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Feeling socially powerless makes you more prone to bumping into things on the right and induces leftward line bisection error

Wilkinson, D.T.; Guinote, A.; Weick, M.; Molinari, R.; Graham, K.

Feeling socially powerless makes you more prone to bumping into things on the right and induces leftward line bisection error Thumbnail


Authors

D.T. Wilkinson

A. Guinote

R. Molinari

K. Graham



Abstract

Social power affects the manner in which people view themselves and act toward others, a finding that has attracted broad interest from the social and political sciences. However, there has been little interest from those within cognitive neuroscience. Here, we demonstrate that the effects of power extend beyond social interaction and invoke elementary spatial biases in behavior consistent with preferential hemispheric activation. In particular, participants who felt relatively powerless, compared with those who felt more powerful, were more likely to bisect horizontal lines to the left of center, and bump into the right-hand (as opposed to the left-hand) side when walking through a narrow passage. These results suggest that power induces hemispheric differences in visuomotor behavior, indicating that this ubiquitous phenomenon affects not only how we interact with one another, but also how we interact with the physical world.

Citation

Wilkinson, D., Guinote, A., Weick, M., Molinari, R., & Graham, K. (2010). Feeling socially powerless makes you more prone to bumping into things on the right and induces leftward line bisection error. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 17(6), 910-914. https://doi.org/10.3758/pbr.17.6.910

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Jul 17, 2010
Online Publication Date Jul 17, 2010
Publication Date Dec 1, 2010
Deposit Date Sep 12, 2018
Publicly Available Date Sep 19, 2018
Journal Psychonomic Bulletin and Review
Print ISSN 1069-9384
Electronic ISSN 1531-5320
Publisher Springer
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 17
Issue 6
Pages 910-914
DOI https://doi.org/10.3758/pbr.17.6.910
Related Public URLs http://kar.kent.ac.uk/27458/

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Copyright Statement
This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Psychonomic bulletin and review. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.3758/PBR.17.6.910





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