Elsevier

Consciousness and Cognition

Volume 21, Issue 3, September 2012, Pages 1547-1550
Consciousness and Cognition

Short Communication
Induced power changes the sense of agency

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2012.06.008Get rights and content

Abstract

Power differentials are a ubiquitous feature of social interactions and power has been conceptualised as an interpersonal construct. Here we show that priming power changes the sense of agency, indexed by intentional binding. Specifically, participants wrote about episodes in which they had power over others, or in which others had power over them. After priming, participants completed an interval estimation task in which they judged the interval between a voluntary action and a visual effect. After low-power priming, participants judged intervals to be significantly longer than judgments after high-power or no priming. Thus, intentional binding was significantly changed by low-power, suggesting that power reduces the sense of agency for action outcomes. Our results demonstrate a clear intrapersonal effect of power. We suggest that intentional binding could be employed to assess agency in individuals suffering from anxiety and depression, both of which are characterised by reduced feelings of personal control.

Highlights

► Intentional binding is the reduction in perceived time between actions and effects. ► Intentional binding is thought to index the sense of agency. ► Power is thought to be related to the feeling of personal control. ► We primed power and found intentional binding was affected by low power priming. ► Power priming thus affects the sense of agency as indexed by intentional binding.

Introduction

Differences in power are an essential feature of interpersonal life, examples of which include interactions between doctors and patients, professors and students and airport security personnel and travellers. Researchers have identified effects of power on self-regulation, affect and other cognitive processes. For example, power disinhibits action, such that people with high power act more in any given situation, regardless of what the options for action are (Galinsky, Gruenfeld, & Magee, 2003). In addition, high power causes individuals to rely more on stereotypical and categorical information than individuating information (Fiske et al., 1987, Goodwin et al., 2000). In general power has been interpreted as an interpersonal construct (Inesi et al., 2011, Magee and Galinsky, 2008). In this regard, the core experience of power has been related to the feeling that ‘something moves or acts, because of my will, not because of its own will’ (Winter, 1973, Winter, 2010).

Although most ideas and conceptualisations of power are rooted in an interpersonal context, recent evidence suggests that power is fundamentally linked to the feeling of personal control (Fast et al., 2009, Inesi et al., 2011). Personal control is the belief that outcomes are related to personal action and not determined by other uncontrollable external factors such as fate. Given this suggestion, differences in the amount of power an individual possesses should change the experience of actions and their outcomes, such that those with high power feel more control compared to those with low power. Power and the sense of agency (SoA) should therefore be related.

The SoA has been defined as the sense that “I” am the one who is causing or generating an action (Gallagher, 2000). There are at least two ways to experimentally assess the SoA. The first is to explicitly ask an individual how much control they felt for producing a particular outcome (Nahab et al., 2011). Another, implicit approach is to measure the perceived interval between an action and its consequent effect. It is well established that, when participants make an action that is followed by an effect (say a key press followed by a tone), they judge the interval between the action and effect to be shorter than it actually is. This perceived compression of the action-effect interval is termed ‘intentional binding’ (Haggard, Clark, & Kalogeras, 2002; see Moore & Obhi, 2012 for a review). Critically, intentional binding does not occur if the action is involuntary, a finding that reinforces the idea that binding indexes agency (Moore and Obhi, 2012, Tsakiris and Haggard, 2003).

Here, we examined how differences in induced power affect the SoA measured by intentional binding. We used an established priming procedure to induce a powerful or powerless mental state in participants (Ebert and Wegner, 2010, Galinsky et al., 2003). We predicted that individuals primed with low power would exhibit less intentional binding than unprimed or high power individuals. We also predicted that individuals primed with high power would exhibit more intentional binding than unprimed or low power individuals.

Section snippets

Participants

Fifteen right-handed participants took part in the study (three male, mean age 18, SD = 0.68). All participants gave informed consent and the study was conducted in accordance with (Canadian) Tri-Policy guidelines for research with human participants.

Procedure

Participants came to the lab under the guise of participating in two separate studies; one concerning perceptions of power, and one examining temporal judgments. When participants arrived, they were first told that the study on temporal judgements

Results

One participant was excluded from analysis because they failed to record several judgments. For the remaining participants, for each condition, interval judgments that were more than 2.5 standard deviations from the mean for each interval were excluded. This procedure resulted in removal of less than 1% of trials.

Discussion

In the present study we examined the effects of power priming on the SoA assessed by intentional binding. The low power prime condition yielded judgments of action-effect intervals that were longer than no-prime and high power prime conditions. Thus, given that intentional binding is thought to index the SoA (Ebert and Wegner, 2010, Moore and Haggard, 2010), our results demonstrate that low power reduces the SoA. Our results are the first to demonstrate an effect of power on the SoA, although

Acknowledgment

SSO holds funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering research council of Canada that enables work in this area.

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