Onlookers see people who break rules as more powerful

Power relations are a feature of every workplace, particularly those with formal ranks and explicit hierarchies. Holding power means greater freedom to act, and this can have consequences on behaviour such as ignoring societal norms. As an example, one wonderful experiment revealed that powerful people are more likely than others to take more biscuits from a plate, eat with their mouths open and spread crumbs. Gerban van Kleef and colleagues from two Amsterdam universities set out to explore something with implications for how individuals gain positions of power: are people who break the rules considered more powerful by onlookers?

Across four studies, the evidence suggests that they are. The first two studies involved reading about scenarios, one where someone in a waiting room helped themselves to the staff coffee urn, another where a book-keeper overruled a trainee's concerns about a financial anomaly. In each case, a control group were given a matching scenario that lacked the norm violation, and in each case, the transgressing individuals were rated as both more norm violating and more powerful.

A further study showed identical effects in a real situation, where of two confederates sharing a waiting room, the one who violated more norms (arrived late, threw his bag on the table) was perceived as more powerful. This and the book-keeper study also demonstrated that ratings of 'volitional capacity' – the freedom to act as you please – were higher in the unethical condition, and appeared to be the route by which transgression lead to perceptions of power. That is, we consider transgressors powerful because they show more capacity to act freely.

One further study employed video and added an indirect measure of power, based on the observation that powerful people tend to respond with anger, not sadness, to negative events. A film shows a person making an order in a café, either civilly or (in the transgression condition) treating the waiter and café environment brusquely, for example by tapping ash onto the floor. Participants rated the transgressing person as more powerful, and when they were then told that the food that arrived was not what he ordered, were more likely to expect him to react angrily.

I have a quibble with the video study: it's possible that in the transgression condition the actor employed micro-expressions or tone of voice to convey impatience, sternness or other markers that might imply latent anger. The article doesn't provide ratings of emotion prior to the revelation of the wrong order, so this remains a possibility.

Nonetheless the strong evidence amassed here is sobering. In the authors' words: “as individuals gain power, they experience increased freedom to violate prevailing norms. Paradoxically, these norm violations may not undermine the actor's power but instead augment it, thus fuelling a self-perpetuating cycle of power and immorality”. Workplaces might consider how to foster environments where it is safe to call out abuses of power, both major and petty, in order to interrupt these cycles and stop the sour cream rising to the top.

(A freely available copy of the article is available here.)

Van Kleef, G., Homan, A., Finkenauer, C., Gundemir, S., & Stamkou, E. (2011). Breaking the Rules to Rise to Power: How Norm Violators Gain Power in the Eyes of Others Social Psychological and Personality Science DOI: 10.1177/1948550611398416

Consumers behave differently when they suspect staff will stereotype them

Organisations recognise that people respond to stereotypes, and make merry use of them in their marketing strategies and advertising schemes. But we also respond to being stereotyped by others, an experience called ‘stereotype threat’ which can affect our feelings and behaviour. Do organisations recognise this too?

If not, they’d be advised to check out an upcoming article in the Journal of Consumer Research, where Kyoungmi Lee and colleagues explore the phenomenon. Their series of experiments asked male and female participants to evaluate hypothetical purchases of technical services and goods, reasoning that these purchases could be influenced by the stereotype that women fare poorly in the so-called STEM domains: science, technology, engineering and maths.

In their first two experiments, half the participants were cued for stereotype threat. The first experiment involved a financial service product, and cued the STEM threat using mathematical symbols inserted into the promotional materials they were asked to evaluate. At the start of the second experiment, meanwhile, participants were simply asked to record their gender, an act shown previously to be sufficient to alert the risk of stereotype threat.

The promotional materials depicted the service providers as either male or female, using photographs or more elegantly in the second study - evaluating car repair services - by amending the hairdo on an otherwise identical cartoon mechanic. The investigators found that in both experiments female participants were significantly less prepared to purchase when the service providers were male, but only when the stereotype threat was cued.

In experiments one and two, female participants in the stereotype threat conditions had rated their anxiety as slightly higher, and accounting for anxiety levels seemed to explain the change in purchasing behaviour. If so, then lowering anxiety should erode the effect. The investigators employed vanilla scent as their means of chilling consumers out.

In this study all participants were cued for the threat through recording their gender before evaluating a potential car purchase. Under normal conditions, the threat effect duly emerged, but for those female participants whose study materials were infused with vanilla scent, no difference in purchasing emerged: they were just as happy to buy a car from a man.

Gender discrimination really does happen in the marketplace, so it makes sense for people to be wary. Organisations ought to be mindful of unnecessarily triggering stereotype threat, whether by unbalanced promotional material or clumsy service providers. We can also see another good reason for diversity in workforces: it gives customers more opportunities to avoid any perceived stereotyping. Your organisation really may be a stereotype-free zone, but you can hardly blame a customer for wondering.

Lee K, Kim H, & Vohs KD (2011). Stereotype Threat in the Marketplace: Consumer Anxiety and Purchase Intentions. Journal of Consumer Research (38) : 10.1086/659315

When it pays to weigh: different effects of weight gain on income for men and women

Weight matters to boxers, jockeys and gymnasts, but for the rest of us it's not high on our radar during work hours. However, increasing evidence suggests that consideration of body size affects how employees are evaluated in the workplace. A study from late last year tells us more about the troubling relationship between weight and pay – and how it works differently for men and women.

While much previous research on the “wage penalty” of obesity has been in the economics literature, Timothy Judge and Daniel Cable take a psychological approach. They acknowledge that the stereotyping literature provides some plausible psychological mechanisms: for instance, people who are obese are judged as less agreeable, less emotionally stable, less extraverted, and less conscientious than their lighter peers, despite this being untrue.

However, they point out that how these stereotypes come in to play may be different for men and women. Cultivation theory – the idea that what we see as desirable is shaped by media images – suggests that we may be relaxed about larger men, because being robust and solid is an image depicted more attractively than that of being thin. In contrast, 'average media woman' weighs much less than average real woman. Therefore, what we deem as overweight may be wildly different across sex.

Judge and Cable took these insights to two data sets taken from census studies: a German one of around 11,000 people, and 8,000 in a US sample involving data from fifteen reporting occasions, taken biannually. In both cases, participants were from a variety of jobs, and a ream of control variables were accounted for - from height to having kids to self-esteem. The US data had the additional advantage of allowing within-individual analysis: by looking at how losses and gains of weight affect a person's pay, we avoid the issues of whether both weight and financial destiny were determined by a birth variable that wasn't accounted for.

In line with hypotheses, the study found that for women the penalty of being heavier was twice as great when moving from very thin to average weight, compared to a move from average to heavy. The researchers see this as cultivation theory in action: women are punished if they deviate from the media ideal of skinniness, and even average weight represents betrayal. Any further deviations are almost academic. Meanwhile for men, the opposite was found: more weight actually means more pay, until a certain point where the weight finally begins to exact a cost, but one much smaller than that of being underweight.

The findings generalised across both sample groups, suggesting that this relationship isn't specific to a single national culture. Part of it could be that ideal-sized people have a genuine edge in some work situations (eg being judged as reliable or persuasive by their clients) but the broadness of the effect suggests an influencing factor common to most jobs: being recruited by and working alongside others who favour you more or less.

The authors conclude by acknowledging the troubling nature of their finding, but suggest that “it may be possible and competitively advantageous for employers to try and recognize – and then reduce – the role that weight plays in their employment decisions.”

You will be delighted to know that the paper is freely available on Timothy Judge's homepage.

Judge, T., & Cable, D. (2011). When it comes to pay, do the thin win? The effect of weight on pay for men and women. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96 (1), 95-112 DOI: 10.1037/a0020860