Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do Social Influence and Power Work?
Connect dependence with the predicted effects of reward, threat, and constraint.
Why you’re reading it. Compare structural power with its proposed psychological consequences.
A question to consider. How might accountability change a supervisor's behavior while leaving control of resources intact?
Why this reading
This framework asks how control of resources changes attention, emotion, and action through opportunities for reward and exposure to threat.
Before you read
Approach involves pursuing opportunities; inhibition involves restraining responses. Power, status, dominance, and felt control are related but distinct. A proxy stands in for a construct and can introduce other differences.
Read for
- Connect each prediction to the proposed reward or threat pathway.
- Compare manipulated resource control with gender, status, or class used as proxies.
- Examine the proposed roles of accountability, unstable hierarchies, and cultural context.
Consider afterwards
- What comparisons would distinguish an effect of gaining power from an effect of losing it, rather than only a high–low difference?
Editorial context
The authors acknowledge proxy and student-sample limitations. Moskowitz's methodological comment questions whether high–low comparisons isolate the two proposed effects. Treat this as a conditional framework, not a rule that power always corrupts or a current validation of every cited experiment.