Power and the Social

The Influence of Suffering, Social Class, and Social Power on Prosociality: An Empirical Review

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The third basis for social power is referent power , which results largely from the influencee's feelings of identification with the influencer and desire to maintain similarity with the influencer. However, the "normative function" of a reference group is analogous to the reward and coercion power bases discussed above.

French and Raven note: " The fourth basis for social power, legitimate power , stems from internalized values of the influencee which dictate that the influencer has the right of influence and that the influencee is obligated to obey. These internalized values may reflect cultural values and norms, group norms, or role prescriptions. The influencee's underlying feelings of "oughtness" toward the compliant behavior and "has the right" toward the influencer characterize this power base. Because this power base is often derived from many complex societal and personal values, the range of legitimate power A has over B will vary across situations.

To the extent that A's legitimate power is derived from a general value or belief of B, A would be expected to have power across many situations. However, if the power rests on limited role characteristics, it is unlikely that A will have power outside the role situation. One paradoxical type of legitimate influence is that of the "dependent" and "powerless.

For example, a person may appear "helpless" in order to get another to perform a task. Schopler and Bateson suggest that the "power of dependence" is a form of legitimate power since it involves the acceptance of an influence role relationship. Thus, the more powerful is obligated to perform the duties associated with the powerful role position and submit to the demands of the influencee.

The expert power basis stems from the influencee's attribution of superior skills or knowledge to the influencer. The degree of expert power is a function of the amount of knowledge the influencee has and the degree to which the knowledge or skills of the influencer are appropriate for a given situation.

The final power basis, information , differs from the previous bases in that it is "independent" of the influencing agent Deutsch and Gerard, That is, this power stems from the "logic," "reasoning" or importance of the communication provided by the influencing agent and independent of the communicator. The content of the communication alone leads to changes in belief structures, behavior, attitudes, etc. In most situations it is difficult to independently distinguish expert and information social power.

In fact Collins and Raven suggest that informational influence may follow only after some degree of expert power is perceived by the influencee p. Although there has been considerable research on social power and the French and Raven bases, there has been little to improve the operationalizations of these concepts.

social power

One method of operationalizing social power is by creating an experimental treatment situation depicting the desired social power. The effect of the social power treatment on various dependent variables can then be tested. Busch and Wilson employed this method in a study on the effect of life insurance salesmen's expert and referent bases of social power on subject's trust in the salesman, overall attitude toward life insurance and several behavioral measures.

Low and high expertise power was created by presenting the salesman as either "above average" or "excellent" on six attributes of selling ability and training. The referent conditions of low and high similarity were created by using Byrne's attitude similarity procedure Byrne, , pp. In this method, the influencer is presented as either being similar or dissimilar to the subject on a list of attitude topics.

Although the operationalizations employed in this study appeared at least on the surface, to be reasonable, the authors reported only marginal differences in referent power between the high referent-low expert and iow ref-erent-high expert conditions. This comparison was made using manipulation check measures for referent power which were two 7 Point items "how much they subject would like the salesman if the met him" and "would they enjoy working with him in a research experiment. Nelson, , some questions arise regarding the validity of using measures of attraction as surrogates for referent power in a situation where several power bases are operant.

From this one might suggest that either the concept of referent power, the method of operationalization , or the manipulation check measures be revised.

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Another method of operationalizing social power in an experimental design is via a cartoon representation Leet-Pellegrini and Rubin, , Raven, This consists of a series of cartoons illustrating an influence situation. In the Leet-Pellegrini and Rubin study, the first cartoon panel showed a young adult standing in front of a doorway at a city street corner.

The second panel depicted a police officer saying to the young adult, "Would you please move away form here. Such checks were not presented in the Leet-Pellegrini and Rubin study. While a thorough review of common experimental treatment operationalizations of the other social power bases is beyond the scope of this paper, it should be noted that they seldom are more sophisticated than that of those mentioned above. Declarations by the experimenter regarding the influencer's ability to control monetary payments or electrical shocks, or attributed knowledge and experience to the influencer are also typical.

Another perspective on the measurement of social power is provided by Raven, Centers and Rodrigues In this study, the authors sought to determine the differential susceptibility to a social power base as utilized by one's spouse. Following the introductory statement:. The subjects rated the following statements on a three point scale very unlikely, somewhat likely, very likely :. Because you felt that given you were both part of the same family, you should see eye-to-eye on these matters. While the face validity of these items appears to be high, the authors presented no information on the reliability and validity of these measures.

This brief review has illustrated the most common methods of operationalizing the French and Raven bases of social power and their shortcomings.

Society and Social Power

The effectiveness of the experimental treatments is often not verified by manipulation check measures. Also, in cases where the manipulation check is not consistent with the treatment, one may question either the treatment or the manipulation check measure unless reliable and valid check measures are employed. The use of rating and ranking measures is also subject to deficiencies. Often, content and other types of validity for the items are assumed.

In addition, single item measures are subject to many sources of error and do not allow for the assessment of reliability.

Thus while these approaches provide convenient operationalizations of social power, they do not answer issues of measurement reliability and validity. There is a need for more valid and reliable measures of social power. For this study a Likert approach was selected. Some of the assumptions which underlie the Likert procedure are: 1 the concept being measured is unidimensional; 2 the intervals between adjacent responses are equal; 3 the intervals are equal across items; and 4 a "positive" direction can be determined for each item Runkle and McGrath, , p.

The first assumption will be addressed in the analysis section. The second and third assumptions are commonly made in Likert scaling situations and do not appear to be unreasonable for this study.

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The fourth assumption also seemed reasonable since trained judges were used to select the scale items. A Likert scale development format was used for this study and included the following major steps: 1 A large pool of belief statements which reflect different characteristics of a social power situation was generated; 2 Judges rated these items to select those which clearly indicate a particular type of power: 3 Influence situations were generated and judged for use as standards for scale development. For each power basis, two situations were selected which depicted that social power base; 4 Subjects assumed the role of the influencee in a situation and responded to multiple items reflecting each basis of power; 5 Items reflecting each social power basis were analyzed to determine the most reliable items for the final scale; 6 Power base scores across situations were compared as a check on predictive validity.

The items generated by the author, depicted characteristics of either an influence situation in general, a particular relationship between the influencer and influencee, abilities or resources of the influencer, etc. One hundred and fifty items were generated, approximately 25 for each French and Raven power type. While this process does not ensure a thorough sampling of the population of the social power characteristics for each power basis being measured, it is felt that the large number of initial items provides an acceptable representation of social power characteristics.

Social Power and Power Over Space: How the Bourgeoisie Reproduces itself in the City

Each item was judged as to whether or not it was an indicator of each of the French and Raven types of power. A judge could designate the item to represent more than one power type. A minimum of five of the six judges classified the item as an indicator for the same power type; and.

The item also was not classified as an indicator in the other categories a total of 3 or more times either within another category or over several categories. This procedure required reasonably high interjudge consistency, but still tolerated a small degree of inevitable variability present in judging tasks of psychological concepts. Eighty-five items were selected by the judges as acceptable indicators, items for each type of power.

Scenarios were used to represent influence situations. This approach allowed for the development of clear examples of each power basis. While using this approach lessens the external validity of the results, it does allow other researchers to easily and rather inexpensively test the findings.

In this case, the subjects were instructed to assume the role of the influencee in a given scenario, and then indicate their agreement or disagreement to each of the 85 belief statements selected by the judges. An important aspect in the development of the scenarios was the need to generate situations which clearly depicted only one type of social power. This was necessary to ensure that the later scale results could be validated with a known situation treatment i. The second issue was the need to generate two situations depicting each type of power.

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This replication of situation treatments was intended to ensure that the scales developed from this research would have some degree of generalizability. Situations were generated by the author and reviewed by the same panel of judges.

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