Power psychs people up about... themselves

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-02/sp-ppp020315.php

Public Release: 3-Feb-2015
SAGE Publications

We all know the type - people who can talk on and on about their latest adventures, seemingly unaware that those around them may not be interested. They also get really psyched up about their own experiences. A new paper suggests that what separates such people from the rest of us is their perceived sense of power: Powerful people, researchers found, draw inspiration from themselves rather than others.

"It struck me, as it has no doubt many others, that powerful people are often bad listeners," says Gerben van Kleef of the University of Amsterdam. As he thought about how such people interact with others, van Kleef began to wonder whether powerful people become inspired by entertaining their own experiences.

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"We found that more powerful participants were more inspired by their own stories than by those of their conversation partner, whereas less powerful people were equally inspired by themselves as by their partner," van Kleef says.

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In follow-up study, the researchers primed participants with high or low power, by asking participants to recall a situation in which they had control over someone else (high power) or someone else had control over them (low power). "Recalling such a situation temporarily brings back the experience of power," van Kleef says.

After this priming, the participants wrote about an inspiring event that either they had experienced or one that they had heard about from someone else. Those participants primed with high power felt more inspired after writing about their own experience than after writing about another person's experience.

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As to why the powerful get inspired by themselves, van Kleef's team has a few ideas. One is that their inspiration is simply an extension of how powerful individuals tend to prioritize themselves over others in social interactions.

Another possibility, van Kleef says, is that being inspired by another person requires perceiving some quality of that person as being superior to ourselves. "We reasoned that powerful people would have a harder time appreciating the greatness of another person, which would make it more difficult for them to be inspired by others."

A final potential explanation is that social pressures tend to inhibit people's natural general tendency to to talk about themselves. "Because powerful people are less susceptible to social pressures, we expected that they might be less reluctant to publicly indulge in the greatness of their own experiences," he says.

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