近期的研究表明,权力会以各种方式系统地影响个体的信息加工。本研究采用实验法,探讨了权力对风险决策偏好的影响。实验一通过权力经验启动范式,让被试回忆相关事件激活不同的权力感,进而考察高低权力个体在获益框架下风险决策的偏好;实验二则利用角色扮演的方式,将被试分置于权力高低不同的角色中,从而探究个体在损失框架下权力对风险决策偏好的影响。两个实验的结果表明,不论在获益框架还是损失框架下,即使排除个体情绪对风险偏好的作用,高权力个体都比低权力者表现出更强的风险偏好。

以中国大学生为被试,采用问卷的方式,探讨权力对损失规避倾向的影响。实验一发现,与低权力被试相比,高权力被试具有较少的损失规避。实验二进一步考察权力影响损失规避的原因机制,结果发现,权力对收益的价值估计没有影响,但降低了个体对损失的价值估计,从而导致损失规避的减少。结果表明,权力除了激活个体对收益的趋近,还可能抑制个体对损失的感知,权力也是影响决策的因素之一。

Several independent lines of research bear on the question of why individuals avoid decisions by postponing them, failing to act, or accepting the status quo. This review relates findings across several different disciplines and uncovers 4 decision avoidance effects that offer insight into this common but troubling behavior: choice deferral, status quo bias, omission bias, and inaction inertia. These findings are related by common antecedents and consequences in a rational-emotional model of the factors that predispose humans to do nothing. Prominent components of the model include cost-benefit calculations, anticipated regret, and selection difficulty. Other factors affecting decision avoidance through these key components, such as anticipatory negative emotions, decision strategies, counterfactual thinking, and preference uncertainty, are also discussed.

Abstract Recent research has examined consumer decision making when the option of not choosing any of the alternatives is also provided. The findings from this research suggest that the decision to defer choice is sensitive to the uncertainty of choosing the most preferred option from the set of alternatives provided. Building on this research, the author tests whether the decision to defer choice is also influenced by task variables that influence decision uncertainty. In the first experiment, this proposition is tested for choice problems in which information on three relatively equally attractive alternatives is presented either sequentially or simultaneously. As predicted, the preference for the defer-choice option was greater when the three alternatives were presented simultaneously. A second study forced subjects into using one of four decision strategies in order to choose between two non-dominated alternatives. The preference for the no-choice option was found to be higher when the rule required explicit attribute tradeoffs and lower when it simplified choice. These results suggest that choice uncertainty is influenced by the decision strategy used to determine the preference among alternatives. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of the results for marketers' communication strategies.

This article investigates the effect of time pressure on choice deferral. Recent research suggests that the likelihood of deferral is contingent on the ease of making the selection decision (which option to choose) as well as the overall attractiveness of the selected alternative. We focus on how time pressure systematically impacts choice deferral by increasing the use of noncompensatory decision rules in the selection decision and by increasing the relative emphasis placed on the unique features in the deferral decision (whether to choose). Consistent with the hypotheses, we find over a series of five studies that time pressure (1) decreases choice deferral when choice involves high conflict but not when conflict is low, (2) reduces the impact of shared features on choice deferral, and (3) decreases choice deferral for sets with common bad and unique good features (approach pproach conflict) but not for sets with common good and unique bad features (avoidance voidance conflict). We further show that greater attention to the unique features is not a general property of decision making under time pressure but rather a consequence of the primacy of the selection decision over the deferral decision. Consistent with this premise, time pressure did not decrease the relative attention paid to common features when the task was described as purely a deferral decision. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.

Five experiments demonstrate that experiencing power leads to overconfident decision-making. Using multiple instantiations of power, including an episodic recall task (Experiments 1 3), a measure of work-related power (Experiment 4), and assignment to high- and low-power roles (Experiment 5), power produced overconfident decisions that generated monetary losses for the powerful. The current findings, through both mediation and moderation, also highlight the central role that the sense of power plays in producing these decision-making tendencies. First, sense of power, but not mood, mediated the link between power and overconfidence (Experiment 3). Second, the link between power and overconfidence was severed when access to power was not salient to the powerful (Experiment 4) and when the powerful were made to feel personally incompetent in their domain of power (Experiment 5). These findings indicate that only when objective power leads people to feel subjectively powerful does it produce overconfident decision-making.

Although power is often conceptualized as the capacity to influence others, the current research explores whether power psychologically protects people from influence. In contrast to classic social psychological research demonstrating the strength of the situation in directing attitudes, expressions, and intentions, 5 experiments (using experiential primes, semantic primes, and role manipulations of power) demonstrate that the powerful (a) generate creative ideas that are less influenced by salient examples, (b) express attitudes that conform less to the expressed opinions of others, (c) are more influenced by their own social value orientation relative to the reputation of a negotiating opponent, and (d) perceive greater choice in making counterattitudinal statements. This last experiment illustrates that power is not always psychologically liberating; it can create internal conflict, arousing dissonance, and thereby lead to attitude change. Across the experiments, high-power participants were immune to the typical press of situations, with intrapsychic processes having greater sway than situational or interpersonal ones on their creative and attitudinal expressions.

The present research analyzes the influence of situational (role stability vs. instability) and personal (power motivation) variables on risk-taking behaviour of people with low vs. high power. We predicted that low power people are mainly influenced by the situation, whereas high power people also act in accord with their power motivation. We independently measured participants’ power motivation and later conducted a 2 (power role: high vs. low)×2 (situation: stable vs. unstable role) experiment in which we assessed risk-taking behaviour in the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART; Lejuez et al., 2002). We also ran a control group without role assignment. Supporting our hypotheses, risk-taking behaviour of people with low power was influenced by the situation, but not by power motivation, whereas risk-taking behaviour of powerful people was influenced by both sources. Control group’s risk-taking was somewhat influenced by power motivation.

Decision makers generally feel disconnected from their future selves, an experience that leads them to prefer smaller immediate gains to larger future gains. This pervasive tendency is known as temporal discounting, and researchers across disciplines are interested in understanding how to overcome it. Following recent advances in the power literature, we suggest that the experience of power enhances one's connection with the future self, which in turn results in reduced temporal discounting. In Study 1, we found that participants assigned to high-power roles were less likely than participants assigned to low-power roles to display temporal discounting. In Studies 2 and 3, priming power reduced temporal discounting in monetary and nonmonetary tasks, and, further, connection with the future self mediated the relation between power and reduced discounting. In Study 4, experiencing a general sense of power in the workplace predicted actual lifetime savings. These results have important implications for future research.

78 Priming participants with feelings of power improves professional interview outcomes. 78 In two studies, participants wrote application letters and attended 15-minute job interviews. 78 In both studies, unaware judges significantly preferred the power-primed applicants.

Three studies examined the effect of information form on choice deferral in consumer choice and explored the moderating role of knowledge about the product domain. Two theoretical approaches were contrasted: (1) The process approach predicting that choice deferral varies as a function of information form, and (2) the communication approach predicting an interaction of information form and domain-specific knowledge. Participants were presented with different laptops described in an absolute (e.g. ‘300GB hard disc’), evaluative-numerical (e.g. ‘hard disc with 30 out of 100 points in an expert rating’) or evaluative-verbal (e.g. ‘bad hard disc’) information form, and they could choose to buy one of the laptops or defer. Domain-specific knowledge was also assessed. In Study 1, evaluative-numerical and evaluative-verbal values led to more deferral in people with high domain-specific knowledge. The pattern for evaluative-numerical and evaluative-verbal values was replicated for a different information organization in Study 2. Study 3 showed that absolute values led to more deferral the less knowledgeable participants were and demonstrated that domain-specific knowledge and deferral were unrelated when absolute and evaluative-verbal values were presented in combination. In sum, the results support the communication approach and have methodological implications for decision research and theoretical implications for understanding choice deferral in real-life decisions.

A growing body of research demonstrates that power promotes a fundamental orientation toward approach and agency. The current studies suggest that this tendency is moderated by dispositional anxiety. In two experiments, high levels of dispositional anxiety blocked the psychological effects of power. Although people low in anxiety responded to a power prime with greater willingness to take risks, those high in anxiety did not (Experiment 1). Similarly, whereas those low in social anxiety responded to power with increased sexual attraction toward a confederate, individuals high in social anxiety failed to show the same effect (Experiment 2). In both studies, the interaction between power and anxiety was statistically mediated by perceptions of reward. Although power enhanced people's perceptions of reward, this effect was eliminated by high levels of dispositional anxiety. This research provides insight into how, and in whom, power promotes approach and agentic behavior.

The present research tested the hypothesis that power, defined as the capacity to influence others, promotes analytic cognitive processing, by examining the use of linguistic categories and the categorization of objects. Supporting the hypothesis, recalling instances of influencing others facilitated the use of adjectives and discouraged the use of verbs to describe others (Study 1). Recalling instances of influencing others also promoted taxonomic, instead of thematic, categorization (Study 2). Furthermore, the authors also examined the effect of power in a real-life context. They examined whether socioeconomic status (SES) differences in cognitive processing can be partly explained by sense of agency, an antecedent of power (Study 3); high SES individuals made more taxonomic categorization than did low SES individuals, and a sense of agency partially mediated the SES differences in categorization. These findings underscore the role of power in shaping cognitive processes.

Abstract Hypotheses involving mediation are common in the behavioral sciences. Mediation exists when a predictor affects a dependent variable indirectly through at least one intervening variable, or mediator. Methods to assess mediation involving multiple simultaneous mediators have received little attention in the methodological literature despite a clear need. We provide an overview of simple and multiple mediation and explore three approaches that can be used to investigate indirect processes, as well as methods for contrasting two or more mediators within a single model. We present an illustrative example, assessing and contrasting potential mediators of the relationship between the helpfulness of socialization agents and job satisfaction. We also provide SAS and SPSS macros, as well as Mplus and LISREL syntax, to facilitate the use of these methods in applications.

Previous research has indicated that indecisiveness is associated with informational tunnel vision, in that individuals scoring high on a measure of indecisiveness tend to gather more information about the alternative they ultimately choose, while largely neglecting other options. In the first study, a decision making paradigm was employed in which participants had to choose a college course from a set of five options. Findings confirmed that the score on a measure of indecisiveness correlated positively with the amount of information gathered concerning the ultimately chosen course, but not with the gathered information pertaining to non-chosen courses. In the second study, choice difficulty was manipulated by varying the distinctiveness of the courses. Again, indecisiveness seemed to be associated with tunnel vision, regardless of choice difficulty. Hence, the findings support the notion that indecisiveness limits people information gathering. It is proposed that this type of tunnel vision serves as a defence against a natural tendency to gather as much information as possible.

The current paper reviews the concept of power and offers a new architecture for understanding how power guides and shapes consumer behavior. Specifically, we propose that having and lacking power respectively foster agentic and communal orientations that have a transformative impact on perception, cognition, and behavior. These orientations shape both who and what consumers value. New empirical evidence is presented that synthesizes these findings into a parsimonious account of how power alters consumer behavior as a function of both product attributes and recipients. Finally, we discuss future directions to motivate and guide the study of power by consumer psychologists.

The article presents a study to determine whether the powerful are normally under greater attentional demands than the powerless. This study was participated by 81 undergraduate students to examine whether high-power individuals make equally good decisions following conscious versus unconscious thought. It was found that high-power individuals were equally good at identifying the better choice after conscious versus unconscious thought when given problems that require a complex decision. It also concluded that the powerful seem to be able to handle a number of decisions which have great impact without making excessive errors.

Elevated power increases the psychological distance one feels from others, and this distance, according to construal level theory, should lead to more abstract information processing. Thus, high power should be associated with more abstract thinking-focusing on primary aspects of stimuli and detecting patterns and structure to extract the gist, as well as categorizing stimuli at a higher level-relative to low power. In 6 experiments involving both conceptual and perceptual tasks, priming high power led to more abstract processing than did priming low power, even when this led to worse performance. Experiment 7 revealed that in line with past neuropsychological research on abstract thinking, priming high power also led to greater relative right-hemispheric activation.

Choice often produces conflict. This notion, however, plays no role in classical decision theory, in which each alternative is assigned a value, and the decision maker selects from every choice set the option with the highest value. We contrast this principle of value maximization with the hypothesis that the option to delay choice or seek new alternatives is more likely to be selected when conflict is high than when it is low. This hypothesis is supported by several studies showing that the tendency to defer decision, search for new alternatives, or choose the default option can be in-creased when the offered set is enlarged or improved, contrary to the principle of value maximization.