Feeling socially powerless makes you more prone to bumping into things on the right and induces leftward line bisection error

Wilkinson, D.T.; Guinote, A.; Weick, M.; Molinari, R.; Graham, K.

Abstract

Social power affects the manner in which people view themselves and act toward others, a finding that has attracted broad interest from the social and political sciences. However, there has been little interest from those within cognitive neuroscience. Here, we demonstrate that the effects of power extend beyond social interaction and invoke elementary spatial biases in behavior consistent with preferential hemispheric activation. In particular, participants who felt relatively powerless, compared with those who felt more powerful, were more likely to bisect horizontal lines to the left of center, and bump into the right-hand (as opposed to the left-hand) side when walking through a narrow passage. These results suggest that power induces hemispheric differences in visuomotor behavior, indicating that this ubiquitous phenomenon affects not only how we interact with one another, but also how we interact with the physical world.

Citation

Wilkinson, D., Guinote, A., Weick, M., Molinari, R., & Graham, K. (2010). Feeling socially powerless makes you more prone to bumping into things on the right and induces leftward line bisection error. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 17(6), 910-914. https://doi.org/10.3758/pbr.17.6.910

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jul 17, 2010
• Online Publication Date: Jul 17, 2010
• Publication Date: Dec 1, 2010
• Deposit Date: Sep 12, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 19, 2018
• Journal: Psychonomic Bulletin and Review
• Print ISSN: 1069-9384
• Electronic ISSN: 1531-5320
• Publisher: Springer
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 17
• Issue: 6
• Pages: 910-914
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/pbr.17.6.910
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1314868
• Related Public URLs: http://kar.kent.ac.uk/27458/