Sociocognitive research has demonstrated that power affects how people feel, think, and act. In this article, I review literature from social psychology, neuroscience, management, and animal research and propose an integrated framework of power as an intensifier of goal-related approach motivation. A growing literature shows that power energizes thought, speech, and action and orients individuals toward salient goals linked to power roles, predispositions, tasks, and opportunities. Power magnifies self-expression linked to active parts of the self (the active self), enhancing confidence, self-regulation, and prioritization of efforts toward advancing focal goals. The effects of power on cognitive processes, goal preferences, performance, and corruption are discussed, and its potentially detrimental effects on social attention, perspective taking, and objectification of subordinates are examined. Several inconsistencies in the literature are explained by viewing power holders as more flexible and dynamic than is usually assumed.

Significance: Even though humans are the most altruistic species, disparities in prosocial orientation are common and occur across social groups that vary in education, sex roles, biology, and financial resources. In the present research, using different manipulations of social status—defined as the level of social prestige and reputation enjoyed by individuals in the eyes of others—we show that mere incidental low status triggers a prosocial orientation manifested in helping behavior, signaling communal intent, and the endorsement of egalitarian goals and values. These effects start to appear early in human ontogeny. The findings suggest that humans have basic cognitive and motivational programs that they use flexibly as they navigate unstable hierarchies typical in human societies.

Six studies examined how power affects responses to situational affordances. Participants were assigned to a powerful or a powerless condition and were exposed to various situations that afford different classes of behavior. Study 1 examined behavior intentions for weekdays and weekends. Studies 2 and 3 focused on responses to imaginary social and work situations. Study 4 examined planned behavior for winter and summer days. Finally, Studies 5 and 6 examined behavior and attention in the presence of situation-relevant and irrelevant information. Consistently across these studies, powerful individuals acted more in situation-consistent ways, and less in situation-inconsistent ways, compared with powerless individuals. These findings are interpreted as a result of the greater tendency for powerful individuals to process information selectively in line with the primary factors that drive cognition, such as affordances. One consequence of these findings is that powerful individuals change behavior across situations more than powerless individuals.