More Power To You

Invisibilia goes on a power trip [View this email online]( [Invisibilia]( Art by Sasha Fominskaya for NPR This week on Invisibilia, a close look at the expression of power in everyday interactions. We've all heard that power is dirty, that it corrupts. And yet, there's no denying that we need it - to meet our needs, to make demands, to effect change in the world. So what happens when you’re so grossed out by power, you’d rather avoid the power game altogether? When a comic and a dominatrix go head to head, we find out the surprising forms power can take and what it takes to treat a power allergy. [Listen to the Episode]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Newsletter continues after sponsor message --------------------------------------------------------------- Power Up --------------------------------------------------------------- Reading List: - [Power For All]( by Julie Batillana and Tiziana Casciaro - [Unbound - A Woman's Guide to Power]( by Kasia Urbaniak - "[The P-Word: Power aversion and responsibility aversion as explanations for the avoidance of power]( by Kathryn E. Hull, Jennifer R. Overbeck, Luke D. Smillie, and Piers D. L. Howe Puppy Power --------------------------------------------------------------- Photo of "Joy Walk Club" courtesy of Anna Drezen Make sure to check out [Alex Song-Xia's website]( and [follow them on Twitter](. As mentioned in the episode, Alex has recently discovered a secret weapon for combatting their power allergy: their new rescue pup Bandit. Alex has built a community of other dog-owners and friends who help watch each other’s dogs, saying yes when they can and no when they can’t. They call themselves the "Joy Walk Club" (initially proposed as a joke, the moniker stuck). Photo of Alex and Bandit courtesy of Jason Hammons Power Play --------------------------------------------------------------- There are countless books on how to become powerful and influence others. But Vanessa Bohns, author of [You Have More Influence Than You Think]( isn’t interested in how to acquire more power. Instead, she’s curious about the influence we already have - and how we can use that influence more responsibly. Vanessa’s research shows us that people tend to be more agreeable than we think, and that while asking for things might be hard, so is saying “no.” Here are some excerpts from our conversations with Vanessa, edited for length and clarity. In Vanessa’s studies, she looks at how often we expect people to turn us down, compared to how often they actually do it. She started out with simple scenarios, having participants ask strangers to do favors like fill out surveys or give them directions. But over several studies, she progressively upped the ante - having participants ask strangers to count beans for them, or vandalize library books. After over 15,000 requests, Vanessa says participants would consistently expect rejection, and strangers would agree to help. For instance, in the library book study, participants thought 28% of people would agree to it, when 64% - over half - said yes. I feel very strongly that our fears about asking are definitely overblown. Our fears for ourselves. We think if we ask someone for advice, they're gonna judge us negatively, when in fact they tend to judge us more positively when we ask them for advice. We think that if we ask someone for something, they're gonna say “no.” But they're less likely to say “no.” We think that it's gonna damage the relationship, when in fact it's been suggested that it actually might strengthen the relationship, asking for things. I think we overthink it so much. We think that we have to ask in this really complicated way and offer a million apologies, but really all we have to do is just ask the question, and ideally ask it directly instead of hinting and beating around the bush. And ideally ask it in person, if you're actually hoping for a yes. If someone's asking you for a favor - someone who's a friend or a stranger who doesn't have power over you is asking you for something, there's this kind of social element of risk. What if they don't like me, what if they think I'm a jerk? What if I damage the relationship? It's really hard to say no. We will often agree to things that we don't actually want to do. I don't think that means we shouldn't ask for things, but I do think it means that we need to ask for things more mindfully. Vanessa is also interested in the psychology of sexual consent. She did a study on unrequited workplace romances, surveying close to a thousand STEM graduate students - of all genders - to see if this dynamic applied to romantic requests. She asked about experiences they had pursuing a colleague and getting rejected, and being pursued by someone they weren’t interested in. What we found was that people who were rejected thought it was much easier for the person who rejected them to do it than the people who had to do the rejecting. They thought “it was actually pretty easy for this person to say no to me,” and that it didn't really affect their later behaviors. But the people who actually did the rejecting said that they did all sorts of things to change their behavior. They avoided the person afterwards. They might have even taken on different projects, or dropped off of projects that they were working on. So it actually impacted them much more than the person who did the asking thought it did. So we might think, you know, if you're interested in someone, just go for it, what's the harm? But it's hard to reject people, just like it's hard to be rejected. And when we did break it down by people who had been pursued by someone who was in a higher position of power, the gap between perceiving how hard it was for someone to do the rejecting and actually doing the rejecting - the gap got even bigger when there was a power dynamic. Vanessa quotes Adam Galinsky in saying, "When you're in a position of power, your whisper sounds like a shout." Since it seems like people tend to be much more agreeable than we think, one of the questions she's interested in is: how can we know when people are freely giving their consent to do things? It’s this idea that even a subtle suggestion or a request feels like an order if someone has power over you. But on the flip side, what's so interesting is that when you're in a position of power, you're also less likely to recognize the power that you have over another person. And this finding has changed the way Vanessa does her job. I definitely am so much more mindful of the way I ask for things. One simple thing that I often try to do with my graduate students is I will ask them something, and I'll talk to them about it in person - like, here's the thing I'm thinking of… but I want you to take a day to think about it and then email me what you think. It gives them the time and space to sort of think, “Do I really wanna do this?” And then, it's a lot easier to say no over email than to do it, you know, on the fly, face-to-face with another person. If you take time to think about what you want to say and you email it to someone, it's a lot easier to say. But I think a lot of us don't think like that when we're in positions of power, you know, we just ask somebody and forget all these nuances that actually, it's really hard for them to say no to you in that moment. I won't even let people tell me in person their answer to a question where I'm like, I'm not a hundred percent sure. I'm just like, please just think about it. In our latest episode, The P-Word, Alex Song-Xia describes their deep discomfort expressing what they want, and saying no to requests. In many ways, Alex is the poster child for Vanessa’s research. Vanessa has an example she teaches that illustrates how not expressing what you want can actually end up making everybody in a group worse-off. It’s called the Abeline paradox. There's a family sitting on a porch in Texas on a hot day, and they're all kind of just sitting around doing nothing. And one of them feels like the rest of the group must be bored. So they suggest this trip to Abeline. Then another one assumes that that person suggested the trip because they really wanna go there, and so they say, okay, and then the rest of the group goes along, because they assume these two people really wanna go. And so they all make this long, hot, annoying trip and nobody has any fun, and they come back home and no one wants to offend anybody else, so they ask, “Oh did you enjoy that?” and since they’re asking, then they probably did like it… And so there's this idea that we all just had this experience nobody liked, but we are reading into other people's minds and trying to judge how they felt and monitor our responses. We wind up having this conversation that isn't actually true to anyone's internal preference. To explain why we forget that it's so hard for people to say no to us, Vanessa explains that there is something called a hot/cold empathy gap - referring to “hot” and “cold” emotional states. A situation where you have to look someone in the eye and say “no” might be a hot state, whereas imagining that same situation in the hypothetical would be a cold state. We're not very good at simulating a hot emotional experience when we're not in it. One of my favorite examples of this is if you go out to dinner and you eat this delicious dinner, right. And at the end, you're full, and you're asked if you wanna pack up the dinner and, you know, someone might say like, “Maybe you'll have this for breakfast tomorrow.” And you just can't imagine actually eating that dinner for breakfast the next morning. It sounds just totally unappealing. And then you wake up the next morning and you're really hungry. And all of a sudden you're like, “Wait a minute. Actually, that spaghetti or pizza sounds pretty good for breakfast.” Even though we have all been full, we forget how different things look when we're actually hungry. So, when you're in a cold state, it's really hard for you to imagine how you would feel in a hot state and how someone else would feel in that same hot state. According to Vanessa, her studies show that we really don’t need to worry so much about the risk of rejection, or what people will think of us if we do make requests. On the whole, making requests can bring us closer to each other, and can help social groups reach agreements that work for all parties. But her work also serves as a powerful reminder that saying “no” is much harder than we think it is - a fact we reliably forget. To Vanessa, what’s most important is making sure that a “yes” is given freely, and at the end of the day, it’s all about how you ask. --------------------------------------------------------------- Stream your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to find your local station stream. 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