How does power and influence shape our lives?

Transcript

Intro: This podcast was made on the lands of the Wurundjeri people, the Woi Wurrung and the Bunurong. We'd like to pay respects to their elders, past and present, and emerging. From the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne, this is PsychTalks.

Cassie: Hi and welcome back to PsychTalks, where we explore some of the most interesting ideas in psychology and neuroscience. I'm Associate Professor Cassie Hayward and I'm joined once again by my fantastic co-host, Professor Nick Haslam.

Nick: Thanks Cassie, and today we're talking about power, how it works and how it's used. Whether it's in the workplace, at home, or just in everyday conversations, our ability to persuade and influence other people can have a lasting effect on our lives and theirs.

Cassie: That's right, and guiding us through this exploration of power is Professor Jennifer Overbeck from Melbourne Business School. Jen's research explores how people experience and use power and what makes someone influential and why the best way to get people on board might not be as obvious as you think.

Jen, welcome to PsychTalks. I wonder if we can start just by you telling us a little bit about your background and how you ended up in Melbourne studying power and influence.

Jen: OK, I will start with the last part of that. How did I end up studying power and influence and then trace my way to Melbourne? So, a long time ago, before I ever went back to graduate school, I was working and I was in Los Angeles for, uh, a work event on the day that the Rodney King riots broke out, and I don't know if you remember that, but this is where a black motorist had been pulled over and beaten by white police officers.

They were charged and tried, and then the verdict came out that they were not guilty in South Central LA exploded into violence and burning and looting and that sort of thing. And the work colleague I was with that day was complaining about how the people in South Central were responding to injustice by just destroying their own neighbourhoods and destroying where they lived.

He didn't understand it and it seemed really counterproductive and irrational to him. And my response was, look, they, they tried working the system, they tried going to court, didn't work out for them. And now they're responding by seizing whatever powers available to them, right? Which is to destroy what's immediately in their context. And he didn't get that and we never resolved our discussion. And the, the issue stuck with me.

And a few years later, I found myself pursuing a PhD in social psychology at the University of Colorado and looking for, you know, research topics. And I just thought, this is, this is something that's been on my mind for years. I was working in a stereotyping lab and I said, well, let's look at how power shows up in, um, interracial context and interethnic contexts. And so that was the beginning and it stuck with me, um, throughout my career.

So I did a PhD in social psych. I was always interested in business and bringing the questions and answers of research back into a business context. So I did a postdoc in organisational behaviour at Stanford, which is where I went, met you, you did the same postdoc right after me. And so that was, it was a great opportunity to meet you, Cassie.

And then I was an academic in the US at USC, University of Southern California, and Utah, and then I got the opportunity to come here to Melbourne. It was supposed to be just a few years, you know, adventure overseas, but for lots of different reasons, it ended up sticking. And so I've been in Melbourne now for 11 years at the Melbourne Business School.

Cassie: And officially Australian.

Jen: Officially Australian since 2020. Yep.

Nick: Well that's great. So look, as the one person who doesn't have a Stanford pedigree, can you explain to me then what does a psychologist mean by power and influence? Can you define what those terms mean?

Jen: Yeah, absolutely. I was going to say, Nick, that I would go very slowly so that, you know, you can definitely understand it.

So these are actually terms that are debated more than you might expect among psychologists, but I think at this point there's a consensus that psychologists typically define power in terms of asymmetrical control over valued resources. So this is where, you know, person A controls resources that person B needs and person B can't get them anywhere else.

And then recently, uh, a few more psychologists have started to say it's not just that you control the resources, it's what you do with them. And so A is using the fact that B relies on those resources to make B do things that they don't necessarily want to do, right? So power is the ability to compel somebody to engage in an activity that they don't wish to or to believe something that they don't believe, etc.

And we can distinguish that from influence and the language gets a little bit messy because we tend to use these terms to mean multiple different things. So influence on a large scale means, or at a, at a high level, means that we are trying to elicit a change in another person.

And you can do that in various ways. So you can use power to influence, I can make you do something that elicits a change, but I can also try to get you to change out of your own free will and free choice. And that's where I'm not relying on power to do that, but relying on something that we'll call persuasive influence. That's something that, a phrase that I like to use to keep that distinction straight. And persuasive influence is basically B has a choice, B can do the thing A is asking or not do the thing.

And A is trying to set up the conditions to bring B into alignment so that B will choose to do the thing.

Cassie: And Jen, building on that definition, what's a good way to think about those differences between power and then persuasive influence? What are some examples that people might kind of recognise?

Jen: Yeah. So I think a really obvious context that many people can relate to immediately is thinking about work, thinking about your boss, for example. So your boss might want you to do something. Maybe they want you to build a new AI training program for your team. And so they could ask you to do it.

They could tell you how great it would be for your career progression. Um, they could even say that they don't know how AI works and they really, really need your help to do it. And these are all examples of persuasive influence where it's up to you, at least it sounds like you can say no. You can make the choice whether to do it, but the boss is trying to get you to do it.

But then on the other hand, let's say you do say no, the boss could come back and say, yeah, well, hm, you know that other project you're working on, the one that's really great for your career, and you think it's going to put you in front of the CEO and lead to a meteoric rise and you really want to do it? If you don't do this AI project for me, you're not going to be doing that project anymore. I'm going to take you off of it.

And that's where the boss is using their ability to control the work that you do, control where your efforts go, as a source of power so that they can compel you to do something that you don't really want to do.

And so obviously we see that in a lot of different contexts, but you know, it's that difference between I'll find the levers that bring you into alignment versus, now I'm just going to find something that I can hold over your head and force you to do what I want.

Cassie: I'm getting very worried because Nick's actually my boss, so he might be getting a lot of ideas from this interview.

Nick: I already had lots of ideas, Cassie, and none of them work. No, no, no power, no influence.

And why is this important? So how does power and persuasive influence differ from power without persuasive influence? You know, what do those two things look like?

Jen: So this harkens back to some of my favourite research that I've done in 2011 with my colleagues Alison Fragale and Maggie Neale. We ran a series of studies looking at if you have power and status versus power without status, and status is a, it's a source of persuasive influence.

So one of the reasons that people respond to you voluntarily is that they respect and admire you. They think that you're worth following. And so if you say something, they take it seriously, they find it persuasive and they agree willingly, but, but they agree. And in that series of studies, some of the, what we found was that if you have power, that's something that could be regarded negatively by other people.

But as long as you had status, it was regarded positively. So people who had power and status were seen as dominant, but also warm. And it was expected that if you're going to interact with somebody like that, it's going to be a positive interaction.

But if you interact with somebody who has power without status, they're regarded as dominant, but cold, and people anticipate that that interaction is going to be negative. They anticipate, it's, it's something like, um, airport security, right? So I'm going to go up and, and hopefully you get to walk right by airport security and nothing happens. But if they stop you and they're like, ‘Excuse me, can you come over here’, you know, you immediately have that reaction like, oh, this isn't going to be good.

Well, it's a high-power person. They can control whether you get to pass security and get on your plane, but they, they're not in a high-status role. And that's actually one of the roles that we looked at in our, in our research. You anticipate that this is going to be a negative interaction that obstructs your goals. And people actually have an anticipatory bad, um, approach to somebody like that. So if, if you're in airport security, I might come to that interaction with my own sense of bristliness and unfriendliness and that sort of thing.

And then there's other research by other colleagues, primarily Nate Fast and Adam Galinsky, that says it's actually not wrong to expect that kind of negative response from the TSA agent. People who are in powerful roles but recognise that they're not respected by others, tend to assign other people like more humiliating and degrading activities.

They, they kind of restore the balance by putting the other person down. So it has a lot of consequences to try to interact in a way where you're relying on your power, but you're not using any of that persuasive influence because you can, um, you can contribute to this perception that you're a difficult, unpleasant, cold person and that somebody should be resistant to you.

But there are a couple of other implications too, so I'll, I'll just tell you two others. The first one is that when we use power, we can achieve compliance. So people will do the thing that we say because they have to, right? If, if you tell me you have to work on the AI project, or else you don't get to do the other one, I'll do your AI project, but I'm not going to put the best of myself into it.

If it's something where the influence attempt is trying to persuade me to believe something, probably not going to believe it. I'll tell you I do. I'll spout all the right words and then I'll walk away and go back to what I used to believe. So we can get compliance out of power. But if we want commitment, if we want internalisation of the thing, then we really need to use persuasive influence because the person has to come along on that journey with us.

And then the other point is that when people primarily use power rather than adding in some of that persuasive influence, you're really, they're behaving as tyrants. And work by Dacher Keltner tells us that when you have a very tyrannical leader who doesn't give other people a choice in how to behave and how to be led, then you get more likelihood of organised resistance arising and of ultimately that leader being taken down. So if you want to maintain your leadership over a period of time, it's definitely more sustainable to have both the persuasive influence and the power.

Nick: So any tyrannical leaders who are listening to this podcast should think again.

Jen: And I hope all the tyrannical leaders do because they really need to hear this.

Cassie: Before we, well, maybe instead of going down the tyrannical leader path, let's say a listener is trying to convince their boss to take on an idea they have, so the power is with the boss. What can they do in that scenario, how can they put forward their idea in a way that's most likely to be approved?

Jen: Yeah. It's a really great question. And part of what I like about the question is what you didn't say, because it highlights the way most people approach influencing and an opportunity that they miss. So if you want to try to persuade your boss of something, it's important not to think of this as a one-shot interaction, where if I have the right message or if I pick the right time or if I say it the right way, then I'm going to persuade my boss.

Influence, when you don't have power or when you have less power, it's a long game. So power is a short-term game. If you need to get something done right away, power is the most efficient way to do it. If you need to influence people and you need them to accept what you're saying, then you have to have established the foundation of that influence a long time before you need it. So you have to see me if I want to influence you, you have to see me as a credible person. You have to respect me or admire me. You have to think I'm legitimate. You have to think that I'm worth listening to, that there's, there's going to be a value in listening to me.

And so if I am trying to influence my boss, if I show up late. I've just been watching the show Enlightened on HBO and I don't know if either of you have seen it, but there's this character, Amy Jellicoe, who's full of idealism and really wants to influence people, but at the same time, she shows up to work late, she doesn't actually do her job when she's there. She's very narcissistic and she doesn't pay attention to other people. And so every time she asks for something, people just say, like, why should I listen to you? And so over and over and over she doesn't get what she wants. And then finally there's a point in the, in the show where she has something of value to offer and that causes somebody to listen.

You have to think ahead. So what I would be telling people who have trouble influencing their boss is stop thinking about the immediate thing you want to influence about and start thinking about your relationship with your boss. Can you invest more in your relationship with your boss? Can you show that you're on the team? Can you exhibit some behaviours that show a common identity and commitment to the team that you are on with your boss? And can you demonstrate your competence?

So really maybe focus for a while on getting a few wins and showing that you're somebody worth investing in. And once you have that foundation, then you can go in and you can have an ask and you just find that the person's much more receptive to the things that you have to say. Now, obviously there are things you can do in the moment, but my number one advice is to slow down, plan ahead and build a relationship.

Nick: So that's a great scenario. How about another scenario that a listener might be facing? Let's say they're trying to go for a promotion. Does the same advice apply or is there something different in that case?

Jen: Well, definitely I would say if you're going to go in for a promotion, you want to have a history of being a team player and, uh, showing competence, because otherwise there's not going to be much of an argument for that promotion.

But then of course, you also need some strategies for making the ask, right? And we can think of this a couple of different ways. Some of the recent research that I've been doing with one of my PhD students, Craig Lewis, is looking at the amount of power versus the amount of persuasive influence that underlie particular influence tactics that you might use. So asking politely is an influence tactic.

That's a very high-persuasive influence, very-low power tactic, and threatening to, um, fire somebody, that's a very high-power, low-persuasion tactic. And so you would want to be thinking about, um, you know, what's, what's my boss's level of resistance likely to be? Chances are they're going to resist a little bit giving you a promotion. Chances are that's going to be costly. They're going to need to know why it makes sense. You're going to have to, to help them understand it.

But I would plan and think about a few arguments that rely on different influence tactics that stay very much in that choice space.

So one of the things you don't want to do, going in with somebody who has a lot more power than you is try to act like you have power that you don't, or try to overreach on the amount of power that you have. We don't actually have evidence about this yet. We're, we're testing this currently or, or imminently, but, um, one of our hypotheses is that if you try to use a tactic that you don't have the power to use, it's going to backfire. It's actually going to reduce your power for future influencing. So you don't want to overreach, you want to stay in that influencing space, pick a few different tactics.

And think about, all right, my boss says no when I just ask for a raise, what do I come back with? What's the next step? Well one of the, one of my next things might be to explain why it's good for the company. So here are the benefits to the company of giving me a promotion and a raise, and if that still doesn't get a yes, then I can have a plan developed that says, here's how you can promote me, here's how we backfill my position, here's how my new position would work, and so I can help them imagine it. And if that doesn't work, then I can offer a compromise.

Well, maybe you don't give me a promotion now, but maybe you agree to a set of benchmarks, and in 6 months if I meet all those benchmarks, then maybe I can have a promotion then. And so you, you have a sequence of arguments ready, you anticipate what some of the resistance is going to be, and you try as much as possible to stay in that persuasive space, instead of what some people do is say, well, you know, other people would appreciate me, and if you don't, I'll just have to go somewhere else. And so you're jumping right up to high power, right? And you're trying to make a threat and force them to do what you want. But you're not the powerful party in the room, and so you're just probably going to have a lot more space and success if you stay with persuasive influence.

Cassie: My guess is that a lot of these tactics differ in their success as a function of gender and age and ethnicity and those other variables. Has your work looked at how those variables play out in these scenarios?

Jen: Yeah, so I haven't personally, but there is some really great research by Nick Hayes, at Michigan State, who has looked at the fact that men tend to use more what we would call power and women more what we would call status or persuasive influence.

So, there are, as I'm sure that you and listeners would be familiar with, there are expectations for agentic versus warmth-oriented behaviour from men and women, right? And power is clearly more agentic and persuasive influence also has agency in it, but it's a warmer form of agency because it recognises the importance of others.

And so if we look at Nick's work, men both value and gravitate more toward power and then are rewarded more for power related behaviour. And for women, status is a much safer way to try to gain influence and leads to less backlash against women. So we don't have data on the question yet, but based on that past work, my clear prediction is that if you are a man, you're more likely to be able to use power without as much penalty, although I think everybody probably needs to balance power and persuasive influence.

But for women, it may be particularly important to be able to use persuasive influence and have those tactics available. And then I think that should extend as well to, you know, any member of a majority versus minority group or minoritised group, as designated by society. So if you're in a, a country's racial majority, you should probably find it easier to act with power. And if you're in a racial minority, then there are probably, sanctions for using power that you're not seen as entitled to use.

Nick: So having privilege allows you to use power more successfully, but it's also true, isn't it, that there's a lot of ambivalence about exercise of power, maybe less if it's a, you know, white male leader than some other kinds, but it's not as if power gives you a blank slate.

Jen: Not only does it not give you a blank slate, I do a lot of executive education in my role at the business school, and so I'm regularly talking to CEOs and people who are at the very top levels of companies and I bring up the word 'power'. And you know, some people are perfectly comfortable with it, but a lot of people just immediately, no, no, no, I I'd like to be more influential, but I don't want power.

Like that's not the thing. Power, power is not where I want to take my professional development. And I see this all the time. A few years ago, I was working with a prospective PhD student and we were doing an interview project and just talking to people who were in positions of power about how they thought about power.

And I will always remember this one interviewee. She was somebody we had advanced knowledge of the person, the prospective student had worked with her, knew the people around her, and knew how she used power in her role. And she was really seen as a very coercive leader. Like she just told everybody what to do. She was unsparing. She could be very unpleasant and just, you know, a taskmaster.

And we had a conversation with her, and her whole philosophy of power was, you've got to involve people, you have to have participation. You know I spent a tonne of energy trying to make sure that everybody's happy, etc etc etc. And I've seen this repeatedly, that there are people who value very much staying in that persuasive space, but they don't really understand what the full range of influencing looks like. And they, they try to be persuasive, they run into some resistance and they don't know what to do. And it's like, how do I move you, I don't know what to do. So I'm just going to jump up here and try to grab power and maybe that'll do something. And they, they, they don't understand that there's a whole range of tools that they might have between the two extremes, and, and they tend to just jump. And I think it's a very prevalent pattern. I mean, I can't give you data about it yet. But I think it's a really prevalent pattern.

And Jeff Pfeffer at Stanford has argued that the people most successful at leading are the ones who are very deliberate and very conscious about what their power is, where it comes from, and how they want to use it. And it, it makes them more effective. And I completely agree with that.

Nick: And yet the more implemental ones get more respected.

Jen: They do. Yes, there's a mismatch. In fact, Joe Magee at NYU New York University has done a paper looking at how people approach power and how others view them based on how they approach power. And he found that people who are implemental, meaning you take your power and you act in a really decisive way, like just jump right in and do it, are seen as more powerful and admired more than power holders who are deliberative. In other words, who are thoughtful and really think about it.

And although that's not exactly the same scenario, I really think that it hits on this idea that when we think of a leader, we think of strength. Certainly, we know from political science that when people think of political leaders, especially when there's high threat in the environment, they're looking for somebody who's strong because that's a protector, right? That's somebody who's going to, that strength should be a shield and an umbrella for the rest of us.

And somebody who's more thoughtful or somebody who's more collaborative doesn't necessarily get the same support. So we have these stereotypes about power that say you want somebody who's, you know, going to crack heads, even though, as we said at the very beginning, in a lot of ways that's the less sustainable approach to power.

I'll veer just very briefly into politics for a moment because my husband and I have all these discussions these days about Joe Biden. We're recording this episode at a time when there's a book that's just come out about he was too old and maybe shouldn't have been in his role. And you know, I had argued for a very long time that Biden seemed like a somewhat ineffective campaigner. He didn't communicate very much. He wasn't on the news and he wasn't putting forth that, that impression of strength that other candidates may have put forth.

But I was arguing that he might have been a very, very effective leader because he's more focused on establishing partnerships and working with people and getting things done. Now, um, my husband's saying, well, what do you think now after the book came out, so no comment on that. But, uh, I do think that we look for the wrong signals and leaders, and I think that's true not only in politics, but in organisations. There's some great research by Cameron Anderson at Berkeley.

That shows that if you have a group of people engaging in problem solving, let's say they're doing math questions, and there's a demonstrable answer, a correct and an incorrect answer to the math question, but you look at who delivers the answers more confidently. The most confident member of the group is more likely to be accorded status, even if their answer is demonstrably correct, uh, incorrect. And so yeah, I think that our instincts about how to pick leaders are very out of line with what serves us best in terms of leadership.

Cassie: That's terrifying, and following on from this high-powered politics and negotiation and executive education, my next question is how do I use this at home with my kids? How do I get my kids in from playing soccer when I need them to come in for dinner?

Jen: Yeah, so, Craig Lewis, my PhD student, has two young kids, and he has, throughout the time that we've worked together on this topic of influencing, I think what happens with his kids has been a major touchstone and inspiration for our work. So, Craig has actually printed out the two dimensional graph that we have showing all of the influence tactics as a poster on the wall in his office for his own purposes, but he found himself trying to get his kids to brush his teeth, brush their teeth for, not his, theirs, to brush their teeth before going to bed, and yeah, dad, I'll do it, yeah, yeah, I'll do it, I'll do it. and in the meanwhile they keep playing their games.

And after a while doing this work on influencing, he started to bring it into his conversations with them and said, Look, what I'm doing right now is I am asking you, I'm asking you to brush your teeth and you have the choice. Like it is still up to you whether you comply with this. But ultimately I do have power, which means I can make you do it. I can pick you up and I can carry you in there. I can take away the Game Boy. I, you know, I can set up situations where you're going to have to go brush your teeth.

Like as parents, I think it's very easy to start in a, in an influential space. You want to be respectful of your kids. You know, there's the whole love and logic approach of giving them choices. It's very rational, but kids are kids and they're, they're doing what they want to do. And so sometimes we have to jump up to power.

And I think what Craig has tried to do is to say, maybe there's a sequence of things that I can do that stay in the sort of middle power space where I've got 4 or 5 different tactics ready to go, and if asking them politely doesn't work, well, I kind of know my escalation pattern. And because we've had the conversation, because they know that ultimately this could get ugly, they often do choose at some point, but they felt like they had a choice and they felt like, you know, that they weren't just forced to do something. And he's felt like the long-term effects of that have been really positive.

Nick: I mean, in the parenting area, do you think all of this is partly because so many people now just think power in general is illegitimate and they're wary of using it even though they have it?

Jen: Well, I have watched with interest some of the articles recently on gentle parenting and like the Gen Z trend to gentle parenting, and I'm concerned about that because I think that there are power relations in the world regardless of how squeamish we may be about it.

We also have a need and a desire for that. So there's a whole other line of research by, um, Aaron Kay at Duke University on a concept called compensatory control that says that when scary things happen in the world, people actually look around them to see that there's an agent in power. So if there's a hurricane, belief in God spikes. And so when bad things are happening, we want there to be a strong leader. We want to believe that there's somebody there who's watching out and there's order in the world, and there's somebody who's going to take care of it.

And I think gentle parenting abdicates the power role in a lot of ways so that kids don't see that there is anybody to take that powerful role and it's just them, right? And they're the ones with power. But how scary is that? You don't know how the world, you don't know how to handle all the random terrors of the world. So I think, yeah, parents coming to understand that they have power and that they can possess that power, but they don't have to necessarily be using it all the time.

That there's a choice and that they can interact with their kids in a way that keeps them in a space that respects their children, but with that boundary. Like I think that would be a really effective way for parents to be able to think. And, and there are lots of scholars out there who've looked at authoritative parenting and the benefits of it. And I just, I hope that they're getting attention these days too.

Nick: Well, they've only been saying that for about 30 years, so let's hope.

Jen: Yeah.

Cassie: And for some small goals for our listeners, what could they put into practise from today? Like what are 3 things that they could do to, to maximise their, their influence in their life?

Jen: Well, I'll tell them what I often say when I'm doing workshops on this topic. Number one, I think they should do an audit of themselves to see what kind of power they have, what kind of resources do they control that other people might value and give themselves credit for anything that might count.

We talk in our research about 6 different kinds of resources, so you could have money, lots of us don't have money, so that's not the only source of power. You could also have intellectual capital, so you could know things that, that other people need. You could have social capital, your relationships, your reputation. You could have human capital, which is your time and energy and effort. You could have, um, material capital, which as a parent, you control the iPad, you control the, the access to the, you know, pool or the fun spaces. Um, and you can have psychological capital through emotional intelligence, being able to change how people feel.

And so all of those are things that could be a source of power. What do you have? Where are you strong? Where are you weak? What do other people value in you? And just, just knowing that stuff before you go into an interaction can be really helpful.

Number 2 would be, look ahead, 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, and think about what relationships are going to matter to your success and define that however you want. It could be at work, it could be personally, it could be in some social domain or even philanthropic activities, whatever.

Who am I going to need and am I tending those relationships the way that I should? And if I'm not, then let me tend to them. And I advise that people sit down every year and just sort of do a little scan of am I attending my relationships. Some people hear that and they think it sounds very instrumental. Like, I'm just going to do this because I'm going to need people, but you're not, I'm not saying do this when you need something. I'm saying do it because you know people are important to you and ask yourself, are you showing up for them, which I think is just a really good thing for all of us to do as human beings. We tend to run our relationships kind of on autopilot and I'm saying be a little bit more intentional.

Jen: And then the third thing is to keep an eye out for information on the amount of power and persuasive influence that underlie different kinds of tactics, and think about if I want to be softer, if I want to be persuasive, if I want to give people a choice, how can I plan for resistance? How can I expect to be told no 3 times, 4 times in a row, and be ready to come back with something each time I hear that without giving up and jumping to power.

Nick: Such great advice, Jen. Thanks so much for spending time with us today.

Jen: It's been an absolute pleasure. I'm a big fan of both of you. Thanks for having me.

Nick: That brings us to the end of this episode of PsychTalks, and it's time for me to thank our incredible guest, Professor Jennifer Overbeck. This episode was produced by Carly Godden with production support from Mairead Murray and Gemma Papprill. Sound engineering was by Jack Palmer. Thanks for listening and we'll catch you next time.