their personal sense of

power, using a measure that assesses an individual’s power in

general, across his or her social relationships (eight items; a 5 .82; e.g., ‘‘I think I have a great deal of power in my relationships

with others’’; Anderson, John, & Keltner, 2005). Scores on this

sense-of-power scale are correlated with people’s standing in

power hierarchies (whether or not they occupy powerful roles)

and predict the same behaviors as structural manipulations of

power (Anderson & Berdahl, 2002; Anderson & Galinsky,

2006). Participants also reported their tendency to engage in

perspective taking, using a scale that measures the ‘‘tendency to

adopt the psychological point of view of others’’ in everyday life

(Davis, 1983, pp. 113–114; seven items; a 5 .64; e.g., ‘‘I

sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how

things look from their perspective’’). We regressed perspective-

taking scores on power scores (controlling for participant’s sex)

and found a significant negative relationship, B 5 �0.35, SE 5 0.17, prep 5 .88.

To establish that power leads directly to a lack of perspective

taking, we conducted four experiments using a diverse set of

perspective-taking variables. We explored whether high-power

participants would be less inclined to spontaneously adopt an-

other individual’s visual perspective (Experiment 1), less likely

to take into account that others did not possess their privileged

knowledge (Experiments 2a and 2b), and less accurate in de-

termining the emotion expressions of others (Experiment 3),

compared with individuals in low-power or control conditions.

Because structural manipulations of power (e.g., providing di-

rection or evaluating other people) often increase cognitive load

(Fiske, 1993), which might reduce the ability to engage in

perspective taking, we used a priming procedure—having in-

dividuals recall an experience with power (Galinsky et al.,

2003)—in which power was manipulated while cognitive load

was held constant.

EXPERIMENT 1: DRAWING AN E

Experiment 1 was designed to examine the effect of power on the

tendency to spontaneously adopt another person’s visual per-

spective, an important dimension in understanding other peo-

ple’s beliefs and intentions (Baron-Cohen, 1995). We used a

procedure created by Hass (1984) in which participants are

asked to draw an E on their foreheads. One way to complete the

task is to draw an E as though one is reading it oneself, which

leads to a backward and illegible E from the perspective of

another person (see Fig. 1, left panel). The other way to approach

the task is to draw the E as though another person is reading it,

which leads to production of an E that is backward to oneself (see

Fig. 1, right panel). We predicted that participants in the high-

power condition, compared with those in the low-power condi-

tion, would be more likely to draw the E in the self-oriented

Fig. 1. Responses to the task of drawing an E on one’s forehead: self- oriented E (left), indicating no perspective taking, and other-oriented E (right), indicating perspective taking.

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A.D. Galinsky et al.

direction, indicating a lesser tendency to spontaneously adopt

another person’s perspective.

Method

Subjects were 57 undergraduates (41 women and 16 men) with

an average age of 20.02 years. In return for their participation,

they received a payment of $10 and entry into a $300 lottery.

The experiment involved two conditions, a high-power and a

low-power condition. Participants came in groups of 2 or 3 to the

lab, where they were given a high- or low-power experiential

prime, which has been shown to reliably manipulate a sense of

power (Galinsky et al., 2003). Participants assigned to the high-

power condition were instructed to recall and write about a

personal incident in which they had power over another indi-

vidual or individuals. Participants assigned to the low-power

condition were instructed to write about a personal incident in

which someone else had power over them. For both groups,

power was defined as controlling the ability of another person to

get something he or she wanted or being in a position to evaluate

someone else. Participants were unaware of the power-prime

manipulation that the other participants in their session received.

After completing this power-priming task, each participant

was brought to a separate room, and the experimenter explained

that the next tasks would be described in a packet on the desk in

the room. The packet instructed the participant to begin working

on a resource-allocation task, which was designed to reinforce

the power prime. Those participants who received the high-

power prime were asked to allocate seven lottery tickets to them-

selves and another participant, whereas those participants who

completed the low-power prime were asked to estimate how many

of the seven lottery tickets they would receive from the other

participant. Participants next read the following instructions:

Please follow the instructions below and perform the tasks re-

quested in the order they are presented. They are coordination

tasks.

Task 1. With your dominant hand, as quickly as you can, snap your

fingers five times.

Task 2. With your dominant hand, as quickly as you can, draw a

capital E on your forehead with the marker provided. Don’t worry,

the marker is nontoxic, and we will make sure it is removed before

you leave today.

At the end of the experiment, each participant was thoroughly

debriefed and fully probed for suspicion. Not a single partici-

pant expressed any suspicion that the power manipulation and

the dependent measure were related.

Results

As Hass (1984) pointed out, handedness could affect the di-

rection of the E; thus, we controlled for handedness (49 right-

handed and 8 left-handed participants) and participant’s sex in

all analyses. Using logistic regression, we regressed the direc-

tion of the E (0 5 self-oriented, 1 5 other-oriented) on power

condition, handedness, and participant’s sex. The only signifi-

cant effect was for power, B 5 �1.51, SE 5 0.76, prep 5 .88. High-power participants were almost three times as likely as

low-power participants to draw a self-oriented E (33%, 8 of 24,

vs. 12%, 4 of 33).

To determine whether the amount of power people expressed

possessing predicted perspective taking, we had one coder, who

was blind to both condition and hypotheses, rate each essay

using a 7-point scale measuring how much power the participant

reported having. This coder had achieved high reliability (a 5 .94) with another coder on a large sample of power essays from

another set of studies. Participants described themselves as

having more power in the high-power essays (M 5 5.75, SD 5

0.53) than in the low-power essays (M 5 2.21, SD 5 0.55), t(55)

5 24.44, prep 5 .99, d 5 6.57. Using logistic regression, we

regressed the direction of the E on these ratings of power in the

essays, handedness, and participant’s sex. The only significant

effect was for the amount of power expressed in the essays, B 5

�0.41, SE 5 0.21, prep 5 .88. The more power participants described possessing, the more likely they were to draw a self-

focused E.

The results are consistent with our theorizing. Individuals

given an opportunity to spontaneously adopt another person’s

visual point of view were less likely to do so if they had received

the high-power prime than if they had received the low-power

prime. In the next set of experiments, we sought to determine

whether power affects the tendency to take another person’s per-

spective when doing so is required for effective communication.

EXPERIMENTS 2A AND 2B: CONSIDERING COMMUNICATION INTENTIONS

Most messages can be interpreted in multiple ways, and ef-

fective communication requires taking the knowledge and per-

spectives of one’s audience into account. The same semantic

content (e.g., ‘‘nice suit!’’) can be received as a compliment or as

a thinly veiled insult, depending on knowledge of the speaker’s

tastes and previous interactions. People who have privileged

knowledge about a speaker’s intentions often have difficulty

recognizing and adjusting for the fact that other listeners do not

share this privileged perspective (Keysar, 1994). They are

cursed by their knowledge, inaccurately predicting that others

see the world as they do. Epley, Keysar, Van Boven, and Gilovich

(2004) have suggested that individuals initially anchor on their

own vantage point and then adjust for another person’s per-

spective. We contend that power leads this adjustment to be

particularly insufficient.

Experiment 2a

Following Keysar (1994), we gave participants a message and

asked them to interpret how a friend of the speaker might per-

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Power and Perspectives Not Taken

ceive the message. The message on its face seemed sincere, but

privileged background knowledge about the speaker’s inten-

tions suggested a sarcastic interpretation. We predicted that

high-power participants would be more likely than low-power

participants to assume that the friend understood the sarcasm,

even though a sarcastic interpretation depended on privileged

background knowledge that the friend did not possess.

Method

Subjects were 42 undergraduate students who participated in

return for a for $10 payment. They were greeted in the laboratory

by an experimenter, who explained that they would complete

several questionnaires related to decision making. The experi-

mental manipulations and our dependent variables were em-

bedded in the packet of materials that participants received.

Power Manipulation. The power manipulation was the same

experiential prime used in Experiment 1.

Message Interpretation. After completing the power prime and a

filler task, participants read a scenario in which they and a

colleague went to a fancy restaurant recommended by the col-

league’s friend but had a particularly poor dining experience.

The next day, the colleague sent an e-mail to the friend stating

only, ‘‘About the restaurant, it was marvelous, just marvelous.’’

Participants were asked to respond to the question, ‘‘How do you

think the colleague’s friend will interpret the comment?’’ Re-

sponses were made on a scale anchored at very sarcastic (1) and

very sincere (6). There was no information in the e-mail itself to

suggest anything other than sincerity. However, if participants

anchored on their privileged knowledge of the speaker’s inten-

tion, then they would think that the friend would interpret the

message as sarcastic.

Debriefing. As in Experiment 1, no participants expressed any

suspicion that the power manipulation and the dependent

measure were related.

Results

High-power participants thought the message would be per-

ceived as more sarcastic by the naive recipient (M 5 3.74, SD 5

1.54) than did low-power participants (M 5 4.84, SD 5 1.30),

t(40) 5 2.47, prep 5 .93, d 5 0.77. These findings support our

prediction that power leads individuals to anchor too heavily on

their own vantage point, insufficiently adjusting to other indi-

viduals’ perspectives.

Experiment 2b

We ran a follow-up experiment using a different scenario to rule

out the possibility that power simply produces sarcastic attri-

butions. Fifty-one subjects read that they and a colleague had

gone to a restaurant where the colleague’s friend always had poor

dining experiences. They, however, really enjoyed the meal. The

colleague sent the friend the same ‘‘marvelous, marvelous’’

e-mail, and subjects predicted how the friend would interpret

the comment, using the same sarcastic-sincere scale from Ex-

periment 2a. In this experiment, however, the privileged infor-

mation implied sincerity, but the naive listener would have

inferred sarcasm. As in Experiment 2a, high-power subjects

were significantly more anchored on their privileged knowledge

than low-power subjects were. Specifically, high-power subjects

(M 5 3.31, SD 5 1.46) thought that the naive recipient of the

message would interpret it as more sincere and less sarcastic

than did low-power subjects (M 5 2.36, SD 5 1.35), t(49) 5 2.4,

prep 5 .93, d 5 0.68.

EXPERIMENT 3: INTERPRETING EMOTION EXPRESSIONS

The previous experiment suggests that power can reduce ac-

curacy in social judgment. Power might also inhibit the ability to

pay attention to and comprehend other people’s emotional

states. Accurate perception of another person’s emotional state

is part and parcel of the capacity to experience empathy. Indeed,

empathy has been defined as ‘‘the ability to perceive accurately

how another person is feeling’’ (Levenson & Ruef, 1992, p. 234).

Because the ability to discern others’ emotions bears resem-

blance to theory-of-mind abilities related to perspective taking,

this skill has also been called affective perspective taking

(Denham, 1986). We predicted that power would be associated

with worse ability to accurately detect other individuals’ emo-

tion expressions. Consistent with this prediction, previous

studies have determined that men, who typically have more

power in society than women do, are worse judges of other

people’s emotion expressions than women are (Hall, Gaul, &

Kent, 1999; McClure, 2000).

To test our hypothesis, we used pictures from the Diagnostic

Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy (DANVA2; Nowicki & Carton,

1993). The pictures were of young men and women expressing

emotions that differed in both their quality and their intensity.

Because the first two experiments did not use an experimental

control condition, it was not entirely clear whether activating

high power decreased perspective taking or activating low power

increased perspective taking. To resolve this ambiguity, in the

final experiment we compared a high-power condition with a

control condition.

Method

Seventy undergraduate students (16 men and 54 women, aver-

age age of 20.17 years) were recruited from an on-line partici-

pant pool at a private West Coast university and paid $12. When

they arrived at the lab, they were seated at semiprivate cubicles

and were told they would be completing a study on experiential

cognition.

There were two experimental conditions: high-power and

control. Participants in the high-power condition completed the

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A.D. Galinsky et al.

same experiential prime that was used in the previous three

experiments. Participants randomly assigned to the control

condition responded to the following: ‘‘Please recall your day

yesterday. In the space below, describe your day, including

thoughts, feelings, events, etc.’’

Next, subjects were told they would complete an ostensibly

unrelated task that involved ‘‘looking at the experience of oth-

ers.’’ Specifically, they were told that they would be observing a

series of faces and their task would be to determine the emotion

being expressed by each target. The stimuli they saw were the

Adult Faces and Adult Paralanguage Scale associated with the

DANVA2, which consists of 24 images of faces that express

happiness, fear, anger, or sadness. After viewing each stimulus,

participants selected which of the four emotions was being ex-

pressed.

Results

Accuracy was measured by recording the number of errors

participants made in judging the target’s expressed emotion. We

submitted the total number of errors to a 2 (high-power vs.

control condition) � 2 (participant’s sex) analysis of variance. The results replicated prior work, showing a main effect for

participant’s sex, F(1, 66) 5 4.59, prep 5 .90, Z 2

5 07, with men

(M 5 4.56, SD 5 3.01) making more errors than women (M 5

3.61, SD 5 2.12). More important to the present research, a

main effect of power also emerged, F(1, 66) 5 10.81, prep 5 .98,

Z2 5 .14. Participants primed with high power made more errors (M 5 4.54, SD 5 2.80) in judging the emotion expressions than

control participants did (M 5 3.11, SD 5 1.57). The interaction

was not significant, F(1, 66) 5 2.32, prep 5 .79, Z 2

5 .03. These

findings support the prediction that power is associated with

decreased accuracy in emotion detection and suggest an addi-

tional consequence of diminished perspective taking: greater

difficulty in experiencing empathy.

DISCUSSION

Across four experiments, we found that power was associated

with a reduced tendency to comprehend how other individuals

see the world, think about the world, and feel about the world.

Priming power led participants to be less likely to spontaneously

adopt another person’s visual perspective, less likely to take into

account that another person did not possess their privileged

knowledge, and less accurate in detecting the emotional states of

other people. This inverse relationship between power and

perspective taking emerged across multiple forms of perspective

taking; regardless of whether participants were explicitly told to

be accurate (Experiment 3) or whether the consideration of

another person’s perspectives was spontaneous (Experiment 1),

power was associated with less perspective taking than was

observed for low-power or control participants. In addition,

evidence from the third experiment, in which participants who

were primed with power deviated from those in a control con-

dition, demonstrates that it is high power that is an impediment

to, not low power that is a facilitator of, perspective taking. Given

that participants were unaware of the connection between our

experiential manipulation of power and the perspective-taking

dependent variables, we can say this relationship is at least

partially a nonconscious one. We believe that power leads not to

a conscious decision to ignore other individuals’ perspectives,

but rather to a psychological state that makes perspective taking

less likely. The four experiments, combined with our initial

study demonstrating a negative relationship between a measure

of power and a measure of perspective taking, suggest that

compared with low-power individuals high-power individuals

are less focused on the meaningful psychological experiences of

those around them.

Although the current studies collectively point in the direc-

tion of our hypothesized inverse relationship between power and

perspective taking, we acknowledge that each of our designs was

limited to a dichotomized independent variable, and our find-

ings always depended on a difference between two conditions.

The use of multilevel manipulations of power in the future would

provide for greater precision in interpreting power’s effects.

Diminished perspective taking may connect to the finding that

power is associated with action and increased goal pursuit

(Galinsky et al., 2003). By not attending to the concerns of other

people, the powerful can plunge headfirst into action and pursue

goals without restraint (Galinsky et al., 2003; Magee, Galinsky,

& Gruenfeld, in press). Although lack of perspective taking may

lead the powerful toward malfeasance, it can be an adaptive

response to attentional demands, one that allows for efficient

navigation of social and organizational worlds.

Our results are consistent with recent views that power can

lead to objectification (Gruenfeld, Inesi, Magee, & Galinsky,

2005; Keltner et al., 2003), the tendency to view other people

only in terms of qualities that serve one’s personal goals and

interests, while failing to consider those features of others that

define their humanity. Giving less attention to the human aspects

of other people should make it easier for a power holder to use

them as tools in the service of his or her goals and interests

(Gruenfeld et al., 2005).

The current results also indirectly support the idea that there

is an integrated relationship among power, perspective taking,

and stereotyping: Perspective taking decreases stereotyping

(Galinsky & Moskowitz, 2000), power increases stereotyping

(Fiske, 1993), and power decreases perspective taking. Fiske

(1993) has argued that stereotyping is one way that the powerful

maintain their privileged position. Failing to take others’ per-

spectives, objectifying others in a self-interested way, and

stereotyping others may all be part of the cognitive toolbox that

power holders use to stay in control. However, lack of per-

spective taking may also sew the seeds of power’s demise. When

disregard for the concerns, emotions, and individuality of oth-

ers—their humanity—persists, the powerful can inspire enmity,

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Power and Perspectives Not Taken

bitterness, and incipient rebellion. The inverse relationship

between power and perspective taking may allow the powerful to

accomplish short-term goals but lead to the long-term loss of

power.

Although our studies demonstrate that power reduces per-

spective taking, we suspect this relationship is not invariant.

One important moderator might be the extent to which accurate

knowledge of another person’s perspective would increase the

likelihood that a power holder will achieve his or her goals. In

addition, the degree of responsibility that high-power individ-

uals feel for their subordinates is likely to influence perspective-

taking tendencies. Indeed, when the powerful feel a sense of

responsibility, their behavior resembles that of the ideal per-

spective taker: They show increased generosity (Chen et al.,

2001) and more individuated impressions (Overbeck & Park,

2001). Similarly, increasing accountability (the pressure to

justify one’s decisions or view to other people; Tetlock et al.,

1989) may direct the attention of power holders to other people’s

perspectives, checking and balancing the cognitive effects of

power. Finally, culture may be a critical variable in determining

when power leads to perspective taking and when it leads to

egocentric self-focus (Zhong, Magee, Maddux, & Galinsky,

2006).

The observation that responsibility, accountability, and cul-

ture may influence how power is experienced and enacted offers

insight into when and how power may be delivered from the

forces of corruptibility: Action-oriented power combined with

perspective taking may be a particularly constructive force. If

the powerful are led to take the perspectives of others, their

actions ultimately might benefit the lives of the less powerful,

while also possibly helping them to remain in power.

Acknowledgments—Earlier versions of this article benefited

greatly from insightful comments by James Cutting, Katie

Liljenquist, Jennifer Overbeck, Chen-Bo Zhong, and one anon-

ymous reviewer.

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