Emotional convergence between people over time

The authors propose that people in relationships become emotionally similar over time--as this similarity would help coordinate the thoughts and behaviors of the relationship partners, increase their mutual understanding, and foster their social cohesion. Using laboratory procedures to induce and assess emotional response, the authors found that dating partners (Study 1) and college roommates (Studies 2 and 3) became more similar in their emotional responses over the course of a year. Further, relationship partners with less power made more of the change necessary for convergence to occur. Consistent with the proposed benefits of emotional similarity, relationships whose partners were more emotionally similar were more cohesive and less likely to dissolve. Discussion focuses on implications of emotional convergence and on potential mechanisms.

Power, approach, and inhibition

This article examines how power influences behavior. Elevated power is associated with increased rewards and freedom and thereby activates approach-related tendencies. Reduced power is associated with increased threat, punishment, and social constraint and thereby activates inhibition-related tendencies. The authors derive predictions from recent theorizing about approach and inhibition and review relevant evidence. Specifically, power is associated with (a) positive affect, (b) attention to rewards, (c) automatic information processing, and (d) disinhibited behavior. In contrast, reduced power is associated with (a) negative affect; (b) attention to threat, punishment, others' interests, and those features of the self that are relevant to others' goals; (c) controlled information processing; and (d) inhibited social behavior. The potential moderators and consequences of these power-related behavioral patterns are discussed.

From Power to Action

Three experiments investigated the hypothesis that power increases an action orientation in the power holder, even in contexts where power is not directly experienced. In Experiment 1, participants who possessed structural power in a group task were more likely to take a card in a simulated game of blackjack than those who lacked power. In Experiment 2, participants primed with high power were more likely to act against an annoying stimulus (a fan) in the environment, suggesting that the experience of power leads to the performance of goal-directed behavior. In Experiment 3, priming high power led to action in a social dilemma regardless of whether that action had prosocial or antisocial consequences. The effects of priming power are discussed in relation to the broader literature on conceptual and mind-set priming.

Who's Being Served? "Self-Serving" Attributions in Social Hierarchies

Making external attributions for negative events, though often considered "self-serving," also implies that the attributor is not in control of critical resources. We hypothesized that making external attributions for negative events will lead to impressions of powerlessness. Because individuals in high-status roles are expected to have power and control, external attributions may violate these role expectations; thus, we further hypothesized that status would moderate the relationship between attributions and interpersonal outcomes. Specifically, more negative impressions and affect will be directed toward high-status individuals who make external attributions than toward their lower status counterparts. Three studies were conducted, one using a role-play methodology, one using an experimentally created hierarchy, and one using vignettes. The results supported our hypotheses: external attributions can be highly disserving for people in high-status positions. Copyright 2000 Academic Press.

Negotiation

The first part of this paper traces a short history of the psychological study of negotiation. Although negotiation was an active research topic within social psychology in the 1960s and 1970s, in the 1980s, the behavioral decision perspective dominated. The 1990s has witnessed a rebirth of social factors in the psychological study of negotiation, including social relationships, egocentrism, motivated illusions, and emotion. The second part of this paper reviews five emerging research areas, each of which provides useful insight into how negotiators subjectively understand the negotiation: (a) mental models in negotiation; (b) how concerns of ethics, fairness, and values define the rules of the game being played; (c) how the selection of a communication medium impacts the way the game is played; (d) how cross-cultural issues in perception and behavior affect the negotiation game; and (e) how negotiators organize and simplify their understandings of the negotiation game when more than two actors are involved.