Niro Sivanathan

. Three experiments demonstrated that the experience of power leads to an illusion of personal control. Regardless of whether power was experientially primed (Experiments 1 and 3) or manipulated through roles (manager vs. subordinate; Experiment 2), it led to perceived control over outcomes that were beyond the reach of the power holder. Furthermore, this illusory control mediated the influence of power on several self-enhancement and approach-related outcomes reported in the power literature, including optimism (Experiment 2), self-esteem (Experiment 3), and action orientation (Experiment 3). These results demonstrate the theoretical importance of perceived control as a generative cause of and driving force behind many of power's far-reaching effects. A fourth experiment ruled out an alternative explanation: that positive mood, rather than illusory control, is at the root of power's effects. The discussion considers implications for existing and future research on the psychology of power, perceived control, and positive illusions.

Physical cleanliness has many medical benefits, such as protection from the dangers of contagion. We explore a potential unintended consequence of cleanliness. Given the metaphorical association between physical cleanliness and moral purity (Zhong & Liljenquist, 2006), we contend that a clean self may also be linked to a virtuous self. This enhanced moral self-perception can in turn license harsher moral judgment. Three experiments found that cleanliness, whether induced via physical cleansing or through a visualization task, licensed severe judgment on morally contested issues such as abortion and pornography. Further, we found that an inflated moral self mediated the relationship between cleanliness and moral judgment. These results provide unique insight to the social significance of cleanliness and may have important implications for discrimination and prejudice.

Individuals conspicuously consume to signal their wealth. As a variant to this economic explanation, four studies explored individual’s psychological need for self-integrity as a potential motivating force for these consumption decisions. Relying on both field and experimental studies, and employing multiple instantiations of high-status goods and self-threat, we demonstrate that individuals consume status-infused products for their reparative effects on the ego. Individuals under self-threat sought ownership of high-status goods to nurse their psychological wounds (Study 1), and when afforded an alternate route to repair their self-integrity, sought these products less (Study 2). Furthermore, among a representative sample of US consumers, low-income individuals’ lowered self-esteem drove their willingness to spend on high-status goods (Study 3). Finally, these high-status goods serve the purpose of shielding an individual’s ego from future self-threats (Study 4). The compensatory role of high-status goods has important implications for consumer decision-making and public policies aimed at reducing consumer debt.

The current investigation explores how power and stability within a social hierarchy interact to affect risk taking. Building on a diverse, interdisciplinary body of research, including work on non-human primates, intergroup status, and childhood social hierarchies, we predicted that the unstable powerful and the stable powerless will be more risk taking than the stable powerful and unstable powerless. Across four studies, the unstable powerful and the stable powerless preferred probabilistic over certain outcomes and engaged in more risky behaviors in an organizational decision-making scenario, a blackjack game, and a balloon-pumping task than did the the stable powerful and the unstable powerless. These effects appeared to be the result of the increased stress that accompanied states of unstable power and stable powerlessness: these states produced more physiological arousal, a direct manipulation of stress led to greater risk taking, and stress tolerance moderated the interaction between power and stability on risk taking. These results have important implications for the way social scientists conceptualize the psychology of power and offer a theoretical framework for understanding factors that lead to risk taking in organizations.

Individuals driven by negative emotions often punish non-cooperators at a cost to themselves. The current research demonstrates that, although time delays can attenuate this effect, they can also produce unintended consequences. Five experiments investigated the effects of time delays and thought patterns on punishments in direct and third party interactions. The results show that time delays decreased punishment (Experiment 1) by reducing negative emotions (Experiments 2A and 2B). However, thought patterns during a delay were crucially important (Experiments 3A and 3B): People who engaged in a distraction task punished less; people who engaged in affective rumination punished more; and people who engaged in cognitive reappraisal were unaffected by a delay. These differences meant that, after a time delay, affective ruminators administered greater punishments than cognitive reappraisers or distracted individuals. Implications of these findings for managing punitive impulses via time delays are discussed.

Conspicuous consumption and its accompanying debt played a critical role in crippling global financial markets in 2008. Although a confluence of factors contribute to hyper-consumerism, the authors explore the potential role of two psychological forces—the desire to combat self-threats through compensatory consumption and the relatively pain-free experience of consuming on credit—that may have interactively contributed to the pernicious cycle of consumption and debt. Consistent with their predictions, the authors find that self-threat sways individuals to consume with credit over cash (Experiment 1) and the interactive effect of self-threat, product status, and payment method creates a perfect storm, whereby threatened individuals not only seek to consume high-status goods but also, when using credit, do so at higher costs to themselves (Experiment 2). These findings have broad implications for consumer decision making and offer psychologically grounded insights into the regulation of lending policies aimed at promoting consumer health.

To those with high status, abundance is granted. Moving beyond the multitude of objective benefits, the authors explore how status, once conferred, colors the perceptual world people inhabit. In four experiments, participants’ status state influenced their judgments of status-relevant features in their environment. Participants in a state of high status reported hearing applause (Experiment 1) and seeing facial expressions (Experiment 2), in reaction to their performance, as louder and more favorable. In addition, expectations of how others will respond—expectations stemming from one’s current status state—accounted for this effect (Experiment 3). Finally, differences in judgments between participants experiencing high versus low status were observed only when the target of the evaluation was the self (Experiment 4). These results advance scholars’ understanding of the psychological experience of status and contribute to the growing literature on the dominant influence psychological states have on people’s judgments of their social world.

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.