Power, competitiveness, and advice taking: Why the powerful don’t listen

By L. Tost, Francesca Gino, Richard P. Larrick. 2012

264 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Four experiments test the prediction that feelings of power lead individuals to discount advice received from both experts and novices. Experiment 1 documents a negative relationship between subjective feelings of power and use of advice. Experiments 2 and 3 further show that individuals experiencing neutral and low levels of power weigh advice from experts and experienced advisors more heavily than advice from novices, but individuals experiencing high levels of power discount both novice and expert advice. Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrate that this tendency of individuals experiencing high levels of power to discount advice from experts and novices equally is mediated by feelings of competitiveness (Experiment 3) and confidence (Experiments 3 and 4). Finally, Experiment 4 shows that inducing high power individuals to feel cooperative with their advisors can mitigate this tendency, leading them to weigh expert advice more heavily than advice from novices. Theoretical and practical contributions are discussed.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5eb82b6eefaf4c1d389624fe58b8d1edd729f7bf

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Citations in the corpus

The Contaminating Effects of Building Instrumental Ties (2014, unknown): “…making decisions (Anderson and Galinsky, 2006; Inesi, 2010), taking action (Galinsky, Gruenfeld, and Magee, 2003), focusing on personal goals (Gruenfeld et al., 2008), and resisting both persuasion and conformity (Briñol et al., 2007; Galinsky et al., 2008; Tost, Gino, and Larrick, 2012).”
Compliant Sinners, Obstinate Saints: How Power and Self-Focus Determine the Effectiveness of Social Influences in Ethical Decision Making (2013, background): “such as the tendency to disregard ethical organizational standards (as documented in our Study 4) or ignore useful advice (See et al., 2011; Tost et al., 2011).”
Too arrogant for their own good? Why and when narcissists dismiss advice (2015, methodology): “For ease of analysis and pre - sentation of the indirect effect model , we used only the high - and low - narcissism conditions as part of the narcissism factor ( for a similar procedure , see Tost et al .”