Objectification has been defined historically as a process of subjugation whereby people, like objects, are treated as means to an end. The authors hypothesized that objectification is a response to social power that involves approaching useful social targets regardless of the value of their other human qualities. Six studies found that under conditions of power, approach toward a social target...

The processes of power are pervasive, complex, and often disguised in our society. Accordingly one finds in political science, in sociology, and in social psychology a variety of distinctions among different types of social power or among qualitatively different processes of social influence (1, 7, 14, 20, 23, 29, 30, 38, 40). Our main purpose is to identify the major types of power and to defi...

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 ...

Several real-life complex systems, like human societies or economic networks, are formed by interacting units characterized by patterns of relationships that may generate a group-based social hierarchy. In this paper, we address the problem of how to rank the individuals with respect to their ability to “influence” the relative strength of groups in a society. We also analyse the effect of basi...

IS adoption is inherently a social practice shaped by the immediate social context but capital power does not have a stronger presence in ANT and sociomateriality. The paper describes Bourdieu’s practice theory and suggests that by this lens we can better understand IS adoption (e.g., implementation of MRP II/ERP/ERP II) as symbolic capital changing power relations in an adopted organization. S...

Recent research has explored the relationship between social hierarchy and empathic accuracy—the ability to accurately infer other people’s mental states. In the current research, we tested the hypothesis that, regardless of one’s personal level of status and power, simply believing that social inequality is natural and morally acceptable (e.g., endorsing social dominance orientation, or SDO) w...

A system with a self-similar property is scale-independent and statistically exhibits that property at all levels of observation. In addition, a power law describes the distribution of a scale-independent property. Many investigators have observed social activities and structures, particularly in the science system, that are best described by a power-law distribution. However, unlike classical ...