The Psychology of Power

Dr. Richard A. Sprott

June 2008

In the past year, several experiments have documented the effect of power and powerlessness on people’s functioning. The results have been sometimes surprising – and they beg for investigation within the contexts of our BDSM and leather culture.

For example, there is a common belief that people in power have earned that position because they naturally possess some inherent talent or skill, which makes them better than others competing for that position. This is the idea behind “meritocracy” – we should give positions of power to persons who are better, more talented, smarter, more capable. And likewise, those already in a position of power must have already proven themselves to be more capable, etc. We see this cultural belief get played out in our circles when submissives or slaves, or Dommes and Doms, make some assumptions about “what makes a Dom.”

Recent psychological studies have documented, however, that arbitrarily being placed or primed to take a position of power can cause people to act in a more capable, controlled manner – and being placed or primed to take a position of powerlessness can cause people to make more mistakes, get more confused, act less competently. And these effects are beyond a person’s awareness or control.

In particular, the way in which powerlessness expresses itself is interesting. Powerlessness lowers a person’s ability to control their own behavior and thinking; it causes a person to lose track of their intentions and goals; it causes a person to become much more sensitive and affected by the environment and immediate context; it causes a person to focus on details and to miss “the big picture”; it causes a person to become more rigid and less flexible in their thinking and behavior. Power increases a person’s ability to control their impulses, to adjust and flexibly respond to a changing environment, to focus and stay on task and keep goals in mind, to focus on the big picture (and in fact to miss some details). Power also increases one’s likelihood of acting, moving, doing and taking risks – and powerlessness decreases one’s chances of acting when one could or should.

In other words, power changes the basic psychological functioning of people in ways beyond their awareness or control. In experiments, we can see the effect just by having people read words like “obey” or “subordinate” to establish powerlessness, and read words like “dominate” or “authority” to establish power – at least enough to see the effects on both simple and complex tasks.

Now, some of these findings should be familiar to us who create the Dom/sub dynamic in our sexual play. But having them confirmed in the laboratory also raises our confidence in our experiences and intuitions. The examination also raises our awareness of some aspects which may have only skirted our attention. For example, having a clearer picture on how power affects our thinking and behavior raises some questions about safety in scenes – knowing that a sub, in a scene, is more rigid, more detailed-focus and less “big picture” focused, and less capable of impulse control and less likely to say anything – but more sensitive to detail, to environmental changes that might signal danger – how might that affect the way in which we advise and train people in terms of safe, sane and consensual aspects of our creative sexuality?

Dr. Richard A. Sprott is a developmental psychologist and active in the leather community of the San Francisco Bay Area. He is San Francisco Leather Daddy XXIII, serves on the board of the Leathermen's Discussion Group, and is Executive Director of CARAS - Community-Academic Consortium for Research on Alternative Sexualities (at www.caras.ws). He can be reached at sfleatherdaddy23@earthlink.net