The Field Guide › Paper
Proposes an integrative theory of how power shapes affect, cognition and behaviour, defining power as an individual's relative capacity to modify others' states by providing or withholding resources or administering punishments — a definition kept deliberately distinct from status (an evaluation-based grant of respect), authority (power derived from institutionalised role), and dominance (behaviour aimed at acquiring power), any of which can exist without the others. Power itself is traced to four levels of determinant: individual variables (traits, physical characteristics), dyadic variables (the other party's investment in and alternatives to the relationship), within-group variables (formal role and status), and between-group variables (ethnicity, gender, class, ideology, numerical majority or minority) — a structure that anticipates the later, more practitioner-facing formal/informal/demographic/expert typology built on French and Raven's bases of power. The theoretical engine borrows Gray's behavioural approach/inhibition systems and Higgins's promotion/prevention framework: elevated power places people in reward-rich, socially unconstrained environments and so activates approach — positive affect, attention to rewards, automatic and heuristic cognition, disinhibited and trait-consistent behaviour; reduced power places people under threat, punishment and constraint and so activates inhibition — negative affect, vigilance toward threat, effortful and systematic cognition, and behaviour that is careful, other-attentive and situationally contingent rather than internally driven. Twelve propositions and twenty-nine hypotheses trace the consequences across domains: high-power individuals stereotype more and judge others' attitudes less accurately (illustrated by traditionalist and revisionist academics each overestimating the other's extremism); take second helpings more readily and eat more messily; flirt, tease and interrupt more disinhibitedly; and attribute collective outcomes to their own agency while attributing the circumstances of the powerless to the powerless themselves rather than to situation — a mechanism directly implicated in why the privation of low-power people gets read as a trait rather than a condition. Low-power individuals, in contrast, prove more vigilant, more accurate judges of others' attitudes and of how they are seen by the powerful, and more cognitively complex in their reasoning, evidenced most strikingly in a study of U.S. Supreme Court opinions where justices writing from minority coalitions argued with greater integrative complexity than those writing from a unanimous majority. None of this is fixed: accountability, threats to the stability of a hierarchy, and individual or cultural differences in dominance orientation all constrain the disinhibiting effect of power, a point the paper develops in direct dialogue with Tetlock's work on accountability as a check against unconstrained judgement. Read alongside the structural taxonomies of French and Raven (1959) and Berger, Cohen and Zelditch (1972) — which explain where power comes from — this supplies the psychological account of what holding or lacking it then does to attention, judgement, and the willingness to speak.