Power and Social influence in relationShiPS

As the philosopher Bertrand Russell observed, power plays a central role in everyday social interactions, and it serves as an organizing principle in the social and behavioral sciences (Reis, Collins, & Berscheid, 2000). Given its paramount importance, one might expect power would hold a privileged place in the field of social psychology and particularly in the study of relationships. Although there are major theoretical statements on what power is (e.g., French & Raven, 1959; Thibaut & Kelley, 1959) and how it should affect relationship dynamics (e.g., Huston, 1983), and there are isolated pockets of research on how power influences interpersonal outcomes (see the References), power has never been a hotbed of theoretical or empirical activity. One overarching goal of this chapter is to begin to change this state of affairs. There are several reasons why power has not become a central, organizing construct within either social psychology or the field of interpersonal relationships. First, the construct of power has multiple components, making it challenging to define and measure. This, in turn, has made it difficult to interpret the effects that the amount of power wielded by each partner has on important relationship or individual outcomes. Second, most prior studies of power in relationships have been descriptive and have relied on global assessments of power (e.g., “In general, how much power or influence do you have over your partner?”). Partners in established relationships, however, often have and may exert different amounts of power in different decision-making domains (e.g., financial, sexual, future plans), and global conceptualizations and measures of power do not assess—and often may not predict—domain-specific areas of power in relationships, especially in close and committed relationships. In addition, the degree to which people are accurately aware of the power dynamics in their relationships remains unclear. Overreliance on self-report measures may have masked some of the actual processes of power and influence in many relationships. Despite these challenges, understanding power and the influence strategies and tactics that individuals use to get what they want from their relationship partners is essential to understanding a host of important relationship dynamics and outcomes (Reis et al., 2000). Although power can be (and has been) defined in different ways, we provisionally define power as the ability of one individual in a relationship (the influence agent) to exert influence on another person (the target of influence) so that the influence agent obtains the specific outcomes he or she wants in a given situation while being able to resist influence attempts by the target. We define influence strategies as the higher level goals and interpersonal approaches that influence agents use to try to