Persönlichkeitspsychologie & Pädagogische Psychologie
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My research interests

1. Do people want different kinds of power and how do they obtain it?

dopl pic3Sometimes we want to influence other people or we want to avoid the influence of other people on us. Some of us might feel this desire more strongly most of the time (i.e., have a strong power/autonomy motive), some would only feel this rarely (i.e., have a weak power/autonomy motive). Although power/autonomy seems to be a fundemantal human desire, researchers have long struggled to wrap their head around it. What do people desire when they desire power? Dominance, prestige, leadership, status, autonomy, money? To provide structure to power motive research, my colleagues and I developed the dominance, prestige, and leadership account of social power motives (Suessenbach et al., 2018) in which we can distinguish between meaningfully different desires for power. We can now measure these different desires quite well and distinctively. Moreover, we could show these desires relate differently and in line with our hypotheses to a range of personality characteristics and relevant power behaviour (e.g., aggression, taking on leadership positions). Nonetheless, much more work needs to be done to investigate how different power desires function; for example:

  • How do different desires for power predict how much power one will eventually obtain?
  • How does obtained power as well as desires for power interact with each other to determine who will be the leader of a group?
  • Does it make us happy (or sad) if we obtain (or not obtain) our power goal?

Click here to learn more about the dominance, prestige, and leadership account of social power motives

  • Relevant publications
    • Suessenbach, F., Loughnan, S., Schönbrodt, F. D., & Moore, A. B. (2018). The dominance, prestige, and leadership account of social power motives. European Journal of Personality. https://doi.org/10.1002/per.2184

 

2. How do different kinds of power desires relate to what we think is morally right or wrong?

moral2Despite grand philosophers such as Immanuel Kant or John Locke suggesting core rules regarding what ought to be morally right, psychologists have long found that people indeed strongly differ in what they assess to be morally appropriate. But what determines what we see as morally right or wrong? In a 2015 study (Suessenbach & Moore, 2015) we used hypothetical moral dilemmas to investigate the role of power desires (in this case power mostly represented leadership/taking responsibility) in moral decision making. Compared to people with lower desires for power those with higher desires for power found it more morally appropriate to sacrifice one person in order to save multiple others (i.e., have a more utilitarian view on morality). In another set of recent studies (Suessenbach et al., 2018) we found that if people had high prestige desires (a different kind of power desire related to wanting admiration and respect) they claimed to have higher moral standards. However, the same people with high prestige desires only weakly followed through on their claims, thus did only somewhat act more prosocially. Although it seems clear that power desires are linked to moral decision making many questions still need to be answered. For example:

  • Why do people with high desires for prestige claim to have higher moral standards but do not go out of their way to act more morally? Do they only act prosocially until they feel their morality has been established?
  • When does showing moral behaviour actually lead to an increase in power (and when doesn't it)?

 

  • Relevant publications
    • Suessenbach, F., Loughnan, S., Schönbrodt, F. D., & Moore, A. B. (2018). The dominance, prestige, and leadership account of social power motives. European Journal of Personality. https://doi.org/10.1002/per.2184
    • Suessenbach, F., & Moore, A. B. (2015). Individual differences in the explicit power motive predict “utilitarian” choices in moral dilemmas, especially when this choice is self-beneficial. Personality and Individual Differences, 86, 297-302. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2015.06.031

 

3. How does our own political identity interact with power desires when making (politcal) decisions?

politics2Politics is where many of the influential decisions are made that impact us on a daily basis. However, whereas lawmakers can force us to behave in one way or another we are often already voluntarily behaving along our political beliefs. In several studies we investigated how our political identity predicted our behaviour in ultimatum games. For example, in Scotland people showed much stronger reactions to the generous or less generous behaviour of politcal ingroup members as opposed to politcal outgroup members (Cram et al., 2018). In Spain/Catalonia, those who strongly believed in loyalty towards their politcal ingroup treated their political outgroup more unfairly than their political ingroup (Cram et al., in prep.). Adding another layer, during the 2016 US election we not only investigated effects of people's political identity but also their desires for power (Suessenbach & Moore, 2019). We found that Trump voters believed much more in Trump's pre-election conspiracies (e.g., that there will be large-scale voter fraud) if they had higher dominance desires (i.e., a kind of power desire involving coercing others and fear of being coerced). As most pre-election polls predicted a Trump defeat, we explained this by highly dominant Trump voters needing to pre-emptively justify their anticipated defeat.Moreover, being more dominance motivated also predicted voting for Trump in the first place. This suggests that those who want to be superior to others and at the same time fear to be dominated by others are more susceptible to dominant leaders such as Donald Trump and their conspiracies. Given the large impact of politcal decisions on people it seems very likely that desires for power influence our poltical decision making. To support responsible political decision making in the average citizen (e.g., voting) as well as in lawmakers we need to know much more about how these decision interact with power desires. For example:

  • Which situational variables benefit or harm dominant, prestigious, or responsible leaders?
  • Which politcal leadership is most effective in which situations?
  • What factors influence the relationship of people fearing to be dominated and preferring dominant leaders? And, in turn, how can these factors be changed?

 

  • Relevant publications
    • Suessenbach, F., Loughnan, S., Schönbrodt, F. D., & Moore, A. B. (2018). The dominance, prestige, and leadership account of social power motives. European Journal of Personality. https://doi.org/10.1002/per.2184
    • Cram, L., Moore, A. B., Olivieri, V., & Suessenbach, F. (2018). Fair is fair, or is it? Territorial identity triggers influence ultimatum game behaviour. Politcal Psychology, 39, 1233-1250. doi: 10.1111/pops.12543
    • Suessenbach, F., & Moore, A. B. (2019). Dominance desires predicting conspiracy beliefs and Trump support in the 2016 US election. Motivation Science.
    • Moore, A. B., Olivieri, V., Suessenbach, F., & Cram, L. (in prep). What I Do, Not What I Say…? Physiology, Behaviour, and Identity.

4. Other research interests

I am also interested in range of other topics such as social cognition, multilevel modelling, and how students' achievement motivation and teachers responses to achievement influence the actual achievement of these students.

 

Picture sources: Logo vector created by Kreativkolors - Freepik.com


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