Translator: Sarah Braun Reviewer: Denise RQ
Good afternoon, guys.
Today I want to talk about self perception and the psychology of power.
I'm going to address a question which is:
what is the effect of power,
and how does it change how we connect with others?
Let me start with an anecdote.
It's a picture from my holidays.
Don't worry, the whole slideshow isn't about my holidays.
As a psychologist, I got the chance to visit, in Africa, a remote tribe.
The tribe, from the Maasai, are warriors that barely see other human beings.
And it was fascinating to me because I always thought that, you know,
these are the guys that bind together,
these are the guys that feel all connected
because they are a part from a very collectivist culture,
and these are the ones that really are similar to others
and love being similar to others.
And I met Meya Kuhaya, that's Meya Kuhaya.
Meya Kuhaya was wearing sneakers.
Meya Kuhaya had a mobile phone.
So not exactly the kind of Maasai warrior I was expecting to meet.
And I talked to the guys around and said, "What about this guy?",
and the people I met from the tribe were saying,
"He always wants to be different.
He always wants to show off that he's got the latest things."
I thought, that's not really what I would have been expecting
from someone in an African tribe.
And it started to drive this curiosity as a researcher,
as to is there some kind of human universal
that changes how we connect with others?
Is there something that gets in the way of us feeling connected to others?
And that's when I started researching
how power gets in the way of how we connect with others.
Three questions I want to address in this talk.
First of all, what makes us feel psychologically connected to others?
How does it come about that we feel disconnected or connected with others?
Then, how does power get in the way?
How does power change how we function, how we process information,
how does it hurt the way we connect with others?
And thirdly, what can we do about it?
Now that we know that power gets in the way,
what can we do to avoid its negative effects?
So, let's start at the beginning at an early age.
If you look at this kid in the picture,
he doesn't look very happy about what's in the plate.
You've got two different ways of talking to that kid,
two different types of discourse
that can change the way that kid will develop a sense of connection.
So, if you're from the Western world, typically you'll tell that kid:
"Eat the vegetables, you'll become bigger, you'll become tall, you'll become strong,"
emphasizing what makes that kid unique and different from others.
You can also say things to kids like: "Think about children in Africa.
Think about how lucky you are to be different from them,"
- disconnected from them -
"because you have food and some of them are starving."
But if you look at what people say in collectivist cultures, in the East,
it's a completely different vibe, a completely different dialogue.
They would say things such as:
"Think about how upset Mummy or Daddy is
that you're not eating what's on the plate."
Or things such as: "Think about the farmer who worked so hard for you
to have these vegetables on your plate.
Think about how upset the farmer would be."
So what you're doing with these dialogues is insisting on connections,
what makes people feel psychologically connected to the rest of society.
Markus and Kitayama are researchers from the US and Japan
[and] were the first ones to get interested
in what makes us feel connected and disconnected from others.
And what they've found is that people from Western cultures
tend to develop this, what they called independent self-construal
that is: "I'm unique and different from others,
and that's my primary way of seeing myself."
Whereas in the Eastern world, it's the other way around;
it's, "I'm connected to others, and my relationships with others,
my similarities to others is what drives me in life and in society."
We both need a sense of independence and a sense of interdependence,
but depending on the context, and on the culture,
we're going to feel more or less connected with others.
Now, it gets re-enforced as we go along.
The toys we play with, the socialization practices,
how we're taught to behave, reinforce these behaviors.
So boys are encouraged to be strong, boys don't cry,
boys shouldn't show their emotions, they should be strong and independent.
Girls are encouraged to socialize, and encouraged to share their emotions,
to care for others,
and that's how they end up always going to the loo together,
and I've never been able to explain that.
(Laughter)
But it's not only about gender practices, it's also about how we grow in our age.
When we are young, we're interdependent, we're naturally connected to others
because we need others, we need our parents to take care of us,
we need our parents to help us dress and so on.
And then we grow up, what it is about when you grow up as an adult?
It's about becoming independent, it's about breaking free.
So our independent self becomes stronger as we become adults.
And then, along the way, when we age, we start being in need of others again,
we've become interdependent again.
But apart from these life stages,
there's something big that can get in the way.
That's Barack Obama, but that's what he represents: power.
What do psychologists think about power?
Power is the capacity to influence others and to stay uninfluenced by others.
Power is the control that we have over resources,
be it financial or be it any other types of resources.
Power can come in many different ways, it can come from, for instance,
the authority that we have in a company, being in a certain position,
but it can also be a sort of expertise, I'm an expert, therefore,
I've got expert power, I can influence others.
Psychologists have been fascinated with power and what it does to us.
One of the first things that power does
is it changes our capacity to step into the shoes of the other,
to see and understand what the other person is seeing.
You see in that picture we've got two people looking at the same thing,
but they're seeing different things.
If you've got the capacity to step into the shoes of the other,
to take the perspective of the other,
then you understand that they're seeing something different and that it is normal.
Researchers Galinski and some colleagues [wrote] a fascinating piece of research
and published it in Psychological Science a few years ago,
whereby they asked people to write a little story,
either about when they were in power or when they were not in power.
This is called priming in psychology,
a temporary shift in how you feel when you are either powerful or powerless.
And then, they paired people in their experiment,
doing little games where they had to write letters on their forehead.
What they've found is that the people
who had to write a story when they were in power
were less likely to write a letter
that would be readable to their partner.
Like what you see on the left hand side.
People who were writing a story about when they had no power
were more likely to take the perspective of the other
and write their letter on their forehead that was readable to the partner.
That's the first big thing about power, and how we connect with others:
power makes us less capable
of empathizing and of taking the perspective of the other.
Power is actually doing other stuff even on our brain.
Kanter and colleagues at the University of California
investigated the effect of power on our brain.
And what they've found is that when we are in situations of power,
the effect of this in our brain can be compared to small brain traumas.
In other words, we end up doing things
that some people who have brain traumas do,
such as swearing, being more likely to display bad table manners,
such as being loud, interrupting others, so power really disrupts our behaviors.
It disrupts the capacity that we have to monitor our behaviors.
We care less about others,
we care less about the consequences of our acts towards others.
Now, power is not just bad.
Researchers in psychology found that being in power helps us to focus.
It helps us to focus on key information,
and it makes us less distracted by peripheral information,
so it's not just bad.
But on our quest to research the psychology of power,
and how it makes us feel more or less connected,
we decided with colleagues to investigate
a very hierarchical environment which were hospital settings.
What we did was we looked at the self perception
of two different categories of people in the hospital
which were doctors and nurses.
We surveyed them and we used measures from literature [reviews]
to measure their sense of independence
and their sense of interdependence, so how connected they felt to others.
What we found was quite interesting.
First, doctors had a predominant sense of self that was about independence.
They felt unique and different in the hospital settings.
Nurses, on the other hand, were balanced;
they neither felt too independent nor too interdependent,
unlike doctors that felt really independent.
But what was most fascinating about our research
were the differences in terms of gender
and how power affects different types of people,
in different types of positions, differently,
depending on whether they're men or women.
What we've found is that when you give power and status to men
they feel less interdependent, they feel less connected to others.
If you give power to women, it's the other way around.
Women in power tend to feel more connected to others.
In our sample, for instance,
men doctors were feeling less connected to others than men nurses.
And it was the other way around for women; female doctors felt more connected
with their patients and the team than the female nurses.
So, what does it mean?
Now that we know that power does not only [do] good to us
because it interferes with how we interact with others,
it interferes with with and how we connect with others,
what is the solution?
That's the third point of the talk.
Well, it's all about mindfulness.
In the research we do,
we teach people to be aware of the consequences of power.
If you know the consequences of power, if you know what power does to you,
you're actually able to counterbalance the negative consequences of power.
Among the games we do for instance,
the first one is about writing diaries from the perspective of the other.
We ask, for instance, our doctors and nurses to write about a scenario
where they step into the shoes of the other.
We want them to train their perspective taking capacities and to be aware
that the other doesn't always see things the way they see things.
The other thing that we try to do is we encourage them to think
in terms of 'we' rather than in terms of 'I'.
Training your 'we' mindset rather than your 'I' mindset.
The last thing we do is what we call interdependency games.
We ask them to list when and where they need the input of the other.
To realise that their lives are about being connected,
to realise that their lives are about understanding the perspective of the other
it's about understanding the inputs of the other.
So what's the bottom line of this talk?
Many business talks talk about leadership, and they all say that we train leaders.
When it comes to leadership and leadership stars, you've got
two types of leadership.
You've got typically what we call the autocratic style of leadership:
you don't listen to others,
you take your decision, and you impose it onto others.
And you've got what we call the more democratic style of leadership.
You listen to others, you take the perspective of the other,
and together you make joint decisions.
Most companies these days value the democratic style of leadership.
But what my research suggests is that it's counterintuitive
with the fact that power actually impairs a lot of the skills that you need
to be a good interdependent leader, a good democratic leader.
So the bottom line for whoever is going to be in a leadership position
is be mindful about the consequences of power.
Bare in mind that power impairs the capacity to take perspectives.
Bare in mind that power impairs your ability to actually respect the norm
and encourages you to break the norm.
Bare this in mind because this is
what will allow you to balance your sense of self, to bring interdependence in.
Only if you bring the interdependence back into your self-perception
you'll stay connected to others,
and you'll be able to be a great, democratic leader.
Thank you.
(Applause)