“Interpersonal Relations and Group Processes: From Power to Action”: Article Summary

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Table of Contents

Research Problem
Key Concepts
Research Methods
Findings
Work Cited

The purpose of this paper is to summarize the research article by Galinsky et al., which is titled “Interpersonal Relations and Group Processes: From Power to Action,” and was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2003. In this article, the researchers describe the three behavioral experiments they performed to investigate the causal relationship between power and action. The article is organized as follows: first, the abstract briefly states the results of each of the three experiments.

Further, in the introduction, the authors review background literature on the problem and establish the significance of their study. Galinsky et al. pay special attention to defining power, discussing its relationship with action, and describing power as a psychological state (454). After that, they provide a detailed description of each of the three experiments, which consists of the purpose, participants, design and procedure, results, and discussion sections. Finally, the authors provide a general discussion in which they explain the association between power and action and address any ambiguities in interpreting their research results.

Research Problem

The research problem that the authors aimed to solve by their study was the necessity to prove empirically that power led to action. Based on their literature review, Galinsky et al. discovered that many researchers suggested a direct positive relationship between power and action (453). Scholars had previously theorized that power led to action, but this theory was not underpinned by empirical studies. Therefore, Galinsky et al. made the first attempt to provide empirical evidence of the causal relationship between power and action.

Key Concepts

The first key concept used in this research article is the concept of power. Galinsky et al. define power as “the ability to control resources, own and others’, without social interference” (454). The researchers also explain that, in their research, they used the concept of social power, which is a person’s ability to control and influence how other people behave. So, their research purpose was to investigate whether individuals endued with social power, that is, the capacity to control the resources and behaviors of others, were motivated to act.

Other key concepts are action, commons dilemma, and public-goods dilemma. According to Galinsky et al., power influences taking action directed toward achieving a particular goal, and it does so by weakening the impact of social norms on the power holder and freeing him or her from doubt (454). A commons dilemma is a situation when people have to choose how much of the common resource they will take for themselves. In contrast, in a public-goods dilemma, people should decide how much they can contribute to the shared resource and how much of it they will keep for themselves. Thus, a commons dilemma deals with taking, and a public-goods dilemma refers to giving.

Research Methods

To test their hypothesis that power leads to action, researchers conducted three behavioral experiments involving power manipulation. In the first experiment, there were 32 participants recruited from students and university staff for the payment of $15 (Galinsky et al. 455). First, participants completed a leadership questionnaire. After that, researchers randomly assigned the roles of the manager and subordinates to participants. Their assigned roles were clearly explained to participants. Then, they were left to complete a simulated blackjack scenario. This scenario was designed to test participants’ likelihood of acting (taking a card). To prove that it was power that increased participants’ likelihood of taking action, researchers tested a control group of 17 additional participants who did not undergo power manipulation.

The second experiment involved 66 participants recruited from undergraduate students for “payment of 10$ and entry into a $300 lottery” (Galinsky et al. 458). The power manipulation, in this case, was writing a 19-line essay. The first group of participants wrote about their experience of holding power, while the second group narrated their experience of being under someone’s control. Further, each participant entered a separate room, where they sat at the table to complete a questionnaire. On the table, there was a fan blowing directly on the participant in an annoying manner. Each room had a hidden camera, which recorded participants’ actions. This experiment aimed to test the hypothesis that participants who recalled power-holding experiences would be more likely to take action to remove the annoying fan in some way.

In the third experiment, there were 155 participants, recruited from business students taking part in the experiment as part of their class activity (Galinsky et al. 460). Two groups of participants were asked to write the same essays as in the second experiment. The third group was a control group, and these participants were asked to narrate their experiences from the previous day. After undergoing this power manipulation, all participants were divided into two groups depending on the task they were to perform. The first group completed a commons dilemma task, where they had to record how many of their ten points they wanted to take from the resource pool. The second group performed a public-goods dilemma task, in which they had to write down how much to contribute to the shared pool. The researchers also tested the participants’ mood using a 7-point Likert scale to exclude its influence on the research results.

Findings

In the first experiment, the participants with a managerial role were more likely to take a card, which proved that holding power increased the likelihood of action, even if power was held in an unrelated field. The second experiment showed that high-power individuals were more likely to act on removing the annoying stimulus than low-power ones, even though the permissibility of such an action was unclear. It proved that power increased the likelihood of action directed toward fulfilling personal desires. The third experiment supported the researchers’ hypothesis about the causal relationship between power and action. Moreover, it showed that high-power individuals were generally more likely to take action, regardless of whether their action was prosocial or antisocial. Overall, the results of the three experiments confirmed the researchers’ hypothesis that power led to action, regardless of the context in which the power was held.

Work Cited

Galinsky, Adam D., et al. “Interpersonal Relations and Group Processes: From Power to Action.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2003, vol. 85, no. 3, pp. 453–466.

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“Interpersonal Relations and Group Processes: From Power to Action”: Article Summary

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