Powerful People Make Good Decisions Even When They Consciously Think

The article presents a study to determine whether the powerful are normally under greater attentional demands than the powerless. This study was participated by 81 undergraduate students to examine whether high-power individuals make equally good decisions following conscious versus unconscious thought. It was found that high-power individuals were equally good at identifying the better choice after conscious versus unconscious thought when given problems that require a complex decision. It also concluded that the powerful seem to be able to handle a number of decisions which have great impact without making excessive errors.

[1]  Joe C Magee,et al.  From power to action. , 2003, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[2]  Heeseog Kang,et al.  On Making the Right Choice: The Deliberation-Without-Attention Effect , 2006 .

[3]  Yaacov Trope,et al.  You focus on the forest when you're in charge of the trees: power priming and abstract information processing. , 2006, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[4]  Susan T. Fiske,et al.  Social Cognition and Power: Some Cognitive Consequences of Social Structure as a Source of Control Deprivation , 1993 .

[5]  A. Galinsky,et al.  Lacking Power Impairs Executive Functions , 2008, Psychological science.

[6]  Kerry L. Marsh,et al.  Control motivation and social cognition , 1993 .

[7]  Rick B. van Baaren,et al.  On Making the Right Choice: The Deliberation-Without-Attention Effect , 2006, Science.

[8]  S. Fiske,et al.  Controlling other people. The impact of power on stereotyping. , 1993, The American psychologist.

[9]  A. Dijksterhuis,et al.  A Theory of Unconscious Thought , 2006, Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.