Power influences the expression of Honesty-Humility: The power-exploitation affordances hypothesis

Power motives, personality correlates, and leadership outcomes: A person-centered approach

OBJECTIVE

We investigated how these motivations combined within individuals to form unique profiles, and how these different profiles relate to personality traits and team behaviors.

BACKGROUND

Dominance, prestige, and leadership motives each play a key role in shaping social success or failure in gaining social rank and influence.

METHOD

We used latent profile analysis across two samples (engineering student project teams, Nstudent = 1088; working adults, Nworker = 466) to identify profile configurations and how such profiles related to important outcomes.

RESULTS

We identified qualitatively distinct profiles: ultra-dominance profile (prominent dominance motive with high prestige and leadership motives); prestigious leadership profile (moderately high prestige and leadership motives, low dominance motive); and weak social power motive profile (low on all three motives). Individuals with the prestigious leadership profile were more likely to emerge as leaders, compared to those with a weak social power motive profile. People with an ultra-dominance profile scored higher on narcissism and tended to perceive themselves as leaders, despite not being deemed more leader-like by teammates.

CONCLUSION

Using a person-centered approach allowed us to identify three power motive profiles across independent samples and generate insights into how these profiles manifest different social behaviors and outcomes.

Honesty-humility predicts humanitarian prosocial behavior via social connectedness: A parallel mediation examining connectedness to community, nation, humanity, and nature

Abundant psychological research demonstrates bivariate relationships between individual prosocial propensity, intrinsic connectedness to various social domains, and the enactment of prosocial behavior. More recently, "connectedness" has been positioned as a necessary domain-specific motivator for enacting prosocial propensity in relevant domains of concern. Our study offers novel contributions to this theory by examining the role of connectedness in driving prosocial behavior within a humanitarian domain in which behavior is enacted in the interest of the global community. Additionally, our research uniquely considers connectedness to multiple social domains concurrently, in order to disentangle any covariance that may be impacting research findings. A parallel mediation model with four mediators (connectedness to community, nation, humanity, and nature) was applied to better understand the effect of prosocial propensity (honesty-humility) on humanitarian prosocial behavior. The cross-sectional survey was completed by 715 Australian adults, and support was found for mediation via each of the mediators. Specifically, connectedness to community, to humanity, and to nature each positively affected the relationship between prosocial propensity and prosocial behavior, with the largest effect via connectedness to humanity. Contrastingly, connectedness to nation negatively mediated this relationship, despite being positively correlated with these constructs. These findings highlight the individual difference underpinnings of humanitarian prosocial behaviors and the role of connection to relevant domains in behavior actualization. Fostering connectedness to humanity remains desirable to promote global prosocial outcomes, with future research needed on the interplay between these related levels of connectedness and between connectedness to one's nation and global humanitarian engagement.

On power and its corrupting effects: the effects of power on human behavior and the limits of accountability systems

Power is an all-pervasive, and fundamental force in human relationships and plays a valuable role in social, political, and economic interactions. Power differences are important in social groups in enhancing group functioning. Most people want to have power and there are many benefits to having power. However, power is a corrupting force and this has been a topic of interest for centuries to scholars from Plato to Lord Acton. Even with increased knowledge of power's corrupting effect and safeguards put in place to counteract such tendencies, power abuse remains rampant in society suggesting that the full extent of this effect is not well understood. In this paper, an effort is made to improve understanding of power's corrupting effects on human behavior through an integrated and comprehensive synthesis of the neurological, sociological, physiological, and psychological literature on power. The structural limits of justice systems' capability to hold powerful people accountable are also discussed.

The role of humility in Chief Executive Officers: a review

Humility, defined as a multidimensional construct comprising an accurate assessment of one’s characteristics, an ability to acknowledge limitations and strengths, and a low self-focus, is a complex trait to potentially counterbalance detrimental effects of “negative” personal traits (e.g., narcissism), thereby making it relevant to researchers and practitioners in Management and Psychology. Whereas the study of the humility construct has become ubiquitous in Social Psychology, to our best knowledge, a review of the effects of humility in the contexts of company leaders (i.e., Chief Executive Officers) is lacking. Our systematic review suggests that CEO humility, directly and indirectly, affects a variety of individual, team, and organizational level constructs. Implications for research and practice are discussed, providing a future agenda for the construct to reach its full potential despite its relative novelty.

Relationship between Honesty-Humility and Cyberbullying Perpetration: A Moderated Mediation Model

Previous studies have verified the roles of big five personalities in cyberbullying perpetration (CP). The Big Five model has been revised to include an additional dimension, called Honesty-Humility (HH). It is not clear whether HH would be associated with CP. Thus, the effect of HH on CP was examined. To further explore this influencing mechanism, materialism was examined as a mediator, and parental psychological control (PPC) was examined as a moderator in the relationship between HH and CP. A total of 1,004 Chinese adolescents (M = 12.95, SD =1.12) participated in this study using a cross-sectional design and multiple questionnaires, namely, the Honesty-Humility subscale of the 24-item Brief HEXACO Inventory, the Revised Cyber Bullying Inventory, the Material Values Scale for Children, and the Parental Control Questionnaire. Correlation analyses indicated that CP, materialism, and PPC were significantly and positively correlated with each other, and were significantly and negatively associated with HH. The mediation model revealed that materialism played a mediating role in the relationship between HH and CP. The moderated mediation model revealed that stronger PPC strengthened the direct associations of HH with materialism and CP, and further strengthened the indirect relationship between HH and CP. Specifically, Chinese adolescents with lower levels of HH were more likely to build material values and further engaged in cyberbullying perpetration, when they perceived stronger PPC.

Beliefs, affordances, and adolescent development: Lessons from a decade of growth mindset interventions

Beliefs play a central role in human development. For instance, a growth mindset-a belief about the malleability of intelligence-can shape how adolescents interpret and respond to academic difficulties and how they subsequently navigate the educational system. But do usually-adaptive beliefs have the same effects for adolescents regardless of the contexts they are in? Answering this question can reveal new insights into classic developmental questions about continuity and change. Here we present the Mindset×Context framework and we apply this model to the instructive case of growth mindset interventions. We show that teaching students a growth mindset is most effective in educational contexts that provide affordances for a growth mindset; that is, contexts that permit and encourage students to view ability as developable and to act on that belief. This evidence contradicts the "beliefs alone" hypothesis, which holds that teaching adolescents a growth mindset is enough and that students can profit from these beliefs in almost any context, even unsupportive ones. The Mindset×Context framework leads to the realization that in order to produce more widespread and lasting change, we must complement the belief-changing interventions that have been aimed at students with new interventions that guide teachers toward classroom policies and practices that allow students' growth mindset beliefs to take root and yield benefits.

Bending Our Ethics Code

Abstract. Deception of research participants has long been and remains a hot-button issue in the behavioral sciences. At the same time, the field of psychology is fortunate to have an ethics code to rely on in determining whether and how to use and report on deception of participants. Despite ongoing normative controversies, the smallest common denominator among psychologists is that deception ought to be a last resort – to be used only when there is no other defensible way to study a question or phenomenon. Going beyond previous normative discussions or inquiries into the mere prevalence of deception, we ask the fundamental question whether common practice is compatible with this interpretation of our field’s ethical standards. Findings from an empirical literature review – focusing on the feasibility of nondeceptive alternative procedures and the presence of explicit justifications for the use of deception – demonstrate that there is a notable gap between the last resort interpretation of our ethical standards and common practice in psychological research. The findings are discussed with the aim of identifying viable ways in which researchers, journal editors, and the scientific associations crafting our ethics codes may narrow this gap.

Relations between HEXACO personality and ideology variables are mostly genetic in nature

Existing work indicates that socio-political attitudes (or: ideology) are associated with personality, with Social Dominance Orientation and Right-Wing Authoritarianism relating most strongly to honesty-humility and openness to experience, the two value-related domains of the HEXACO framework. Using a sample of 7067 twins and siblings of twins (including 1376 complete twin pairs), we examined the degree to which these relations arise from common genetic and environmental sources. Heritability estimates for the HEXACO personality and ideology variables ranged from .34 to .58. Environmental factors shared by twins reared together showed negligible effects on individual differences in personality and ideology. At the phenotypic level, Social Dominance Orientation and Right-Wing Authoritarianism dimensions related most strongly to honesty-humility and openness to experience. These associations were mostly explained by genetic factors (48%–93%). Genetic correlations between openness to experience and the ideology scales ranged from –.29 to –.53; those between honesty-humility and the ideology scales ranged from –.31 to –.43. None of the environmental correlations exceeded | r| = .18. These results suggest that the relations between the two value-related domains of the HEXACO personality model and ideology are mostly genetic in nature, and that there is substantial overlap in the heritable components of personality and ideology.

Construct and Predictive Validity of an Assessment Game to Measure Honesty-Humility

Research on commercial computer games has demonstrated that in-game behavior is related to the players’ personality profiles. However, this potential has not yet been fully utilized for personality assessments. Hence, we developed an applied (i.e., serious) assessment game to assess the Honesty–Humility personality trait. In two studies, we demonstrate that this game adequately assesses Honesty–Humility. In Study 1 (N = 116), we demonstrate convergent validity of the assessment game with self-reported Honesty–Humility and divergent validity with the other HEXACO traits and cognitive ability. In Study 2 (N = 287), we replicate the findings from Study 1, and also demonstrate that the assessment game shows incremental validity—beyond self-reported personality—in the prediction of cheating for financial gain, but not of counterproductive work and unethical behaviors. The findings demonstrate that assessment games are promising tools for personality measurement in applied contexts.