Dip in brainpower may follow drop in real power ... ABSENCE D'AUTONOMIE ET DE "POUVOIR" SOCIAL = INVOLUTION COGNITIVE ET INTELLECTUELLE

Dip in brainpower may follow drop in real power

Mod­ern, open and dem­o­crat­ic so­ci­eties are sup­posed to re­ward brains and hard work with suc­cess, at least some­what fair­ly.

But what if fail­ure degrades brain­pow­er, cre­at­ing a vi­cious loop in which suc­cess slips in­ex­orably fur­ther away for an un­lucky group that started out worse off?

Pow­er­less peo­ple of­ten achieve less be­cause lack of pow­er it­self erodes cog­ni­tive func­tion­ing, re­search­ers say.
A group of re­search­ers claims this may be ex­actly what hap­pens, so rosy views on the ben­e­fits of ad­vanced so­ci­eties must be re­ap­praised as sim­plis­tic.

“Pow­er­less peo­ple of­ten achieve less be­cause lack­ing pow­er it­self fun­da­men­tally al­ters cog­ni­tive func­tion­ing,” wrote the sci­en­tists in a pa­per de­scrib­ing their re­search find­ings.

The results high­light the im­por­tance of “empow­ering” em­ploy­ees to stim­u­late bet­ter work, es­pe­cially in in­dus­tries where er­rors can be fa­tal, they added. The find­ings, by Pam­e­la Smith of Rad­boud Uni­ver­s­ity in The Neth­er­lands and three col­leagues, ap­pear in the May is­sue of the jour­nal Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence.

The re­search­ers con­ducted three ex­pe­ri­ments with be­tween 77 and 102 Dutch uni­ver­s­ity stu­dents. They were put in dif­fer­ent sce­nar­i­os de­signed to make them feel ei­ther dom­i­nant or sub­or­di­nate. This mes­sage of “rank” was con­veyed ei­ther through sub­tle cues or di­rect state­ments, such as tell­ing par­ti­ci­pants that they would be paired with a part­ner who would di­rect and eval­u­ate their work.

The par­ti­ci­pants were then sub­jected to puz­zles or oth­er think­ing tests. The “pow­erless” play­ers con­sist­ently dis­played im­pair­ments in key think­ing pro­cess­es such as plan­ning, up­dat­ing a men­tal pic­ture and in­hibit­ing ir­rel­e­vant in­forma­t­ion, they wrote.

The re­search­ers ar­gued that this dip in over­all “ex­ec­u­tive func­tion” among low-sta­tus peo­ple re­sults from a loss of fo­cus on over­all goals. Con­sist­ent with this, they added, these play­ers per­formed as well as oth­ers in a fourth ex­pe­ri­ment us­ing a think­ing game de­signed so that it would re­main easy to fo­cus on the task goal. The orig­i­nal per­for­mance deficits seemed not to re­sult from a gen­er­al loss of mo­tiva­t­ion—“low sta­tus” play­ers re­ported put­ting in as much ef­fort as oth­ers, the re­search­ers said.

Ul­ti­mate­ly, they ar­gued, low sta­tus may drain per­for­mance by forc­ing peo­ple to de­vote part of their thoughts to the un­cer­tain­ties and threats that can arise from their su­pe­ri­ors’ chang­ing whims. A re­sult is that the pow­erless nar­row their fo­cus to small-pic­ture goals and to “de­tails” that might not be rel­e­vant to the task.

The find­ings “have di­rect im­plica­t­ions for man­age­ment and or­gan­iz­a­tions,” Smith and col­leagues wrote. In many in­dus­tries such as health care and nu­clear pow­er, “er­rors can be cost­ly, tip­ping the bal­ance from life to death. In­creas­ing em­ploy­ees’ sense of pow­er could lead to im­proved ex­ec­u­tive func­tion­ing, de­creas­ing the like­li­hood of cat­a­stroph­ic er­rors,” they con­tin­ued.

“Such empow­erment might be par­tic­u­larly vi­tal in jobs where it is dif­fi­cult to main­tain goal fo­cus be­cause crit­i­cal situa­t­ions are in­fre­quent,” such as air­port se­cur­ity and product-defect de­tec­tion.

In a larg­er sense, the find­ings sug­gest that dif­fer­ences in in­her­ent abil­ity, mo­tiva­t­ion, or dis­crimina­t­ion aren’t the only fac­tors sep­a­rat­ing the “haves and the have-nots,” Smith and col­leagues wrote. “The cog­ni­tive im­pair­ments of be­ing pow­erless may al­so be an im­por­tant con­trib­u­tor, lead­ing the pow­erless to­wards a des­ti­ny of dis­pos­ses­sion.”

Pamela K. Smith, Nils B. Jostmann, Adam D. Galinsky, Wilco W. van Dijk (2008) Lacking Power Impairs Executive Functions
Psychological Science 19 (5) , 441–447 doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02107.x

Address correspondence to Pamela K. Smith, Department of Social Psychology, Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University Nijmegen, P.O. Box 9104, 6500 HE Nijmegen, The Netherlands, e-mail: p.smith@psych.ru.nl.
Abstract

ABSTRACT—Four experiments explored whether lacking power impairs executive functioning, testing the hypothesis that the cognitive presses of powerlessness increase vulnerability to performance decrements during complex executive tasks. In the first three experiments, low power impaired performance on executive-function tasks: The powerless were less effective than the powerful at updating (Experiment 1), inhibiting (Experiment 2), and planning (Experiment 3). Existing research suggests that the powerless have difficulty distinguishing between what is goal relevant and what is goal irrelevant in the environment. A fourth experiment established that the executive-function impairment associated with low power is driven by goal neglect. The current research implies that the cognitive alterations arising from powerlessness may help foster stable social hierarchies and that empowering employees may reduce costly organizational errors.

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