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The Truth About Power
What It Is, What It Isn’t, and Why It Matters
Power is a captivating topic. No matter who I’m with—women or men, the 1 percent or the 99 percent, nonprofit managers or business leaders, entrepreneurs, middle managers, or senior executives—everyone cares about power, and for good reason: people in positions of power control our fates. Power attracts and repels. Power creates and destroys. Power opens doors and closes them. Power explains who goes to war, why there is peace, and what we fight about. Power dictates how we live and under what laws, who has material advantage and who doesn’t. Bertrand Russell said that power is the fundamental force in human relations. As immortalized in the musical Hamilton, power determines who lives, who dies, and who tells your story.
Human interest in power has deep existential roots. Psychologists believe we care about power because we fear death, and power promises a kind of immortality. That may seem a bit heavy, but it makes evolutionary sense. Power has survival value. Power affords not just greater access to shared resources and control of our own outcomes but also greater connection to others and elevated status within the clan. Human psychology has evolved to support these evolutionary realities. With more power, we imagine, we can live longer, better lives and even live on in others’ hearts and minds after we are no longer physically present.
We seek power often without knowing it. And as much as we hate to admit it, power contests are everywhere, even in places where we think they don’t belong. Not just at work but at home, in our marriages, with our siblings, in our friend groups, and in society more broadly, power is a central organizing force. We are dealing with power differences and negotiating power all the time, often while we think we are doing other things.
When you start to pay attention, you can see these contests everywhere. While engaged in friendly conversations about topics other than power—the news, your teenager’s curfew, even which restaurant to go to on date night—we are often really haggling about who knows more, who is better connected, whose interests matter most, who gets to be the decider, who holds the moral high ground, and who makes the rules.
Much has been written about the powerful—their habits, strategies, and foibles—and many have approached the study of power by looking up, with some combination of fear, admiration, and envy. This “cult of personality” approach seems to suggest that power resides in the person, someone who possesses a combination of superior charm and ruthless ambition that the rest of us don’t. It implies that to be powerful means to pursue self-aggrandizement and world domination, at the expense of everything and everyone else. And so the rest of us, who find this approach to social life abnormal, if not distasteful, conclude that power is not for us. We step away. We cede control to be polite and distinguish ourselves from the bad guys. In effect, we hand our power over to the wrong people because we can’t see how to be powerful ourselves and be a good person at the same time.
When I began to study power, the topic itself made me queasy. Like many of my generation, who grew up during the civil rights era, I was raised to care about social justice, to recognize unfairness in social life, and to believe in equal rights for all people. My first heroes were Martin Luther King, Jr., Bobby Kennedy, and my high school English teacher, who was a not-so-closet feminist. To be a good person, I thought, meant to reject power in all its forms.
So as a researcher, I set out to take some of the shine off power, to lift the veil and show the dark side. It wasn’t hard to do. In study after study, in all kinds of tasks, we found that people we had randomly assigned to our “high-power” conditions were more impulsive, less self-conscious, and less attentive to the consequences of their actions than those we had assigned to “low-power” conditions. It seemed—at first—that power could bring out the villain in anyone.
But as the science evolved and more researchers caught the wave, the picture became more nuanced. Sometimes, when my colleagues and I placed normal people in positions of power in the lab, they became more self-serving and more oblivious to social norms. And other times, it was the opposite. Power didn’t turn everyone into a monster; in fact, sometimes it brought out people’s most cooperative, most prosocial instincts.
In our competitive culture, it is natural to think of power as a means of self-enhancement. But power is also a tool we can use to take care of the people we care about. And this in and of itself can also be self-enhancing. In fact, studies find that when people take personal risks by sacrificing more—sometimes doing more work rather than less, and sometimes investing their own resources in others with no promise of a return—their status in those contexts rises.
Over time, the picture has become clearer: power makes people more likely to act on both their best and their worst instincts. We all have self-serving impulses, but we are also all capable of putting the welfare of others first. The truth about power, I’ve come to realize, is not that power itself is inherently good or bad, or that those who have power are inherently superior or flawed. Rather, how we act with power depends on what is on our minds when the opportunities to use power arise. In the end, it is not how much power we have but what we do with it that defines who we are and our impact on the world.
What Is Power?
The concept of power can be confusing. What is power, exactly? It’s important to spend a moment on this. Some people are content to know power when they see it. But if you want to predict who gets power, why, and how, you have to understand what exactly power is, and also what it isn’t. As social psychologist Kurt Lewin famously pointed out, “There is nothing so practical as a good theory.” If you want to deal effectively with power differences, change the balance of power, or even just figure out how much power you have in a particular situation, you have to know what power is and where it comes from.
Power, by definition, is the capacity to control other people and their outcomes. So your power comes from the extent to which others need you, in particular, for access to valued rewards, and to avoid punishments. When someone needs you for these things, you have more power over them than you would if other people could also meet their needs. When others need you they are motivated to please you, and this gives you control.
Power is not status. Status is a measure of respect and esteem in others’ eyes. Power and status are related, of course, but it is possible to have power without status. For example, when you are running late, and a stranger is leaving the only available parking space for blocks, the urgency of your situation and their ability to control the outcome—they could make you wait while they take a phone call—gives them power, whether they realize it or not. When you have status, you typically have power, because people want to be associated with you.
Power is not authority either. But these are also related. Authority is the right to tell others what to do based on a formal position or title. So authority and power mutually reinforce each other, but it is possible to have power without formal authority (as with the driver vacating the parking spot). It is also possible to have formal authority but no real power: for example, when a university administrator must approve or deny requests for additional research and travel funds but has no direct control over the budget.
Power and influence are also different. Influence is the effect of power. Some people prefer the idea of having influence over the idea of having power, because having influence implies you don’t have to use force. But this is a false distinction. When you have the ability to force someone’s hand, truly, you almost never have to use it.
In short, power is the capacity for social control. So that part is fairly simple, but it is also the tip of the iceberg. To use power effectively, we need to also understand how it works. Our beliefs and assumptions about the rules of power affect how we use it, and much of what we think about the rules is just wrong. In order to use power better, we need to start thinking about it differently. We need to start looking at power on the ground where it lives, in relationships, groups, organizations, and communities. Power is not a personal attribute or possession. Power is a part you play in someone else’s story.
Why Power Isn’t Personal
Myth: Power is personal; either you have it or you don’t.
Truth: Power is social; it lives and dies in the context.
In our culture of individualism, we think power, like everything else, is personal. We treat it like an individual attribute, a possession, to acquire or accumulate. But if you look carefully at power, you can see how we’ve missed the big picture.
Power is not an aspect of the self; it cannot be possessed by a person. Wealth, fame, charisma, good looks, ambition, and self-confidence are all personal qualities we equate with having power. But these are merely potential sources of power. They may also be consequences of power. But none of these qualities guarantee leverage over other people.
