Entrepreneurship & Innovation

A complete model of smile interpretation needs to incorporate its social context. We argue that embodied simulation is an unlikely route for understanding dominance smiles, which typically occur in the context of power. We support this argument by discussing the lack of eye contact with dominant faces and the facial and postural complementarity, rather than mimicry, that pervades hierarchical relationships.

Three experiments explored whether hierarchical role and body posture have independent or interactive effects on the main outcomes associated with power: action in behavior and abstraction in thought. Although past research has found that being in a powerful role and adopting an expansive body posture can each enhance a sense of power, two experiments showed that when individuals were placed in high- or low-power roles while adopting an expansive or constricted posture, only posture affected the implicit activation of power, the taking of action, and abstraction.

The current investigation explores how power and stability within a social hierarchy interact to affect risk taking. Building on a diverse, interdisciplinary body of research, including work on non-human primates, intergroup status, and childhood social hierarchies, we predicted that the unstable powerful and the stable powerless will be more risk taking than the stable powerful and unstable powerless.

This research examines how consumers' spending on themselves versus others can be affected by temporary shifts in their states of power. Five experiments found that individuals experiencing a state of power spent more money on themselves than on others, whereas those experiencing a state of powerlessness spent more money on others than on themselves. This effect was observed using a variety of power manipulations (hierarchical roles, print advertisements, episodic recall, and mental role-playing), across spending intentions and actual dollars spent, and among college and national samples.

The current research explored whether sharing intentionality leads to implicit coordination, a situation in which isolated individuals independently adopt a similar standard of behavior. We propose that knowing that a given goal is experienced in common with other in-group members or similar others intensifies goal pursuit. Two experiments examined whether simply being aware that one's own individual goal was also being separately pursued by similar others results in more goal-congruent behavior.

Five experiments investigated the hypothesis that perspective taking — actively contemplating others' psychological experiences — attenuates automatic expressions of racial bias. Across the first 3 experiments, participants who adopted the perspective of a Black target in an initial context subsequently exhibited more positive automatic interracial evaluations, with changes in automatic evaluations mediating the effect of perspective taking on more deliberate interracial evaluations.

The current research investigated whether mind-sets and contexts that afford a focus on self-other differences can facilitate perceptual and conceptual forms of perspective taking. Supporting this hypothesis, results showed that directly priming a difference mind-set made perceivers more likely to spontaneously adopt other people's visual perspectives (Experiment 1) and less likely to overimpute their own privileged knowledge to others (Experiments 2 and 3).

The article discusses research that shows managers who are perceived as being tough and wielding power are more likely to be promoted than others. The author cites the example of drug maker Pfizer, where in 2001 the no-nonsense Hank McKinnell was hired as chief executive instead of the more collegial Karen Katen. In 2006 Pfizer got rid of McKinnel for poor performance.