Author(s)

Mufan Zheng ¹

Affiliation(s)

¹ Department of Psychology, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

Corresponding Author

Mufan Zheng

ABSTRACT

This article discussed how power affects individuals’ cognitive processing style. Power increases the tendency to rely on automatic cognitive processing during impression formation. Compared to low power individuals or groups, those with high power tend to pay less attention to subordinates, to use stereotyping and prejudices, and to make less accurate judgments. Control motivation and approach/inhibition tendency provide theoretical explanation for the effect. There still lacks further evidences to show that power affects cognitive processing in more broad scope besides impression formation. Goal-oriented theory and abstractive thinking may provide a new perspective to understand the link of power and cognitive processing style.

KEYWORDS

Power, cognitive processing style, automatic cognition

CITE THIS PAPER

Mufan Zheng, Power and Automatic Cognitive Processing. Applied & Educational Psychology (2024) Vol. 5: 116-120. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/appep.2024.050116.

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