Power Flashcards
The capacity to influence others, even
when these others try to resist influence.
Social power
Sources of social power in a group, including one’s degree of control over rewards and punishment, authority in the group, attractiveness, expertise, and access to and control over information needed by
group members.
Power bases
Power based on one’s control over the
distribution of rewards (both personal and impersonal) given or offered to group members.
Reward power
Power based on one’s ability to punish
or threaten others who do not comply with requests or demands.
Coercive power
Power based on an individual’s socially sanctioned claim to a position or role that gives the occupant the right to require and demand compliance with his or her directives.
Legitimate power
Repetitively teasing, ridiculing, provoking, or
tormenting others through various types of irritating, harassing, or aggressive actions, such as name-calling, threats, insults, and physical injury.
Bullying
Power based on group members’ identification with, attraction to, or respect for the powerholder.
Referent power
Ascription of extraordinary or supernatural acumen, ability, and value to a leader by his or her followers.
Charisma
Power that derives from subordinates’ assumption that the powerholder possesses superior skills and abilities.
Expert power
Power based on the potential use of informational resources, including rational argument, persuasion, or factual data.
Informational power
Specific strategies used to influence others, usually to gain a particular objective or advantage.
Power tactics
A dispositional tendency to accept and even prefer circumstances that sustain social inequalities, combined with a general preference for hierarchical social structures.
Social dominance orientation (SDO)
The predicted tendency for certain behaviors to evoke behaviors from others that are congruous with the initial behavior, with positive behaviors evoking positive behaviors, negative behaviors evoking negative behaviors, dominant behaviors evoking submissive behaviors, and submissive
behaviors evoking dominant behaviors
Interpersonal complementarity hypothesis
The transformation of benign individuals
into morally corrupt ones by powerful, but malevolent, social situations
Lucifer effect
A psychological state described by Stanley
Milgram that occurs when subordinates in an organized status hierarchy experience such a marked reduction in autonomy that they are unable to resist authorities’ order
Agentic state
A method of influence in which the influencer first makes a very small request that the target will probably agree to; once the target agrees to the minor request, he or she is more likely to agree to the influencer’s more important request.
Foot-in-the-door technique
The tendency to overestimate the causal influence of dispositional factors and underemphasize the causal influence of situational factors.
Fundamental attribution error (FAE)
The tendency to overestimate the causal influence of dispositional factors and underemphasize the causal influence of situational factors.
Fundamental attribution error (FAE)
An integrative conceptual analysis of the transformative effects of power that finds power to be psychologically and behaviorally activating but the lack of power inhibiting.
Approach/inhibition theory
Predicts that in any group where power is concentrated in the hands of a few individuals (an oligarchy), these individuals will tend to act in ways that protect and enhance their power.
Iron law of oligarchy
A subgroup formed within the larger group that seeks to disrupt or change the group’s
authority structure
Revolutionary coalition
A complex emotional and cognitive reaction
that occurs when individuals feel that their freedom to make choices has been threatened or eliminated.
Reactance
